Author: Megan Rose Dickey

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Human Capital: Moving away from ‘master/slave’ terminology

TGIF, am I right? Welcome back to Human Capital, where we explore some of the latest news in labor, diversity and inclusion in tech.

This week, we’re looking at the use of “master/slave” terminology in computer programming and the current state of gig workers in California.

Human Capital will soon be available as a weekly newsletter. You can sign up here.

Stay Woke

GitHub to sunset master/slave terminology 

This probably isn’t news to developers, but it was news to me when I found out many tech companies still use slave-master language. Now, Microsoft-owned GitHub is gearing up to remove these references to slavery by naming primary code repositories “main” instead of “master.” These changes will go into effect on October 1.

GitHub talked about making these changes as early as June, when CEO Nat Friedman tweeted that it was something the company was already working on. But GitHub is by no means the first company to consider and make these changes. In 2014, open-source platform Drupal moved to replace “master/slave” with “primary/replica.” 

One of its reasons for making the change was, “The word ‘slave’ has negative connotations (although this might or might not be relevant in the naming of a technical term) including multi-century history of slavery to benefit European colonial powers, prison laborers today forced to work in conditions at times resembling that slavery, young girls sold into sex slavery in many parts of the world today.”

Then, in 2018, programming language Python ditched the racist terminology. Meanwhile, Twitter began taking steps to replace those terms earlier this year and hopes to finish replacing that terminology by the end of 2021, according to CNET. 

What’s wild is that these terms ever existed in the first place and are just now being addressed. While Los Angeles city officials way back in 2003 asked its manufacturers and suppliers to stop using the terminology, they did not require it.

So perhaps it’s no wonder why some tech companies struggle to retain Black employees. In 2019, for example, Google reported its attrition rates of Black and Latinx talent — which indicate the rate at which employees leave on an annual basis — were higher than the national average. When racism is built into the technical framework of a company, it perpetuates a false idea that white people are superior to Black people. 

Gig Work

The latest in the battle over Prop 22 and AB 5

Two big things are happening pertaining to gig workers: Prop 22, the California bill backed by Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash that seeks to keep workers classified as independent contractors and lawsuits rooted in AB 5, the California law that went into effect earlier this year that lays out how to properly classify gig workers.

Let’s start with Prop 22. A new poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that it’s going to be a close election. In a survey of 5,900 likely voters, UC Berkeley’s IGS found that 39% of voters would vote yes on Prop 22 while 36% said they would vote no. The other 25% are undecided.

As we mentioned last week, the Yes on 22 campaign has put in about $180 million into the campaign while the No on 22 side has put in about $4.6 million. Meanwhile, we’re seeing ads for Yes on 22 inside on-demand apps.

Image Credits: Screenshot of DoorDash app via TechCrunch

On the AB 5 side of things, Uber and Lyft are still in court after California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, along with city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco sued the companies, alleging they are misclassifying their workers. In the appeals court, which granted a stay on the preliminary injunction that would force Uber and Lyft to immediately reclassify their drivers, a number of amicus briefs have been filed.

In a brief filed by the National Employment Law Group, the ACLU and other civil rights groups, they say Uber and Lyft harm workers of color by classifying them as independent contractors:

Many poor workers of color and immigrants are stuck in a separate and unequal economy where they are underpaid, put in harm’s way on the job, and left to fend for themselves without access to paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and other protections. By insisting that their drivers are not employees, Lyft and Uber further distance workers of colors from the bedrock workplace rights that provide real flexibility and economic security. Instead, their business models trap poor workers into intractable cycles of poverty and economic exclusion.

In the event Uber and Lyft are forced to reclassify their drivers, both Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Lyft CEO Logan Green filed sworn statements earlier this month that confirmed they both have plans to comply with an order requiring them to reclassify their respective workforces.

In Khosrowshahi’s statement, he simply said “Uber has developed implementation plans” to comply with an order within no more than 30 days. In Green’s statement, he said “such an implementation may include ceasing rideshare operations in all or some parts of California.”

