Tap into collective genius, w/Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code & Moms First

0:00Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So, if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com. slash MOS and get up to three months free. One of the patterns I've seen over and over and speaking with successful founders is this.

0:40They don't wait for HR problems to show up. They build solid systems early on so their company can grow without tripping over itself. JustWorks is one of those systems. JustWorks is the human resources platform that helps you scale without sacrificing your team's needs. It handles automated payroll, benefits, compliance, even international hiring, so you can scale your team without slowing your momentum. JustWorks secures your hiring systems so they don't cost you time, money, or people, which is how you scale with confidence. JustWorks for your people. It's not that people weren't queer back in the day.

1:23It's that they had a high day.

1:31You had to pretend to be straight, as many people unfortunately still have to do, to your employer, to your family, to your friends, to your landlord, to everyone.

1:46That's Eric Cervini, writer and historian of LGBTQ plus politics. His book, The Deviants' War, The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, uncovers the story of astronomer Frank Camuni. First and foremost, he was an astronomer. He was a Ph.D. astrophysicist from Harvard. In the late 1950s, Frank was recruited by the Pentagon to help build America's space program. He was well-positioned to be one of the founding fathers of the American Man space program. But then his new employer discovered that Frank was gay. Within weeks, he was barred from ever working in the federal government for the rest of his life.

2:33What happened to Frank was sadly all too common at the time. But it's how Frank reacted to this injustice that made him stand out. What makes Frank Kameny so special is that he was the first to really fight back. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, and that was something that had never been done. He was the first to protest in front of the White House for gay rights, first to testify in Congress for gay rights. Frank couldn't and didn't do this alone. You have to convince your potential allies that there exists a problem with the current status quo.

3:22The repressive constraints of American society in the 1950s and 1960s meant Frank had to work less overtly. Half the work is just getting people in the room to begin with. The way he did this on a really practical level was first tapping into networks that he already had. there actually existed really vibrant queer subcultures. There were more gay bars in San Francisco, in Boston, in Los Angeles in the 1950s than there are now, which is mind-blowing. Frank Kameny was at the center of that. So when it was time to actually create an organization, one of America's first gay rights organizations, the Mattachine Society.

4:12All he had to do is pick up the phone. That early network of supporters and allies enabled Frank to start a movement against the odds, a movement that would help grow a wider awareness of gay rights. He really did lay the groundwork for the modern gay rights movement. He was one of the first to say, actually, no, we have nothing wrong with ourselves. And in fact, what makes us different is what makes us beautiful.

4:47Frank's work was just one of the early threads in a complex struggle that goes on to this day. And he knew, like many other leaders of change, that building a strong network of allies is key to tackling intractable problems. That's why I believe building a network of changemakers is the most powerful way to unlock opportunity and uncover creative solutions.

5:13You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. 10 years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

5:52I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe building a network of changemakers is the most powerful way to unlock opportunity and uncover creative solutions. One of my favorite questions to ask Master to Scale guests is, what's your favorite time-saving hack? The answers range from elegant to illuminating to unexpected. My smartest time-saving hack is to make time to think. The smartest time-saving hack is not watching a lot of TV. Picking out my kids' clothes and my clothes the night before. God. Maybe what? Having a desk in my bedroom? Let me just say my smartest time-saving hack.

6:38What's a hack? Sorry. Making music. How is that a time-saving hack? Because time goes away. So I get to save time by saving me from having a horrible time in the future. All of these hacks are potent ways of making time for doing the real work of leadership, solving problems, and affecting lasting, impactful change. And while there's no hack for achieving this kind of change, there is something every leader should do to greatly increase their odds of success, embracing the dynamic potential of collaborative networks. When we tap into the collective genius of a diverse group, magic happens. Collaboration fosters the cross-pollination of ideas, blending diverse perspectives and skills to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

7:32As a leader, the most effective way to achieve this is to build a network of people and organizations who are fired up by a common purpose. This network of changemakers made up of diverse perspectives will drive innovation and impact. I wanted to talk to Reshma Saujani about this because she has a track record of building inclusive networks of collaborators that let her tackle problems from unexpected angles and unlock massive opportunities. Reshma did this most famously by founding and scaling Girls Who Code, the nonprofit that has supported thousands of young women and non-binary people to develop coding skills and take up impactful roles in the tech industry.

