How I Built This with Guy Raz - Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

As a part of the 2021 How I Built This Summit (At Home) we have selected 10 Fellows, and we'd like to introduce you to them over the next couple weeks. In this episode: Pierre Paul, founder of a company called We Hear You that's developing a sign language translator that turns American Sign Language into audible speech and vice versa. Also, Toby Egbuna, co-founder of Chezie, a platform for job seekers aimed at creating career opportunities for people from under-represented groups.How I Built This Summit - information and tickets at:http://summit.npr.orgSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with a place with a all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, everyone. So as a lot of you know, every year during normal years, we do how I built this summit, an in real life gathering that we've been doing in San Francisco. This year, we're going entirely virtual, but every year we've done the summit, we've invited a group of entrepreneurs to become how I built this fellows.

These are dreamers and builders that may be in all different stages of their businesses and are looking to make connections or get mentorship or take their ideas to the next level. This year, we picked 10 fellows and we're holding a pitch competition where the winner will get a $50,000 check from us. a grant. So over the next two weeks, we are going to introduce you to each of these fellows. One of the questions we ask when we're looking for fellows is, how is your idea going to make the world a better place? And the first two fellows we'd like for you to meet are focused on inclusion. For them, embracing the experiences of people who've been overlooked in the past isn't just something they think about. That is their central idea. First, we're going to hear from Pierre Paul. Pierre's company is called We Hear You. He's developing a sign language translator

that turns American sign language into audible speech and vice versa. Pierre was born in Brazil and he was around five years old when he moved with his parents to the U.S. His family still watched a lot of Brazilian TV and they kept up Brazilian traditions around the house while Pierre was trying to learn a new language. So when I came to the U.S., I remember just struggling with my accent, struggling with understanding English and, like, teeter tottering between Portuguese and English. I'm this little kid who barely understood Portuguese, definitely didn't understand English. And I remember kids just not understanding what it means to be a foreigner with an accent,

what it means to be a foreigner with broken English. And teachers were talking about potentially holding me back because my English wasn't up to par. and faced a lot of xenophobia, a lot of racism, a lot of negative backlash for being different. So when my parents stopped giving us as much of the Brazilian culture that we used to have in the house, it really bothered because I was like, I understand why they're doing this, they're caring about my academics and my progression.

But I decided that if I was going to forget and unlearn Portuguese to master English, I was going to master. I wanted to be able to have a voice, just understanding and crafting words in a way that ensure that anybody who had an exceptionality, whether it be something vocally or something physical, I wanted to be able to let them know that they are not wrong or they don't have a problem for being different than the status quo. And this idea of like mastering expression, especially verbal expression, has really been a theme

in your life. Like I read that in high school, you were, you were like one of the top public speakers in Ohio. You were like a speech and debate kid in high school? Absolutely. Speech and debate was kind of my claim to fame. I remember my school would send me to different tournaments around the U.S. some notable ones, the Harvard tournament, Bethel Park, and I was just able to compete on this national level. And I did end up being one of the top speakers in Ohio, one of the top speakers in the nation. And it gave me an opportunity to receive a speech scholarship to the top speech school at the time, Bradley University. And I was ecstatic.

So you get to Bradley and on the speech scholarship. And I guess while you're there, while you were at Bradley, you worked on a project, I guess it's called a Capstone project, maybe your final year project. Tell me about that. Yeah. So I'm at Bradley. I don't sleep very often. So late at night, my mind just runs wild and I really concern myself with the problems that I see around me, the things happening in the world. And there was one night where I was just feeling complacent. I was feeling complacent where I was, and I was like, I don't like that. So one night I was discovering the internet, looking at different problems around the world and different things that don't have solutions. And one that hit me was the fact that individuals with hearing exceptionalities, whether it be their heart of hearing or their deaf, have a hard time communicating at food establishments. And it was as simple as they tried to order food, whether writing it on a piece paper or a napkin and hand it to.

to the associate and the associate is dismissive. Or the associate doesn't know American Sign Language and they're not able to have their freedom and autonomy to order in their natural language. And when I realized that was a problem, I was like, okay, come on. We have Google Translate for every single language. Like, what are we missing here?