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Have tips? Comments? Send me an email at megan@techcrunch.com 

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3 founders on why they pursued alternative startup ownership structures

There is no one-size-fits all model for building a startup.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, we heard from a handful of founders about alternative approaches to creating a sustainable company that ensures more than just VCs and early founders benefit from its success. 

One way is building a cooperative, which Driver’s Seat CEO Hays Witt described as “a kind of corporate entity that both allows and requires that we return the majority of our profits to our members, and that our members have a majority of governance.”

Driver’s Seat helps ride-hail drivers use data to maximize their earnings. It works by requiring drivers to install an app that educates them about how the co-op collects and uses their data. In exchange, the app gives them insights about their real hourly wages after expenses and how those wages relate to different driving strategies.

“At a community level, what we do is sort of align everybody’s interest so that as gig workers come into our co-op, as they generate data, the value of that data in the aggregate gets higher and higher,” Witt said. “The dividends that we’re able to return back to drivers gets higher and also the kind of insights we’re able to give communities about work gets higher at the same time. So we kind of align all of our impact and mission goals. And our business model is through our co-op structure.”

That’s not to say Driver’s Seat does not create returns for its investors — investors are just one group of many that benefit from the company’s success. Witt said a desire for accountability made him decide to form a co-op.

“If we are always accountable to our co-op members, and our co-op members are gig workers, then we’re going to know that we’re accountable to the right things,” Witt said. “Now, we have investor members, too. We’re accountable to them, too. But our structure means that the gig workers always have at least that 51%. [ … ] it’s certainly not the only way to build a business. But, you know, for us, it was the way that we would build a business that would align with our mission of really changing the gig economy.”

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Explore the global markets of micromobility at TC Sessions: Mobility

While electric scooters first launched at scale in the U.S., they quickly made their way overseas. Now, there’s a bustling electric scooter market in Europe, China, Latin America and one that’s growing in parts of Africa.

At TC Sessions: Mobility on October 6 & 7, we’ll explore the journey of electric scooters and bikes from the U.S. to a number of countries across Europe all the way to Rwanda in Africa with Spin co-founder Euwyn Poon, Gura Ride founder Tony Adesina and Voi co-founder Fredrik Hjelm.

Euwyn Poon, Co-founder and President at Spin

Spin, which got its start as a bike-share operator in San Francisco, shifted entirely to electric scooters in 2018. Now, it’s owned by Ford and recently launched its electric scooter operations in Germany. The plan is to later expand beyond Germany and into France, as well as the U.K.

Spin President and Co-founder Euwyn Poon will talk about what it’s been like expanding abroad and its plans for further growth.

Tony Adesina, Founder and CEO at Gura Ride

While there is much adoption throughout other parts of the world, there are only a handful of operators in Africa, such as Medina Bike in Marrakech, Morocco, Awa Bike in Lagos, Nigeria and Gura Ride in Kigali, Rwanda. Many of the larger micromobility operators, like Bird, Lime, Yellow, VOI, Tier and others have yet to make their way into Africa.

Gura Ride, founded by Tony Adesina, is currently live in six cities throughout Rwanda, offering electric bikes and electric scooters to riders. We’ll chat with Adesina about the state of micromobility in Africa and why he thinks adoption has been slower on the continent.

Fredrik Hjelm, Co-founder and CEO at Voi

With $136 million in venture funding, Voi has become a behemoth that operates in 38 cities across 10 European countries. Voi, like other electric scooter companies, paused some operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But Hjelm ultimately saw the pandemic as an opportunity to change the way people travel around cities, he said in late May after bringing on board Bird’s former UK chief. Meanwhile, Voi partnered with BlaBlaCar that same month to offer shared electric scooter rides via BlaBlaCar’s apps. We’ll discuss with Hjelm Voi’s roadmap and how it’s navigated COVID-19.

Get your tickets for TC Sessions: Mobility to hear from these thought-leaders along with several other fantastic speakers from Waymo, Lyft, Nuro and more. Tickets are just $145 until September 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, with discounts for groups, students and exhibiting startups. And we’ve introduced a $25 Expo Ticket for those who want to peruse our early stage startups and check out the breakout sessions! We hope to see you there!