8:15Reshma's focus has been on tackling deeply embedded inequality and a broken economic system. Her methods are united by how she brings together and inspires mission-driven changemakers. It's something that every leader should study and apply to their organization. To understand how Reshma developed her approach, let's look back at her early and harrowing experience of exclusion. I had a tough childhood in terms of fitting in. And I was angry. My name was Reshma. I wish I was white. I just was trying to hide. A few years before Reshma's birth, her parents were among an estimated 80 ,000 Ugandans of Indian descent who were expelled by the country's dictator, Idi Amin.

8:58Reshma's parents scrambled for refugee status and eventually emigrated to the U.S., where they settled in Schaumburg, Illinois. In 1975, Reshma was born. We were in a working-class white neighborhood that didn't have a lot of brown people. We didn't look the part. Still ate Indian food. I think my mom tried to put it in my lunchbox a couple of times. You know, my mother would wear a sari at the local Kmart and be made fun of. Facing racism is incredibly difficult for anyone, let alone a child. And it can feel like a very lonely experience. For Reshma, seeing how her parents dealt with it heightened her feeling of isolation.

9:34I remember this one time, our house got spray painted, go back to your own country. I woke up and I was out there, I was watching my father, and he just had a little rag and a jar of Clorox, and he's just cleaning it up. And I think he was, like, humming a Bollywood tune while he was doing it. And I remember looking at him saying, I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to be quiet. One day at school, Reshma tried an extreme approach. It was the last day of eighth grade. This girl called me a derogatory term for a brown person. And instead of just normally, I would pretend I didn't hear or just walk the other direction, I agreed to meet her at the schoolyard at the end of the day.

10:12And I got beat up pretty bad with a Wilson tennis racket and a baseball bat. And I remember coming home and my mother just looking at me and looking at my father and being like, why did you bring us this country? It was the last time Reshma would try to tackle a huge problem alone. It was the beginning of this now life of activism, but also doing it in a way that did kind of have a lot of Gandhians' principles about nonviolence, about love, about togetherness, about finding our commonality. And from that moment onwards, I was fighting. And I was also fighting with love. You know, one of the first organizations I started in the ninth grade was called PRISM, Prejudice Reduction Interested Students Movement.

11:01This was Reshma's first attempt at building a network of collaborators. Fired up by the experience, she decided to pursue law and politics as routes to take this approach to the next level. But after gaining her law degree, she started to feel more disconnection than connection. I, you know, was$300 ,000 in student loan debt, so I thought I'd have to work for the man, and then I'd go, you know, give back. And kind of woke up at age 33 in New York City, and I wasn't getting any younger. And I remember I was in a job I didn't want, a life I didn't want. Despite the pressures of her job, Reshma still made time to do pro bono work advocating for immigrants.

11:42The collaborative impact fulfilled her, but she could only do one case at a time. So Reshma began thinking more deeply about how she could start building a network of changemakers for scale impact. Politics seemed like it might be the answer. My parents got expelled from their home because the community never participated in the political process, right? They never fought for their rights. And I saw very clearly what happens when you don't. I worked on my first campaign for Bill Clinton, like, early on, and so I got the bug. Getting experience on the campaign trail convinced Reshma that politics was the way to build a network of motivated changemakers with a shared passion for improving the world.

12:24I romanticized government. I romanticized politics. In 2010, Reshma saw her opportunity. Carolyn Maloney, Democratic representative for New York's 12th congressional district, was vacating her seat to run for the Senate. So Reshma put herself forward. And I was like, I got to do it. This seemed like a good way to start tackling the problems she wanted to solve. I'm like getting excited. I'm talking to consultants. I'm thinking about my campaign. I'm building my policy book. Like, I'm in. But then Reshma hit a stumbling block. Carolyn Maloney changed her mind and instead stayed to defend her congressional seat.