Why is this not been done? And so with that realization, I just couldn't not do anything about it. So as cliche as it sounds, I remember finally falling asleep. and I had a dream about the specific sign language translator. And it's funny, I had a dream that I was in this McDonald's, and I was using this device.

And I woke up the next morning, and I contacted my best friend who's actually now the COO of We Hear You and I'm like, hey, you will not believe what I'm thinking of. What did you tell them? So when I contacted Bethany, I was like, I had this dream that there's a sign language translator that we can create, and it's going to look like this, and it's going to act like this.

And she asked one question, it's funny, this is why we named the company, we hear you. She asked, why do you keep doing what you do in the way that you do it? And I said, well, it's because I hear the struggles of the people around me. So when people ask us why, the answer is because we hear you. We hear what you're facing. We hear what you're going through. And that's what drives us.

Basically, you come up with this idea. You're thinking there's Google Translate. There are all these ways for people who speak different languages to communicate. But it's not easy for people who are deaf or hard of people. hearing to communicate with those who aren't. I mean, there's, and there's some examples. It is a famous pizzeria in San Francisco where all the employees are deaf. And in Washington, D.C., there's Gallaudet University, and there are cafes around there where all the employees are deaf. But it's still, this is a problem that needs to be solved, right? You can't just walk,

walk into a store if you are a hard of hearing or deaf and easily order if that person can't read lips. And it's challenging for the cross communications. You're thinking, how can I solve? this problem. Absolutely. And so I started going to every single professor and every single professional who might have an expertise in this area. And I was told no, so many times, I was told, really great idea can't be done. Really great idea. We don't know where to start. This can't be done. And I refuse to give up. And I remember I'm on the last two people that I could possibly ask. And I tell him the idea. And he's like, I like it. Let's do it. And I remember being shocked. I was like, are you kidding? Are you like yanking my chain? Like, I'm messing around here.

He was like, no, I love he. He's like, I'm super busy. But I have another professor who's going to love to help you. We have some students who interned for NASA who've been looking for a passion project. Wow. And just like that, we got started. We did research. And I had already done copious amounts of research leading up to here. So I handed them this doc that's like 100 pages. And I'm like, this is what I know. These are the problems that I've seen in the past. These are the things that I want to be in the future. Let's get it started. All right. So now you started working on this. And I know that in December of 2020, you were able to put out a proof of concept. This is your company. It's called, we hear you. We hear you, which is great. So W. H.Y. Y. And how does it work? So 2020, we were able to release our first prototype, which was a sign language translator that could take finger spelling.

Finger spelling is briefly explain how that works. Yep. So there are different letters. A, B, C, D. Every single letter has a shape with your hand. Absolutely. So it took finger spelling and then it would string it together once the word was complete. And then we added a spell check function.

And we started in coffee shops because coffee shops are extremely popular. And it was just a great place with a lower vocabulary so that we could expand. So we started with L-A-R-G. large C-O-F-F-E. And this is like an iPhone or like an iPad that was recording? So, absolutely. So Android tablets, one of the things that we really wanted to make sure that our system was, we didn't want somebody to have to buy a complicated glove or a complicated camera.

We wanted to work on any camera. Just an app that would be on any camera. Exactly. So it's software that we can put somewhere. And so we put it in the coffee shop and we received so much good, but so much bad. feedback. And it was a lot of, this is great, where's the full gesture capability? Full gesture capability meaning somebody using American sign language. Exactly.

That would then be automatically translated. Yep. By pointing your iPhone or your Android device at that person, it would come back to you in either text or in audio? Exactly. So essentially it would be large coffee instead of spelling it out and then it verbalizes and then the backwards compatibility, you can talk into it and say, would you like cream and sugar? And it would sign back. Would you like cream and sugar? Wow. We understood that finger spelling really doesn't fully encapsulate American sign language, but it's a good start.