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Twitter and Zoom’s algorithmic bias issues

Both Zoom and Twitter found themselves under fire this weekend for their respective issues with algorithmic bias. On Zoom, it’s an issue with the video conferencing service’s virtual backgrounds and on Twitter, it’s an issue with the site’s photo cropping tool.

It started when Ph.D. student Colin Madland tweeted about a Black faculty member’s issues with Zoom. According to Madland, whenever said faculty member would use a virtual background, Zoom would remove his head.

“We have reached out directly to the user to investigate this issue,” a Zoom spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’re committed to providing a platform that is inclusive for all.”

 

When discussing that issue on Twitter, however, the problems with algorithmic bias compounded when Twitter’s mobile app defaulted to only showing the image of Madland, the white guy, in preview.

“Our team did test for bias before shipping the model and did not find evidence of racial or gender bias in our testing,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “But it’s clear from these examples that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll continue to share what we learn, what actions we take, and will open source our analysis so others can review and replicate.”

Twitter pointed to a tweet from its chief design officer, Dantley Davis, who ran some of his own experiments. Davis posited Madland’s facial hair affected the result, so he removed his facial hair and the Black faculty member appeared in the cropped preview. In a later tweet, Davis said he’s “as irritated about this as everyone else. However, I’m in a position to fix it and I will.”

Twitter also pointed to an independent analysis from Vinay Prabhu, chief scientist at Carnegie Mellon. In his experiment, he sought to see if “the cropping bias is real.”

In response to the experiment, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal said addressing the question of whether cropping bias is real is “a very important question.” In short, sometimes Twitter does crop out Black people and sometimes it doesn’t. But the fact that Twitter does it at all, even once, is enough for it to be problematic.

It also speaks to the bigger issue of the prevalence of bad algorithms. These same types of algorithms are what leads to biased arrests and imprisonment of Black people. They’re also the same kind of algorithms that Google used to label photos of Black people as gorillas and that Microsoft’s Tay bot used to become a white supremacist.

Algorithmic accountability

 

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Human Capital: The Black founder’s burden

Welcome back to Human Capital, where we unpack all-things diversity, inclusion and labor in tech. This week, we’re looking at Google’s internal message board problem, as well as some highlights from TechCrunch Disrupt, where I had the pleasure of chatting with actress, producer and tech investor Kerry Washington about her investment strategy and her thoughts on The Wing’s internal turmoil.

Later, we’ll also highlight some other gems from Disrupt speakers on imposter syndrome, representation syndrome, the hidden burden of being a Black founder, and the importance of encouraging other Black and brown folks to enter this industry and stay.

Also, Human Capital will soon be available as a weekly newsletter. You can sign up here.

Google’s internal message board problem

Google found itself asking employees to be more active in moderating some of the internal message boards, according to CNBC. The issue is that Google has reportedly seen more posts being flagged for racism or abuse on its message boards. Some of these posts reportedly reinforce negative racial stereotypes, use harmful gendered phrases of insult Google employees based on their nationality. Here’s a snippet from Google’s internal blog, via CNBC:

“Our world is going to get more complicated as the year continues,” the team stated in the internal blog. “Tensions continue specifically for our Black+ community with Black Lives Matter, and our Asian Googlers with coronavirus and China/Hong Kong. All of this is compounded by the additional stress of working from home, social isolation, and caregiver responsibilities — to name a few. This new world creates urgency to keep work a welcoming place.”

Yes, tough conversations are the theme of the year. But we also know Google has had issues with employees before. You may remember James Damore, the now former Google employee who sent around an anti-diversity manifesto back in 2017. Google ultimately fired Damore that same month.

We reached out to Google for comment but have not heard back.

Kerry Washington on The Wing scandal

At TechCrunch Disrupt, I had the pleasure of virtually interviewing Kerry Washington, best known for her work in Hollywood as the lead actress on “Scandal” and “Little Fires Everywhere.” But she’s also invested in a handful of tech companies, including Community, Byte and The Wing. The Wing, however, went through some turmoil earlier this year. Employees alleged mistreatment of Black and brown workers, which ultimately led to The Wing CEO Audrey Gelman’s resignation.