13:06Reshma's task suddenly became a lot lonelier and a lot harder. Now I've quit my job. I'm like, you know, I'm in it. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. All the reasons for running haven't changed. I still think that we need younger, fresher voices. I still have a lot of ideas. And there's something about, you may appreciate this as an entrepreneur, there's something about that naivety, right, when you're young. And you kind of think, I really kind of looked and said, oh, I can win this congressional race. And I don't realize how bananas that is. And, well, I mean, you wouldn't do it otherwise. That's kind of the classic entrepreneurial jump off the cliff.

13:47I didn't know how to hire people. You know, I didn't know what to ask for. This was the first time I was building something. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I got a lot of people to support me, from, like, John Legend to Jack Dorsey to, like, you know, all these titans in business. And we had all these young people, like, in our campaign. It was exciting. But it wasn't enough. It was basically like a death sentence in politics. And I lost spectacularly. Reshma had seen becoming a leader in a political party as a shortcut to building a network of changemakers. Instead, she had learned how political parties can be unwelcoming of new perspectives and leadership.

14:32But there had been some upsides to the experience. One was how campaigning across the city opened Reshma's eyes to a new way to drive change. When you run for office, you end up going to a lot of schools. I was going into the best private schools in New York City and some of the poor schools in New York. And I'd walk into computer science classes and robotics labs, and there's just tons of boys, right? Not a girl in sight. I was like, wait, what's going on here? Where are the girls? Reshma could see this was part of a wider problem. I was paying attention to what was happening in tech and the fact that so many of these products were being used by women, but women weren't sitting around the table.

15:14Reshmi used the contacts in tech and education that she'd built up on the campaign trail. And I spent about two years almost treating it like I was creating a startup. I would talk to every smart person I knew, every teacher, every computer scientist, trying to understand the problem, trying to think about what the right solution to that would be. Notice how Reshma hadn't come up with a solution yet. In doing this research, she was not only learning about what would make a successful program and organization, she was pulling together the threads of a new network of collaborators who would be aligned with her mission.

15:50This is a key skill for any leader aiming to build a network of changemakers. You have to invite people in, listen to their experiences, and then ask yourself a series of questions. How does the problem you want to address impact them? What solutions have they tried that have failed? What are the factors that keep getting overlooked? And just what would a solution actually look like? What Reshma discovered astounded her. 74 % of high school girls wanted to pick a career that was about changing the world. And back then, less than like 0.2 % of girls were going into computer science. So I thought, you know what?

16:28But if I could connect coding to change-making, I could inspire a generation of girls to go into technology. Reshma didn't just want to build a network to address the issue of representation in tech. You could use these programs to close the gender gap. The idea was that you would come out of that summer classroom, you would love coding so much that you would want to go major or minor in computer science. And if you major or minored in computer science, you would then go work in the technology workforce. This is a job where you can march up into the middle class. Maybe for the first time, we're kind of starting kids out at the same place.

17:10And whether you are a young girl living in a homeless shelter in Harlem or a girl going to the best private school in New York City, you have an equal shot at getting a job at LinkedIn, right? Like, that really excited me. at the core of my life is not just solving equity for women and girls, but it's also solving poverty. And here I saw an opportunity to do both. So I put the model together. When I talked to people, the number 20 kept coming up, that you wanted to put a group of 20 together to teach them a new skill set. And so I designed these summer camps to have 20 girls. And then I did my first program.

17:52For insight on how that first cohort felt, let's hear from Diana Crisnavarro, a software engineer who was one of the first Girls Who Code students. I took AP Computer Science in high school. We started off with like three girls, and then they dropped out, and I ended up being the only girl in the class. It was very cutthroat and super competitive. And I remember this dude got a 97 on a test and he was like arguing with the teacher and was like, this should be like a 98. And I was just so embarrassed because I was just doing so poorly. I was like, this sucks. I really don't want to code ever again.