So in a perfect world, once your vision is fully realized, tell me how you would love for this to work on a day-to-day basis. I go into a shop and the person taking my order is deaf and how would we? we interact. So in the perfect world, you walk into a shop and you see a tablet set up there. And so you walk up to the counter and you order whatever you want. I would like an Italian melt with a large coffee, cream and sugar, whatever fantastic things you would like. And our system picks it up. You don't even know that you're doing it because you're looking at the associate in the eye and the system picks it up. And then it signs back exactly what you said. Wow. And then they sign it back into the system, verbalize it for you. And that can be a fluid conversation. And then let's say,

you're meeting with somebody there who's a part of the deaf and heart of hearing community, you sit down, you prop your phone up, facing them, and you guys have that conversation the same way that you and I can talk right now. There's no barrier that's blocking that ability to say, hey, have a great day. How are you doing? And that's where I foresee. I see this being something that everybody has in their pocket. Pierre, it's just so remarkable.

I mean, you didn't grow up around people who are deaf. you didn't have a direct connection to the deaf community, but you saw a challenge and you pursued it. And there was a reason why you pursued this challenge. And I have to imagine that it has something to do with a bigger philosophy that you have around inclusion. Absolutely. Diversity and inclusion should never be the afterthought of innovation. It should be the foundation.

Yeah. It's always been a philosophy of mine because I came up to the United States and I was excluded so frequently. I was made to feel like I did not have a place to belong. And when you grew up with that as a kid, getting out of that mindset and then growing into a world and seeing that it still persists sometimes, it kind of sucks. I just put simply, it kind of sucks.

And so I just love helping people any way that I can. And so one thing that I've really been trying to make sure that I'm not doing, I don't want to come across as a hearing savior because the deaf community is far too strong and far too capable to need a hearing savior. All I am as an ally who is hoping to aid in a journey that has been long fought for. It's been something that you can read about. People have tried time and time again to create a sign language translator, but they do it from a hearing-centric perspective.

And so it's just been a lot of consulting with the deaf community, a lot of tough conversations, a lot of knows, a lot of why use, and it's been a lot of why not. Pierre, if you win the pitch competition, how will you use the $50,000 grant? So if we are fortunate enough to win the pitch competition, a lot of that money is going to be allocated to finishing development of our sign language translator

and then also manufacturing the hands-free devices so that we can start putting that into production. So all of that money is just going to go towards furthering our goals so much more and just finding new ways to innovate. So it's just going to be furthering our development and making sure that our vision doesn't just stay inside of We Hear You. It then permeates to every part of society. That's Pierre Paul, founder and CEO of We Hear You.

When we come back, we'll hear from another How I Built This Fellow and his big idea around inclusion. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Fellows Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So Toby Agbuna and his sister D'Maby are the founders of Chese. It's a platform for job seekers that they hope will create career opportunities for people from underrepresented groups. They are first-generation Nigerian immigrants, and while the focus of their company is on inclusion, that's not exactly where Toby started.

I knew I wanted to be in business as soon as I got to school. I was like good at math. And, you know, the typical Nigerian tracks are lawyer, doctor, or business person. And I ruled out lawyers. I don't like reading like that much. And I hate science. So I ruled out being a doctor. And I chose business.

So I knew I wanted to go into consulting. It just felt like a good way for me to kind of try out a bunch of different things and then figure out where I wanted to ultimately take my career. And also my dad wasn't consulting. So I graduated from you. and moved to Boston to start working in management consulting. And I spent three years in Boston and then I actually moved to New York City, shifting a little bit more into people-oriented, diversity, inclusion kind of work. And then the pandemic hit.