“Well, you know, I’m not new to scandal, so there’s that,” Washington told me in response to a question about her reaction to the news. “I was and I am really deeply still inspired by the original vision of the company. And, I think like a lot of companies in this time, because of the several pandemics that we’re facing, whether it’s our awareness around racial injustice, or COVID, lots of people are in a moment of recalibration and self-reflection. So I think that there is incredible space to improve the dynamics. And as somebody who’s an investor, as a woman of color, it’s important to me that there is increased transparency and also accountability.”

Over the past few months, Washington said her role as an investor has been “really just supporting leadership in this transition,” as well as expressing to those leaders a “deep desire” for transparency and accountability.

On imposter syndrome and representation 

Also at Disrupt, my homegirl Kirsten Korosec led a wonderful conversation with Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of PromisePay and Jessica Matthews of Uncharted Power, two Black female founders, about how they both successfully pivoted their companies while navigating the pressures that come with being an underrepresented founder in Silicon Valley.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, founder and CEO at PromisePay:

It feels like tech has failed so significantly in investing in people they don’t know and missed out in growing companies because of that. So I think our obligation is to help make sure that we are not the only ones.

Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO at Uncharted Power:

It’s not imposter syndrome, it’s representation syndrome because I feel the exact same way. When we raised our Series A, the immediate thing I thought was, ‘Oh, man. I can not lose these people’s money.’ This is huge and if we don’t work, it’s not even about us, it’s about every other person who looks like me.

Michael Seibel on the Black founder experience

In a panel on the Black founder experience at Disrupt, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel spoke about a “hidden burden” for underrepresented founders.

“I think that there’s so much deserved activism around access to this world for underrepresented founders, that I feel as though there’s like, more pressure to succeed, in a weird way,” he said. “And I think that can be helpful to a point, but I think that it can be challenging. I also think that there’s so much emphasis around the toxicity in the technology world that a lot of really talented people believe it’s horrible, like believe that our world looks like Jim Crow South. And so therefore they shouldn’t even step any foot into it where like, I would challenge anyone trying to be successful in any industry to be able to avoid the types of problems that exists in the technology industry, if they come from an underrepresented background. So I don’t think the environment’s significantly different in our world than other worlds. I think that the environment is hard. You know, there is bias if you’re underrepresented, across the board, no matter what industry you go to. So if you’re gonna be successful, you’re going to figure out a way to get around it.”

But that’s not to say you’ll have to figure it out on your own, Seibel said. He pointed to how there are people who are willing and able to help. That includes him and the many other Black founders present in Silicon Valley.

“But if we somehow scare talented people away from this world, we won’t ever fix this world,” he said. “And we won’t ever, even more importantly than fixing this world, there’ll be huge swaths of the world that don’t have products and services that they deserve and that they need. And so I think we have to be careful to make sure we communicate that opportunities exist here. And that if you’re trying to be a high powered lawyer, or if you’re trying to be, you know, a top banker, you’re gonna go through the same bullshit. Like, different industries, same bullshit. So if you’re trying to make an impact in the world, strap in. If you’re an underrepresented founder, you’re gonna have to deal with these issues, no matter where you do it.”

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Darkstore launches FastAF app for same-day product delivery

Darkstore, the tech-driven fulfillment solution to enable e-commerce companies to offer same-day delivery, has just released a consumer-facing app called FastAF. Right now, the app is only available in Los Angeles.

FastAF is built on top of Darkstore, which already has relationships with a number of brands that store their products in Darkstores for same-day delivery. With Darkstore, companies like Nike, Adidas and Levis are able to offer same-day delivery to customers by storing their products inside Darkstore’s urban fulfillment centers. Currently, there are 550 Darkstores across 283 cities.

With FastAF, consumers can now order directly from those Darkstores for same-day delivery. FastAF currently offers 1,200 items from 170 brands. Fast AF has partnered with DoorDash to handle deliveries and a different company for returns. To return an item, customers can head into the FastAF app to request a return and then someone will come pick it up from you and take it back to the Darkstore fulfillment center.