18:36The experience was so negative that Diana decided software engineering was a closed network and one she couldn't break into. That was until she came across the website for Girls Who Code. She applied, was accepted, and in the summer of 2012, arrived for her first Girls Who Code session at an office building in downtown Manhattan. Sitting around this gorgeous wooden table, everyone holding laptops, and it's awesome. And then Reshma came in with a box of these super fancy, cool-looking donuts. The program covered coding skills, but Reshma also made sure to get the cohort thinking about how they could work together to solve a range of problems.

19:21What app would you create? What technology would you build? And I remember just watching the room. I believed in this idea that if you actually bring together girls that were black, white, straight, gay, you know what I mean, rich, poor, and you put them in a classroom together and you taught them a new skill set, that they would become best friends. You could just feel like, oh, we're all going to be really good friends and we're all going to do really cool stuff together. And there's people here that really believe in us and really want us to succeed. And it's just this like freaking awesome feeling.

19:53feeling. It was this big light that went off in my head. I thought to myself, you know, maybe I could help create an entire generation of girls that could make the world a better place. And she's like, you guys are going to change the world. And then that was it. We were going to build Girls Who Code.

20:16With that initial Girls Who Code class, Reshma had put together the first threads of a new network of collaborators. To grow it, she had to find a way to scale beyond that first summer class of just 20 students. Although Reshma saw many of the problems stemming from the school system, she didn't believe government-funded education was the right place to start. In many ways, the government was failing, right? That they were failing to produce this talent and that we needed different solutions. Reshma was establishing Girls Who Code as a non-profit. So, for her initial round of funding, she went to the people who she thought would be eager to help.

20:57I went to the big foundations, Soros, Ford, they wouldn't write me a check. When you have a new idea and you're coming into a busy, fractured space where there are lots of different nonprofits, but they've been doing it the same way for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, there's a real resistance to newcomers and new ideas. We'll hear how Reshma overcame this resistance after the break.

21:31Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

22:21And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

23:05So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. We're back with Reshma Saujani on how to build a network of changemakers to unlock opportunities and find solutions. And just a reminder that once you finish this episode, you can see more of my interview with Reshma on the Master of Scale YouTube channel.

23:36Before the break, we heard how Reshma set up a summer coding camp for girls. It had turned out to be much more than a class. The 20 students soon formed a small cohort of changemakers determined to create scalable solutions to wider problems of representation and inclusivity. in the tech industry. Now Reshma wanted to scale Girls Who Code. To do this, she needed funding. Government funding would be too slow. Philanthropic donors had turned her down, but Reshma found a creative solution. She went back to the network that she'd nurtured in her ill-fated political campaign. Like Jack Dorsey was one of my first supporters.

24:17Companies realized at that time that they wanted to build this pipeline of talent, and they needed women and they needed people of color. And so in many ways, it was really this partnership with the private sector. Activating and developing a network is often like this, scrappy yet effective. You need to show everyone how becoming part of the network is in their own interest, but also the interest of the greater good. Reshma signed tech companies up to host coding camps at their offices. It was a win for all parties. Reshma solved the problem of where to host the summer camps. The students got a taste of life at the heart of the tech industry.

24:55As for the companies, well, as Reshma puts it, You have to imagine these 20 young girls coming into your workforce. You're now then enabling another 50, 60 employees to participate in this summer program and teach these girls. And it just helps you in this really powerful way. It helped you retain the women that you had already hired. even for male technologists who may have never worked with a woman before, teach and recognize why this is so important. Reshma also took inspiration from the tech industry and how she scaled Girls Who Code. I built Girls Who Code like it was a tech company. You know, every year I had metrics of scale.

25:38And I pushed. And, you know, the way we hired, our culture, Everything was about building big things, scaling hard, solving tough problems. Once that partnership with the tech companies was up and running, Reshma set her sights on expanding the network. To do this, she turned to the Girls Who Code graduates themselves. I said, all right, I got one favor for you. I want you to go back to your school, and I want you to start a Girls Who Code club. And we had kind of put together, like, Girls Who Code club in a box for them. And that is what then launched, you know, by the beginning of the pandemic, we had over 10 ,000 Girls Who Code clubs.