Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna

Hey everyone, so as a lot of you know, every year during normal years we do uh How I Built the 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, and vice versa. Pierre was born in Brazil, and he was around five years old when he moved with his parents to the US. 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 US, I remember.

Just struggling 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. 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 stop 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 gonna 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, ex 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 in Ohio. Like this you were like a speech and debate

Absolutely. Speech and debate was kinda my claim to fame. I remember My school would send me to different tournaments around the US, 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. It gave me an opportunity to receive a speech scholarship. The top speech school at the time Bradley University.

And I was ecstatic. So he gets a Bradley. And um on the speech scholarship. And I guess while you're there, um while you were at Bradley You worked on a a a project

I guess it's called the Capstone Project, maybe your your final year project. Tell me about that. Yeah, so I'm at Bradley. I don't sleep very often, um, so late at night. My mind just runs wild and I

really concern myself with the problems that I see around. 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 scouring 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 hard of hearing or they're deaf. Have a hard time communicating. Uh Food establishments.

And it was as simple as they tried to. Order food, where they're writing it on his paper or napkin and hand it 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. Yeah, Google Translate for every single language. Like what are we missing here? Why is this Not been done. And so with that realisation. 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 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 gonna look like this and it's gonna act like this. And she asked. One question it's funny, this is why we name the company we hear you. She asked.

Why do you keep doing what you do and 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 or hard of hearing to communicate with those who aren't. I mean there's s and there's some examples. There's a a a a famous pizzeria in San Francisco where all the employees are deaf and In Washington, D C there's Galliadette University and um there are cafes around there where all the employees are deaf, but 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 hard of hearing or deaf and easily order if that person can't read lips and it's challenging for

the cross communication. So 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 are we messing around here?

Um he was like, No, I love you. He's like, I'm super busy. But I have another professor Who's gonna 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'd already done copious amounts of research leading up to here, so I handed them this doc.

That's like a hundred pages and I'm like This is what I know. Wow. 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. Alright, so now

You started working on this. And I know that in December of twenty twenty You We're able to put out a proof of concept. This is this is your company.

It's called We hear you. We hear you, which is great. So W H Y Y Um And how does it work?

So Twenty twenty, 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 they're different letters A, B, C, With your with your hand. Okay. 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 the lower vocabulary so that we could expand.

So we started with L A R G E. Large C O F F In D. And this is like an iPhone or like an iPad that was recording

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 want it to work on any camera. Just an app that would be on on any camera. Exactly. Yep. 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.

Yep. By by pointing your iPhone or your Android device at that person. It would come back to you in In either text or in In in audio.

Exactly. So it essentially 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 And so

In a perfect world. Once your vision is fully. Yeah. you would love for this to work on a day to day basis. I go into a shop and Um the person taking my order.

is deaf and how would we interact? So in the perfect world you walk into a shop. Um, 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 fantastical thing that you would like.

And our system picks it up. You don't even know that you're doing it because you're looking 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 is a part of the deaf and hard 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 that's where I foresee I see this being something that everybody has in their pocket. Pierre It's it's Just so remarkable. I mean you you didn't grow up around people who are deaf, you didn't have a a a direct connection to the deaf community, but you saw a challenge and you pursued it and

There was a reason why you pursue this challenge. And I I 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 grow 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 kinda sucks, like just put simply, it kinda sucks. Yeah. 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 saviour. Because the deaf community is far too strong and far too capable to need a hearing saviour. Олаєм із алай в хопінь айд.

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 no's, a lot of why you's.

And it's been a lot of Why not? If you win the pitch competition How will you use

The fifty thousand dollar 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 gonna go towards furthering our goals so much more. and just finding new ways to innovate. So it's just gonna 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 Aguna and his sister Demi are the founders of Chezy. 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 just I was like good at math and you know the typical Nigerian tracks are lawyer Doctor or business person, and I ruled out lawyer because I 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 kinda try out a bunch of different things and then figure out where I wanted to ultimately take my career. And also my dad was in consulting. So um I graduated from UNC and moved to Boston to start working in management consulting. And I spent three years in Boston and then actually moved to New York City, shifting a little bit more into

people oriented diversity inclusion kind of work. Um and then the pandemic hit, so I actually moved out of New York City. move back home to North Carolina and then now to now to Georgia. Um Like many people and and and and as you may know if you've heard how I built this, we've had several guests who who went into consulting but

Always with an eye on starting their own thing. And consulting's a great place to do that because you learn about a bunch of different industries. Um, it sounds like that 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 you know, 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, you know, kinda difficult to get out. Kind of established my network there and you know our projects are a year, 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. Um, and that's actually kinda 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 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 start turning?

No, that's 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 Yeah, there were jobs out there, but

Companies weren't really serious about hiring for it. Yeah. And I remember I 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 Google or I was just looking up people like

People that work and lift in New York City. And I found myself looking to speak to black people. because I figure that their experiences would be most similar to mine. And

Um I also was kinda like, you know, trying to find like my community or like my my tribe of people in the office at the at Lyft. Before I decided to apply. And it was it was difficult because you know it was like a it was kinda laborist for me to go through LinkedIn every time like that and kinda figure to ultimately just kinda figure out what it's like to be black there. And I kinda took that sentiment to my sister.