Image Credits: Darkstore

While all of the products available on FastAF will come from a Darkstore, not all of the retailers featured in FastAF are Darkstore customers.

“We wanted to have a very good consumer experience out of the gate and use the demand to inform whether we should officially partner with those brands,” Hnetinka told TechCrunch. “The way we’ve chosen the categories and the products are really around what’s relevant in the times right now and what’s essential.”

FastAF features items like masks, hand sanitizer and soap, but also sneakers, sunglasses and other products. FastAF sells the products at MSRP but charges consumers fees related to delivery and fulfillment. Initially, FastAF will waive that delivery fee and is considering rolling out a free delivery option for orders over a certain amount.

Hnetinka, you may remember, founded WunWun back in 2012 to provide on-demand delivery for stores and businesses. The company, which was a strong competitor to Postmates, ultimately shut down in 2015 and then sold its assets to Alfred.

“For WunWun, we were powering offline online,” Hnetinka told me. “We had runners that went to local stores and brought you things in as fast as 30 minutes. With Darkstore, we’re powering online offline. The next wave of that has always been a consumer facing app to enable all of the brands on these ecommerce companies to deliver products quickly. We felt there was no place to get the brands you have a high affinity towards from. These are the types of brands you weren’t able to get fast, previously.”

FastAF is currently only available in Los Angeles, but the plan is to launch in New York later this year. San Francisco is on the roadmap, but Hnetinka did not share an exact timeline.

Darkstore, the company behind FastAF, has raised more than $30 million in funding. Its most recent funding came last September as part of a $21 million Series B round led by EQT Ventures.

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The art of pivoting with Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Jessica Matthews

Building and growing a startup is hard, but pivoting said startup into something new and then achieving that same growth is even harder. But it’s not impossible.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, founder and CEO of PromisePay, and Jessica Matthews, founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, both have experiences doing this. At TechCrunch Disrupt, they shed some light on their respective, yet somewhat similar, paths.

PromisePay, formerly known as Promise, got its start as a bail reform startup that aimed to reduce the number of people held behind bars simply because they can’t pay bail. Now, it’s focused on helping people make payments for parking and traffic tickets, court fees and child support.

“We actually had this huge existential crisis,” Ellis-Lamkins said. “We at Promise are focused on ending mass incarceration and on decreasing the number of people in jails. So we started to be very successful and we sold very well. And what we realized fundamentally is when we created efficiency, it made the systems more efficient at incarcerating people. It didn’t make them more efficient at what our wrong assumption had been, which is if the system is more efficient, it would decrease the number of people in the system. And so we made a decision that growth was not consistent with who we were as a company. So I went back to our investors, which is hard when you’re making money and said, this is not the path because I don’t think this is a long-term path.”

She told investors there are already people who sell their tech to law enforcement, but what Promise wants to do is liberate people. It became clear to her that she was selling to the wrong people when she was talking to a client who said the difference between them and her was that she cares about people in the criminal justice system and they don’t. Ellis-Lamkins told investors she was going to stop selling to prisons and jails, and offered to give investors their money back.

Instead, she started looking at why people are ending up incarcerated.

“And luckily, that spurred growth, but I’m just not going to be a company that grows on the backs of poor people and Black and brown people, because there is a better way,” she said. “But it was frightening in the moment to abandon a market in which we’re making money.”

Thankfully, she said, not one of her investors had a problem with her decision.

Matthews said she had a relatively similar experience with her company, Uncharted Power, which got its start as Uncharted Play. Her company’s first product was an energy-harnessing soccer ball that could power a lamp after just a few hours of playing with it. She later integrated that tech intro strollers to power cell phones.

But after raising her Series A round for Uncharted Play, Matthews realized that her company needed to go all-in on infrastructure. She thought about the ultimate goal of her company, which is to get people the infrastructure they need in their lives. She just didn’t see a way of doing that with soccer balls.

“So we got good at making these things and pushing them and scaling them out, but when you have this balance of not just profit and impact but impact because you know that you’re a member of the group you’re trying to serve. For me, it was sitting down and saying is this actually solving the problem even if it’s successful.”