So I actually moved out of New York City, moved back home to North Carolina and then now to Georgia. Like many people, and as you may know, if you've heard how I built this, we've had several guests who went into consulting, but always with an eye on starting their own thing. And consulting is a great place to do that because you learn about a bunch of different industries. It sounds like that was your plan that you would go into consulting and absorb a lot of different industries and eventually figure out your own thing. That was exactly my plan. I thought that I would get here and get experience in like retail and finance and all these other kind of industries. And that was not the case. I got kind of put into utilities and power generation almost from the beginning.

And it was it was just kind of difficult to get out. I kind of established my network there. And our projects are a year, a year and a half long. So that's kind of how it ended up working. But I was really focused on finding a way to get back to UNC. So I got involved with the diversity recruiting team because, you know, this was like my opportunity to go back to campus every now and then and help other black students get this job that I've been so fortunate to get. And that's actually kind of how I got into diversity and inclusion work. I just kind of realized that I had a passion for like creating opportunities or just helping people realize the opportunities that were out there for them, especially people that look like me or people from other historically underrepresented groups.

So that's kind of where the interest came from. So did you start to think, huh, maybe there's some kind of business around this area that I can create? Was that where sort of the gears in your head started turning? No, that's not what I thought, actually. I thought that, so typically people go into consulting and they work two to three years and then they go somewhere else, right? They go into what we call industry. So I was actually thinking, okay, I've done my two years. So I was really applying to a bunch of diversity and inclusion, analyst, program manager, jobs like that.

And this is three years ago before everything happened last summer. So, like, you know, there were jobs out there, but companies weren't really serious about hiring for it. Yeah. And I remember I found a job at Lyft. I didn't have anyone in my network that worked at Lyft. So I went on LinkedIn and I was just Googling or I was just looking at Lyft in New York City. And I found myself looking to speak to black people because I figured that their experiences would be most similar to mine. And I also was kind of like, you know, trying to find like my community or like my tribe

people in the office at the Edlift before I decided to apply. And it was difficult because, you know, it was like it was kind of laborous for me to go through LinkedIn every time like that and kind of figured to ultimately just kind of figure out what it's like to be black there. And I kind of took that sentiment to my sister and to say, you know, there's not really a way for you to know what it's like to be black or, you know, in her case a black woman or gay or disabled or whatever at a company. And that was kind of the impetus for actually us wanting to start Chessie was that experience, at least for me, was that experience of, Literally wanting to get this information for myself at Lyft and not being able to.

So, I mean, there was and is Glass Door, right? You can go to Glass Door and you can kind of get a sense, depending on if your company is represented on Glass Door, of what it might be like to work there. But you essentially were like, but there's nothing that can tell me what the experience might be like for me as a black man or for an Asian woman or for somebody who is a minority or marginalized. there's nothing like that out there and that was really this kind of sounds like a light, almost like a light bulb moment. Yeah, it was, it was.

I mean, everyone uses Glass Door, but I think Glass Door is just very, it's very one size fits all. You know, a lot of the reviews that they have are very hot or cold. It's very much like, I didn't get the job, this company sucks, don't ever work here. Or it's like, it almost seems like

that people were like paid to put a positive review. They're like so glowing. It's like, this doesn't seem realistic. Yeah. But the biggest thing is that, you know, you don't know who submitted the review, and therefore it's kind of hard to put yourselves in the shoes of that person. So we kind of really wanted to make our reviews. We call them stories. Our story specific to the person that's trying to find this information. So we added what we call portraits to them. So, like, I can go on and find stories with portraits of black men, you know, 21 to 30, not disabled, etc. or even just, you know, any combination of those. And the idea is that you're finding stories from people that identify similarly to you with our platform. So you come up with this idea and you call it Chessie and tell me about the name. So we actually launched as Diversify.