And just uh, 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 w us wanting to start Chesse was That experien 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 there was and is Glassdoor, right? You can go to Glassdoor 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 that can tell me what the experience might be like for for me as a black man or for an Asian woman or for somebody who is

um uh minority or marginalized Th 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. Like I I mean everyone uses glassdoor, but I think glassdoor 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 the people were like

paid to put a positive review. They're like so glowing, it's like this doesn't seem realistic. But the biggest thing is that, you know, you don't know who submitted the review and therefore it's kinda hard to put yourself in the shoes of that person. So we kinda 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 um what we call portraits to them. So like I can go on and find stories with

Portraits of black. Men. You know, twenty one to thirty. not disabled, et cetera, like or you can just, you know, any combination of those. And that the idea is that you're finding stories from people that identify similarly to you. With our platform.

So you c come up with this idea and you call it Chezy, and tell me about the name. So we actually launched as Diversify. Uh huh. 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 Chezi. So again, um we're Nigerian, my sister and I are Nigerian.

We're of the Ebo tribe, so Chesi 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 and start to use it? Yeah, yeah. Tesse we are we are live. We um

have around fourteen hundred stories from companies at some companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Facebook. We have around twelve hundred people signed up for our platform, maybe around twelve twelve hundred fifty I haven't checked today. And we actually just launched a new community feature. So if you recall the the lip 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. Yeah. And the idea behind this community feature is We want to give job seekers a 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 the post and pray kind of models what I call of recruiting.

Where every company right now is trying to recruit diverse talent. But They're all just kind of like Posting some b 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 uh proactive about the recruiting and like 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 gonna be some people who wanna post anonymously? Um they may be at the company but they don't want people to know who they are because maybe they had a uh a difficult or challenging experience. Um, 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 can you know fill out. black male twenty one to thirty.

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 two hundred person company and there's three black people, It's why it's really easy to identify who it is that submitted this review or this story. So yeah, we we took that into into consideration and made it try to make it as anonymous. and kind of identity protecting as possible.

Toby, we've interviewed Jeremy Stoppelman, the founder of Yelp, on how I built this before. And as as you probably know, one of the knocks on on Yelp or even Glassdoor is that Um, you know, is that businesses say, Well we don't you know, we we don't know who's reviewing us and we can't verify even if they've been to the restaurant, they might be a uh competitor and So how do you 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 I've 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 relationships 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 interest 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 or positive. And what we find 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 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 it's do you expect that all the content on Che will go through an editorial process, like your team will be doing interviews with people, or do you think that people will be able to directly post From their their computers. So people can go on like you could go on guide and post about NPR if you wanted to tomorrow.

Most of the stories that we gathered have been uh through this story interview process and I realize that it isn't Super scalable. But we my sister and I have had conversations to say what if this was scalable? We get a very complete picture of someone's experience here through these three interviews.

And to me, ten thousand of these very complete insightful stories is worth More than a hundred thousand It's bad. It's good. My manager sucked.

Reviews that you might see on other sites. Yeah, the curated content is gonna be way more valuable than the user generated content. Exactly. So We're actively thinking about how we can make this story and be 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 of a business. It's it's and you I think you have an essay called The Hardest Part About Being a Founder. Mm-hmm. Um, which is a wonderful essay. Tell me what What's the hardest part about being a founder? The hardest part. For me in this you know, 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 glassroom for minorities and we would just put this idea out there and it would take off. Like literally, I thought that we would hit public the next day, you know be one of those crazy success stories. We had a hundred thousand 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's Can be very viable to businesses. Cause it kinda seems like we almost have to choose, at least in this initial stage, like do we have companies, do we 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 on these stories, should we

offer like a consulting arm. We just have no idea what we're doing. And I think the the hardest part is that ambiguity of What actually should I do? Right, and how do I kinda 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 and 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 gonna try for three months if it doesn't work. We learn something, we move on to the next thing. Toby, I um as part of your High Biltest Fellowship, you will be attending a bunch of workshops and you attended the welcome session hosted by by me and Troy Carter. Um What was your takeaway from that? What was the the thing that you walked away from that with?

I mean I th I think the this entire time it's been myself and my sister. And a lot of the conversation that we had 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 My sister's worked. She's CMO, she runs everything everything that that you see about Chesie in 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, it' eventually

We're going to get some 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's the choice said 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 get them

resources to mentors outside of the company or maybe inside of the company, but being able to help them level up is you know 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 maybe and I started this company for.

If if you and your sister win this pitch competition. How how do you think you would use the fifty thousand dollar grant? If we win the pitch competition, that's

That's the job. Well no,'cause we're still working full time. We're still worth working at our our full time job. I think this would be the jump that we need to 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 Chezy. 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.org. And to find out more about NPR's live events, Go to NPR presents.

dot org. This episode was produced by JC Howard with music composed by Rantin Arablui. Thanks also to Janet, U Jum Lee, Gianna Cappadona, Bruant, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, El Manian, Joanna Pavska, John Isabella, Jessica Goldstein, Niva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this fellows edition. from NPR.

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