Matthews said she realized it wasn’t. So that meant walking away from the products that were bringing in millions and had 64% gross profit margins, Matthews said.

But it all paid off. Last year, Uncharted Power raised additional funding from an investor that validated her thesis for the future of power infrastructure.

“That moment was huge for us,” she said.

Matthews and Ellis-Lamkins also had some other gems worth sharing about imposter syndrome and measuring success. Here are some more highlights from the conversation.

On imposter syndrome and representation 

Ellis-Lamkins:

It feels like tech has failed so significantly in investing in people they don’t know and missed out in growing companies because of that. So I think our obligation is to help make sure that we are not the only ones.

Matthews:

It’s not imposter syndrome, it’s representation syndrome because I feel the exact same way. When we raised our Series A, the immediate thing I thought was, ‘Oh, man. I can not lose these people’s money.’ This is huge and if we don’t work, it’s not even about us, it’s about every other person who looks like me.

On measuring success

Ellis-Lamkins:

I think part of what we should measure is how does technology improve our society in general, a measurement of success. I do think that if we measure success, it should not just be, I could make a billion dollars or have a company that valued at a billion dollars if the consequences are greater than the actual benefit and so I think that’s really important.

Matthews:

Let’s get rid of the term “social enterprise.” It’s bullshit. Enterprise is an enterprise. A problem’s a problem. Let’s create a value system based on the problems. There are some problems that are more important than others. And knowing that means we need to back and support the founders who get that more than others, and then beyond that.

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Apple Watch Series 6 will measure blood oxygen levels

Apple’s new Series 6 watch has some exciting new health features. Thanks to a new health sensor, the Apple Watch Series 6 is able to measure your blood oxygen levels in 15 seconds. The watch will also record background measurements while you sleep.

Your blood oxygen level measures how much oxygen your red blood cells are carrying. In partnership with health care providers, Apple plans to conduct health studies using this new blood oxygen measurement capability.

Additionally, Watch OS 7 will be able to measure your full range of VO2 max, detect if you’re washing your hands and monitor your sleep.

Developing…

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Black Tech Pipeline proves the ‘pipeline problem’ isn’t real

The tech industry has become known as a place that is predominantly white and male. Contrary to the misguided popular belief, it’s not a pipeline problem as much as it’s a retention problem.

Black Tech Pipeline, aims to debunk that myth and help support Black technologists along their respective journeys. Black Tech Pipeline, founded by Pariss Athena, has three key offerings: a job board where anyone can pay to be featured, a recruitment and consulting service and connections to potential speakers for events.

“The goal of Black Tech Pipeline is to bring exposure to the existing community of Black technologists,” Athena said. “We are focused on those who are here because we want to shine a light on the whole ‘pipeline problem’ not being real. We’ve been in the industry. We exist in it. We’ve been here for years. We’re seniors, we’re mid-level, we’re a range. But we also want to create this ripple effect for those who are outside of the industry to show them you have a community of people who look like you and are here to support you through your journey.”

Currently, there are nearly 700 Black technologists in the database. As of July, 8.66% of candidates had zero years of experience, 37.33% had one to two years’ worth of experience, 27.33% had two to three years of experience, 22% had five to 10 years of experience and 10.5% had 10-plus years of experience.

Companies featured on the job board are paying customers of Black Tech Pipeline. That means they get a customized landing page where they can describe the roles they have available, as well as detail their values, how the company thinks about diversity and inclusion, and more. These companies will also be featured in Black Tech Pipeline’s newsletter and social media platforms, which has a combined following of more than 40,000 people.

“We want to give a very transparent view of what it means to work there as someone who is most likely going to be the minority in the workplace,” Athena said.

Athena landed on the idea to create a database of Black technologists after she was laid off from her first job as a software engineer and became more active on Twitter.

“When I got on, I noticed there was a really tiny community of Black technologists, which was interesting, because, at least out here in Boston — and I’m sure this is everywhere — but not only have I always been the only software engineer on the development team, but literally the only Black person in the entire company ever since I entered this industry,” Athena said.