I don't even know how we came up with that name, but it was spelled D-Y-V-E-R-S-I-F-I. And then in January of this year, we kind of decided to rebrand to Chesey. So again, we're Nigerian. My sister and I are Nigerian. We're of the Ebo tried. So Chese is the Ebo word for reflect. And it kind of just symbolizes, you know, the idea of job seekers doing some self-reflection and figuring out what it is that I want out of a workplace, but also,

companies doing reflection to say, like, are we serving our employees properly? What can we do to improve that sort of thing? So tell me where you are right now. What, what, I mean, can you go in and start to use it? Yeah, yeah, Chesley, we are, we are live. We have about 1,400 stories from companies at some companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Facebook. We have around 1,200 people signed up for our platform, maybe on 1,250. I haven't checked today. And we actually just launched a new community feature. So if you recall the lift story that I told you, part of me was trying to figure out what it's like to be black at a company, but also part of me was trying to kind of find

other black people that I could connect with in my search. And the idea behind this community feature is we want to get job seekers a way to interact with the people that are already at a company and kind of like get a feel for their culture and message them, talk to them directly. But also we want to give companies a way to go past the post and pray kind of models, what I call it, of recruiting. where every company right now is trying to recruit diverse talent, but they're all just kind of like posting some jobs over here,

some jobs over here, some jobs over here, and hoping that they get found. This is kind of a way for them to be more proactive about the recruiting and putting their culture out there by making their internal communities of talent, diverse talent, more accessible to candidates. What if, I mean, presumably there are going to be some people who want to post anonymously. They may be at the company, but they don't want people to know who they are

because maybe they had a difficult or challenging experience. Is that possible? Can you do that? Yeah. So all of our stories are anonymous. The only kind of identifying piece of it is you can choose to like display or provide as much information as you want in terms of your portrait. You just have to provide one portrait trait.

So I could, you know, fill out black male 21 to 30, heterosexual, disabled or not disabled, not a veteran. Or I could just say black. Right. And the idea behind that is obviously, you know, if you work at a 200 person company and there's three black people. It's really easy to identify who it is that submitted this review or this story. So, yeah, we took that into consideration and made it, try to make it as anonymous and kind of identity protecting as possible. Toby, we've interviewed Jeremy Stoppulman,

the founder of Yelp on how I wrote this before. And as you probably know, one of the knocks on Yelp or even Glass Door is that, you know, always that businesses say, well, we don't, you know, we don't know who's reviewing us and we can't verify even if they've been to the restaurants, they might be a competitor. And so how are you able to make sure that the people doing the reviews are really who they say they are? Yeah, for these initial reviews that we've gotten, we've actually just called up people. Right. Literally.

So we've done a lot of like, we call them story interviews. So I've spoken to people from those companies that I mentioned before and I'll ask them a number of questions about their, you know, their experience with promotions and their relationship with the managers and diversity programs. What we found is that, one, it's very easy to validate that someone works at a company because obviously they're posting anonymously, but with the conversations that we have are very one-on-one and intimate like we're having right now. But then two, we get a very, a much more complete picture of their job experience. And I realize that when people hear about, think of like a glass door before minorities, they immediately think like people are coming here to bash their companies. That's not the case. A lot of the stories that we've gathered are positive. And what we found is that they're like small details.

that people wish were improved, right? They wish their manager would give them more space to speak up in a meeting. They wish that their company would be a little bit more intentional about the diversity programs that they're doing, like, things like that companies that are actually like valuable insights for companies to know that, oh, we actually, we're doing an overall, a pretty good job, an okay job. There are just some smaller things about our employee experience that we need to improve upon. So in the future, do you expect that all the content on Chesey will go through an editorial process, like your team will be doing interviews of people, or do you think that people will be able to directly post from their computers?