“So because I rarely saw people who look like me, I just figured we weren’t really in this industry, so when I saw that we were a few of us, I was like, ‘Oh, cool, I wonder how many more of us are out there?’ And I had put out a tweet asking what does Black Twitter in tech look like? And that tweet, unexpectedly, went semi-viral and lots of Black technologists from all over the world posted themselves into the tweet, and it created this super long thread of their pictures and captioning what they do in the industry. And overnight, it really formed this movement and community of Black tech Twitter.”

That same week, employers began reaching out to Athena, asking her to help them recruit Black people, she said. Despite not having any recruiting experience, Athena agreed to help. She developed a talent database in order to connect candidates with employers, as well as an accompanying application that automatically filters into the database.

In its earlier days, Athena said she noticed that while many of the candidates were being hired, a lot of them weren’t being retained.

“So there was just this retention problem,” she said. “And as someone who has always been the only Black person in predominantly white spaces, I knew what was going on.”

Pariss Athena, founder of Black Tech Pipeline. Photo courtesy of Athena.

That’s what led Athena to create a consultant package and start charging companies. Anytime a candidate would get hired through her efforts, she would conduct biweekly check-ins during the first 90 days to see how they’re doing.

“That was my way of ensuring that I didn’t send them somewhere harmful,” Athena said. “And with their consent and safety in mind, I would relay the feedback that they gave me to the employer.”

The goal with that is to help employers improve their work culture, as well as the systems and processes that have bias baked into them. Initially, Athena was doing this for free and operating simply out of her Twitter direct messages. Athena has since started charging companies for these services as part of her company, Black Tech Pipeline.

Despite all the effort Athena has put into Black Tech Pipeline, this is not yet her full-time job, but she wants it to be. Ideally, she would be focused more on the consultation piece.

“I really love the fact that I get to be this almost external HR, but for the candidate and not for the company,” she said. “So, I’m not here to protest the company and make sure it looks good no matter how much harm they’re doing. I’m here to make sure this person is having a good experience, and if not, I’m going to hold you accountable and we’re going to work on it. So that’s really what I want to do — make change and hold people to their word. I don’t want to work with anyone that’s going to be performative.”

Of the 12 companies she’s worked with so far, there have been nine hires. Technically, there have been more, but Athena said she doesn’t count the ones where people have been hired but haven’t stayed for very long. Part of that retention problem, she said, reflects a couple of issues she’s had with larger companies.

One of those issues is there being a disconnect between the folks at the company who really do want to implement change and the higher-ups who feel less inclined to do so, Athena said. Another one is that some folks who have been hired have experienced microaggressions that made them want to leave.

“And so when those things happen, I’m reporting it to the manager but they don’t know how to move forward with it,” Athena said. “They’ll say it’s not substantial enough or say it was coincidental. When I cannot get through to employers like that, I finish out my contract with them by doing the check-ins and reporting feedback, but I don’t dive in to look at their current processes and see where they can improve. I don’t do that anymore for those types of employers. So I just finish out the contract and move on.”

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Uber wants to help its drivers and delivery workers register to vote

With the 2020 general election coming up in November, Uber has partnered with TurboVote to launch an in-app feature designed to help riders, eaters, drivers and delivery workers register to vote. This comes after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in August said the company would help every driver register to vote.

Uber will feature in-app banners and send emails giving people information about how to vote. They’ll then be directed to TurboVote to register to vote in their state.

Uber, as usual, also has initiatives to help voters find their polling place and will offer discounted rides to and from the polls. Uber is also asking folks to consider volunteering to be a poll worker, given the shortage this year as a result of COVID-19.

Uber has offered discounted rides to polling places for the last few years but this is the first time Uber has tried to help people register to vote through its app. Earlier this year, Lyft announced it would offer discounted as well as free rides to the polls throughout the general election.

This year, the fate of Uber and Lyft in California is up to voters. Prop 22, which Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart have collectively poured $180 million into, seeks to keep their workers classified as independent contractors.

Human Capital: The battle over the fate of gig workers continues