So people can go on, you could go on guide and post about NPR if you wanted to tomorrow. Most of the stories that we gather have been through this story interview process, and I realized that it isn't super scalable, but we, my sister and I have had conversations to say, like, what if this was scalable? We get a very complete picture of someone's experience here through these story interviews. And to me, 10,000 of these very complete, insightful stories is worth more than 100,000. It's bad. It's good. My manager sucked reviews that you might see on other sites. Yeah, the curated content is going to be way more valuable than the user-generated content. Exactly. So we're actively thinking about how we can make this story interview process part of our

business. Yes, that probably means that we have fewer stories than another review site, but we can guarantee you that the information that you find from the stories that we do have will be insightful and powerful and much more useful during your job search. I know that you have written about being a founder of a business. I think you have an essay called The Hardest Part About Being a Founder, which is a wonderful essay. Tell me what's the hardest part about being a founder? The hardest part for me in this year, year and a half that we've been on it has been the ambiguity. You know, we had an idea that we were going to be this glasser for minorities and we would just put this idea out there and it would take off. Like literally I thought that we would hit publish the next day

it would be one of those crazy success stories. We had 100,000 hits, all these stories. That did not happen. And I think that we've been at a consistent crossroads between, you know, like do we create something that job seekers love or do we create something that can be very viable to businesses? Because it kind of seems like we almost have to choose, at least in this initial stage, like do we have companies to help job seekers. We can't necessarily do both right away. And then we've just had so many discussions about like, should we focus all in, like, all in these stories. Should we offer like a consulting arm? Like we just have no idea what we're doing.

And I think the hardest part is that ambiguity of what actually should I do, right? And how do I kind of move forward? I am very much a planner. Like I'm the person that maps out his itinerary for a trip and everything like that. So like that's not super conducive with being a founder and being running a business where you don't know what you're doing. So a lot of it has just been, you know, having the conviction to say like, we're doing this. We're going to try it for three months. if it doesn't work, we learn something, we move on to the next thing.

Toby, as part of your High Builders Fellowship, you will be attending a bunch of workshops and you attended the welcome session hosted by me and Troy Carter. What was your takeaway from that? What was the thing that you walked away from that with? I mean, I think this entire time it's been myself and my sister. And a lot of the conversation that we have with Troy was around like managing a team. You know, I haven't really, I'm the CEO. I wouldn't say that I've been managing myself.

sister's work. She's CMO. She runs everything that you see about Chessie in news or or social media or anything like that. She runs. So I haven't necessarily been managing her, but I'm actively thinking about now. Like, you know, eventually we're going to get a CTO on. We're going to get some product people on. We're going to get some designers. Like, we're going to have a team of people that I'm kind of going to be responsible for leading and pointing in the right direction. I think that was my biggest takeaway is just like how to be a good leader, how to choice that something along the lines of like, you know, you want to get people in that can do a role and just take off. In terms of leaders, how can you hire the smartest people and just let them make their mistakes?

How do you give them resources to mentors outside of the company or maybe inside of the company, but being able to help them level up as well and giving them a path to it? But I just believe, you know, can you hire really smart people and just get out of their way? You know, I think we're a very mission-driven business, right? And I'm very excited to have a team of people that are equally invested in solving this problem that DeMabee and I started this company for it. If you and your sister win this pitch competition, how do you think you would use the $50,000 grant? If we win the pitch competition, that's the jump. Because we're still working full-time.

We're still worth working at our full-time job. I think this would be the jump that we need to transition into full-time. You know, part of that money would go towards kind of sustaining ourselves, and then part of it will also go towards web development. You know, I've been making it all myself, just learning how to code slash not code. That money would definitely go towards web development and building out a more solid web software product and us going full time. That's Toby Agbuna, co-founder and CEO of Chesey. More stories from our How I Built This Fellows edition will be in your feed on Thursday. If you want to learn more about the fellows or get tickets to the How I Built This Summit, you can visit summit.

npr.n.org. And to find out more about NPR's live events, go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rantin Arableu. Thanks also to Janet Ujjong Lee, Jana Capadona, Bruce Grant, Farah Safari, Liz Metzker, Elmanian, Joanna Palavska, John Isabella, Jessica Goldstein, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR.