PURPOSE, INC.

Participants:

Michael Young

Ahva Sadeghi, CEO and co-founder Symba.io

Watch Ahva’s winning pitch at Pitch for Purpose here: https://youtu.be/cgzWRc6CRl4?t=11269

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

When I started my own entrepreneurial journey, I volunteered at a tech incubator in San Francisco as a mentor and coach. And each week I would meet with teams of startup founders to talk to them about their ideas and share my experience on PR strategy and help them buff up their corporate narratives and their pitch decks. And if you've ever spent any time around startup founders, these are the people Steve Jobs famously called the crazy ones. You come away with a rush of endorphins when you talk to someone who's risking it all to follow their dreams and build a company from an idea. Their energy level is 11 out of 10. It's an incredible experience and I highly recommend it. And when I talked to today's guest, I came away with exactly that same feeling. Ahva Sadeghi is the co-founder of Symba. That's Symba.io. It's a startup that's built a tech stack to help corporations and non-profits manage remote internship programs. And you might ask what do internships have to do with the podcast on corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. And if you think about it, as with any system within capitalism, there are real social and economic inequities built into that system. Basically, the untraded interdependencies or the benefits that accrue to individuals, in this case, interns who are agglomerated at certain schools or within certain geographies. Simply, the kids who are better off can afford better internship programs than those who are not because of where they're located typically.

And even pre-COVID, getting an internship was hard and internships are a big part of how college grads network into their first jobs and build their professional careers. So, leveling that playing field and opening up hiring to the best talent available from anywhere is what Ahva and her team at Symba are doing. And I got introduced to Ahva through my friends over at Tat Consultancy Services who sponsor a program called Digital Empowers along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. And that's a program that focuses on accelerating innovation and supporting social entrepreneurs and as part of Digital Empowers, they run a program, a startup challenge called Pitch for Purpose. And the first place winner of the most recent Pitch for Purpose? None other than that Avha Sadeghi. And through that, Symba will receive funding grant and coaching and mentorship from TCS and other experts, in particular Seed Spot, one of the other partners in that program.

Avha and I had a great conversation today about her journey, her own journey as a startup founder and once an intern. And we talked a lot about how Symba is truly leveling the playing field in internships and we talked about where she's taking the company and what she's building. And so, again as Steve Jobs said, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do and I have no doubt Ahva is going to change the world. So, without further ado, my conversation with Ahva Sadeghi, co-founder of Symba. Ahva, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Thank you so much for having me, Michael.

Michael Young:

Awesome. All right. Lot to cover today as always. And then just a reminder of how we met through Digital Empowers which is a partnership with Tata Consultancy and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And I want to hear about your journey through that program and if there's anything I know about TCS is they're very accomplished at convening interdisciplinary groups of business, technology, not-for-profit, public policy with a focus on social issues and finding amazing new social entrepreneurs like you. So, just set us up on the journey through, your founders journey really if you will start there and then we can get into Digital Empowers and what you're up to. But over to you.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Of course. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to share my story. We've truly been grateful for the opportunity through the Tata Consultancy Services as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It’s an amazing opportunity. And my journey with Symba actually begins several years ago. Actually, Symba turns three in just a couple days and it was an amazing experience up to date. And I remember I never really imagined myself becoming a founder of a tech company. I studied international relations and global affairs and was always very passionate about social impact. My family is from Iran. And so, at an early age, I dreamed of being a diplomat and when I was in college, I did my undergrad in Tucson, Arizona. And all the internships I wanted in global affairs as you might imagine were based in DC. So, I just did not have the same type of access. But that fortunately changed when I was in college. I landed a remote internship at the U.S. Department of State. And so, through that experience, I realized how remote work could create access. And when I finished my graduate studies and I was a human rights fellow with Congressman John Lewis in Atlanta, I helped co-found Symba. And the idea was how do we create access and level the playing field for millions of students all around the world who just do not have the same type of access to the workforce. And so, my journey as a tech CEO did not start off like most. I didn't really know much about sales or business getting started but it's been a phenomenal journey so far.

Michael Young:

That's fantastic. And also, and what I what I love about your story is the fact that you were on this remote distance thing a while ago which is really cool now thinking about kind of the way the world has changed. But I think that the central theme I heard from you is about leveling the playing field and opening up and maybe now get into what Symba does and how it works and who you connect and how it all comes together because I think that's really, to understand the root problem, as you did, as you experienced yourself, talk about then what Symba has become.

Ahva Sadeghi:

I'm happy to share more and it was very interesting when we started off. The problem, like you said, is how do we level the playing field and create opportunities? We saw that students were spending thousands of dollars to get a degree and had no insights on what it was like to work in their field. And when we sat down with talent leaders before we wrote a single line of code at Symba, we started asking questions about what would it take to stand up a remote internship program? How could we help you scale so that you didn't have to bring every intern in-house but maybe they can work for you remotely? And they told us that remote would never happen. They said that is out of the picture. We will never go remote. Internships are all about being in-person and we can only take this many because that's all we have the bandwidth and capacity for. So, what our team did was rather than becoming a marketplace, we decided what if we build a platform that makes it easy to manage and scale internship programs?

And so, we built this product and we partnered up actually with the U.S. Department of State, the team that I did my initial internship with and they were so excited. They did focus groups with us to build out what the software would look like. And today now more than ever since we launched, there is an incredible demand for this service. And we work closely with HR leaders and we onboard them to the product and they can easily manage all the interns, see their projects, track their performance and there's a nice community board where everyone can engage and foster meaningful relationships in a remote atmosphere. So, we're proud to be all female founded, all female coded and really just now in the next stage of growth where we have already launched Symba 2.0.

Michael Young:

Killer. And I would assume that this old idea that you can't do it remotely including internship has passed. Are we through that now?

Ahva Sadeghi:

Well, I think that we are for some companies. But to a degree, we have noticed that there is still a lot of hesitation and some companies are trying to hold onto the idea that maybe next summer their internships will return to in-person. And so, our philosophy at Symba is not about every internship should be remote. We're believer in hybrid workforce where things are flexible and we believe that remote internships can create more access because they help companies scale and create more opportunities whether that be in-person and remote. So, we don't try to distinguish between the two. But we are noticing that some companies were very hesitant. Some companies cancelled and just said we can't even do it if it's remote. And there were some big pretty big name companies that did that, like Yelp and Disney. They just canceled and I believe some big tech companies actually cancelled and then had so much backlash that like the next day, they sent out an email blast to all those interns saying oh, actually, we're going to host it remotely. So, every company has taken a different approach, but definitely the mentality is that they are embracing this new type of workforce.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. And I think I've heard you say that many big companies that you've started working with were managing interns on spreadsheets, right? Like this whole idea that there should be some better way to do it and that has been the state of the art it seems is do it on an Excel spreadsheet.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Definitely just as you mentioned. And for us, it was baffling to think that a 600 or 2,000 person internship program was managed on spreadsheets and usually, there's one or two leaders overseeing an entire program and they're usually scrapped for resources. So, we wanted to change that narrative. We found that this is such an important stage of students’ growth and professional development and companies are spending on average around $50,000 per intern over the course of 12 weeks. So, it's time to ensure that they have meaningful experiences and they have the data and insights of the success of these programs.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And so, let's talk a little bit about Pitch for Purpose and Digital Empowers and that experience and what it was like to go through that. And you did that virtually, right? That was held this year for, what?, the third year or fourth year in a row. But this was the first year that it was done remotely. What was it like to go through that process and talk about that a little bit if you would?

Ahva Sadeghi:

Well, the Pitch for Purpose done remotely was actually very well organized. We were very impressed by the level of detail. They had practice sessions. They even organized mentors to meet with us before the pitch and guide us through the journey. So, it was definitely not just the pitch competition. There was a lot of support and guidance leading up to it because pitching virtually is definitely challenging. I'm the kind of person when I pitch and share Symba, I love hearing people's feedback and I love seeing people's faces light up when we tell stories and their reaction. And it's very challenging to do that in a virtual setting. But we powered through and I really enjoyed meeting all the other founders that Pitch for Purpose brought together. There were over 150 different social entrepreneurs that applied for this opportunity and this was the first year they did the Pitch for Purpose pitch competition. That was the first time they put it together. And so, it was really exciting to share their stories and I really enjoyed meeting everybody afterwards as well. And many of the judges have reached out afterwards to be supportive and many of the community members as well. So, it was so well done and even though it wasn't in-person, we gained so much value and I'm really impressed by the programming.

Michael Young:

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. And it's great to see their focus on social entrepreneurship and addressing issues and challenges which is something I definitely want to get back to because you are squarely on that concept of diversity, equity and inclusion and giving companies access to remote internship means they can recruit from anywhere. They can actually I think put their money where their mouth is in terms of more diverse recruitment and presumably, that remote plus across more schools, more geographies, more places. So, I mean was that a part of your thinking or did that just emerge as the result of what you built?

Ahva Sadeghi:

I'm so glad that you asked that, Michael, because that was really the founding reason we created Symba. As I mentioned, when I was a fellow with Congressman John Lewis, I created Symba as an action project and each of the fellows in the program, we were all tasked with creating an action project that we thought would address some form of inequality or civil rights issue in the United States. And I myself have done six unpaid internships and really only the student who could afford to live in DC or New York over the course of the summer and land one of those opportunities was the student who was going to get ahead in their career. Because students with internships are more likely to land a job, more likely to be paid more. And so, that was the forefront founding reason behind Symba was how can we change the landscape of who has access to these opportunities? And we figured that if you don't have to relocate to a new city, then students could actually afford to participate in these opportunities. In addition to the diversity and inclusion, now we can actually prepare students and companies also, not just students. But how do we work remotely, right? That's one of the biggest questions. I think there's an etiquette to working remotely. There's a skill set that students need to gain to be successful in the new work environment. And now companies also need to build that capacity of managing teams effectively remotely and building that sense of culture and engagement even in a remote workforce.

Michael Young:

Absolutely. And maybe too, I mean I have a relatively small company. We have about 35 people in our company and we have some internship programs. So, I would think that you work with very large organizations. You've mentioned some of those to me and they are doing hundreds and sometimes thousands of interns. You also work with non-profits. You work with colleges. So, just give us a little more shape on that ecosystem and how small companies can could potentially benefit from this kind of remote internship program.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Yes. I'm happy to dive in deeper because it's such a range. And it was funny because when we were doing the beginning of our research and understanding how do you do customer segmentation and how do you reach out to certain customer groups, we realized that there was no set ratio of an internship program according to a company profile. So, you could have a really large company that has an internship program of 20 and then you could have a medium-sized company that has a few hundred person internship program. So, for us, it was very interesting to learn how every company sets up and designs its own program. To date, we worked with over 500 different teams, doing research, standing up programs and we've also learned that not one internship program is like the other. I mean every company really crafts it and structures it from scratch. But there's a lot of value for smaller companies to consider bringing on interns. We at Symba are a pretty small company. We're smaller than you are. We're a third of your size actually. We're a team of 10 and we have four interns at Symba.

And internships are very different than hiring on a full-time employee because with an intern, you need to invest in their professional development, their success, their growth and it grooms the manager who's overseeing that intern into a leader. Because a true leader cares about the success and the professional development of their entire team. And so, myself having an intern has taught me how to be a great manager, has polished my communication skills, has helped me set my team up for success. And I really do believe that small teams should consider bringing on interns also for creativity, also for getting some mentorship involved within your entire team. So, there's a lot of value for interns for the organization. Obviously, there's clear value for the student as well and we really do believe in that and that's our whole philosophy around Symba for symbiotic relationships. Because it's not just the intern gaining value. The organization has a lot to gain. So, I'm excited to hear that you have an internship program as well.

Michael Young:

Well, we're going to get better at it because I think we're going to have to use Symba because we can't keep doing what we're doing and expect different results. I think we need help. So, we'll talk about that later and offline. But I wanted to maybe pivot to kind of your advice for other social entrepreneurs. And I love that you said we're women founded and we're women coded. I thought that’s a really cool thing. And so, just talk about what it's been like as you've gone through this journey and obviously, you're building a company, you've raised some money, you're probably going to raise more. We talked about this is not just a North American play. There's opportunity to take this program, you work with global companies. They want to do this globally. So, just kind of if you're advising another social entrepreneur, what would you say about the landscape now and what you've learned and what have you seen so far in your journey and how would you approach that?

Ahva Sadeghi:

That's a great question. And I feel like that question alone, I we could build an entire podcast off of because I feel like over the past few years of building Symba, I have matured by like 20 or 30 years as far as understanding of the way that the world works from sales to building a team to fostering some of my mentor relationships and understanding the landscape of fundraising and where capital goes and also, women in tech and STEM and business. So, I think all those are really key categories that were pretty alarming for me when I got into the space. You always read about the representation of women or how much capital goes to female founders and how much capital goes to social entrepreneurs and it's been very challenging. But I would inform the social entrepreneur that's asking for my advice that there are two things that are really important. The first is your team. My mentor, when I got started with Symba, I reached out to her and I asked her what are the books I need to read because I told you I didn't know anything about business. And I said what can I read to get ready? I don't know much about sales process and whatnot. And she gave me all of these business books. I mean all these parenting books. And the parenting books were how to raise kids, how to nurture relationships and I was very baffled. I was like what is this? I need to learn about marketing and sales. And she said, Ahva, the key to success at this stage, at the early stage of Symba is building a team and nurturing that motivation and that growth. Because once you do that. then you can begin building your company. You must inspire people to work on an idea before you have capital and that is why you need to read these parenting books. And it was a fascinating conversation.

Michael Young:

Wow.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Yes.

Michael Young:

Wow. I was like okay, where is she going with this but I totally get it. And yeah, that's fantastic.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Yes. And I would say the second piece of advice I would say is really listen and understand the problem. What is the actual problem? Because when we started out with Symba, I thought that we would obviously be a remote marketplace where students could find opportunities and match with really cool companies. But I listened. My co-founder and I, Nakita and I, we listened to our customers who kept telling us about these spreadsheets, about these pain points and we took those insights to build a product based off of our customers’ pain and problem. And so often as a founder, you think that the answer and the solution that will save the world. But a real good startup founder can remove their ego and understand that if you're building something great, it should last way beyond you and it should solve your customers’ problems and not what you think the answer is. So, those would be my two pieces of wisdom that were challenging for me to learn but I've been continuously learning through and growing.

Michael Young:

Yeah, that's really exciting. And I guess in addition to more of the mentorship side, what are some other recommendations? I think where else should founders look for support in building a network of support? What's your experience there whether it's other organizations or people? What advice do you have there?

Ahva Sadeghi:

That's an important question because the founders journey can feel very lonely when you get started. And so, it's important to foster a really strong mentorship and group of leaders in community that want to elevate and work with you and be champions. So, we found that at Symba through multiple different places. We were in two different programs, one with Accelerize which is a B2B SaaS accelerator in San Francisco, and then we were involved in Techstars Anywhere which is a virtual accelerator program and it's really large. We also have been very active with Seed Spot. Seed Spot is fantastic for social entrepreneurs. And I know that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Tata Consultancy Services, they have many opportunities and resources as well for social entrepreneurs and founders. And I really encourage founders to put themselves out there and network, reach out to people. You have to be bold and you will get rejected by so many people, so many things. And they're not rejecting you. They're rejecting maybe the startup idea or not able to make time. But be resilient, be persistent and definitely build your community and nurture your community. So, what I mean by that is when you are getting support, make sure you're giving back, make sure you're supporting other founders. I'm still very early in my startup journey but there have been founders reaching out at their very early stage where they have an idea and I always make time to speak to them. Because I know that my mentors really were champions for me and I'm all about paying it forward.

Michael Young:

Yeah. That's a really great point, and I've done the mentoring at labs and innovation facilities myself. And just the endorphins you get off of people who are taking a risk and going out there and doing their own thing as we all are, it's really exciting, it's really great. And as you were talking, I was actually looking at this quote I have on my desk from Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and in it, he says that, “Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They're hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. Embrace the struggle.” And I think that is that experience of startup is that you have this logical thing and then you get rejected and you're like ah, this isn't working. This is terrible. But you just keep going back to it. And I think that kind of embracing that uncertainty really, for me, has been what it's about. It's great to hear how you've experienced it as well.

Ahva Sadeghi:

That's such a powerful quote, and I couldn't agree more.

Michael Young:

And just keep going, right?

Ahva Sadeghi:

Yeah. Just keep swimming. And every time we reach a new milestone at Symba, I always say this is only the beginning. And we closed our first round of financing. Now we can start building Symba. And it takes so much patience. It takes everything, and it's not just you as the founder. It's your whole community, and that's why programs and initiatives like the Tata Consultancy Services and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation are so, so important because they create exposure and they also provide the capital and support that founders do need. Because it's not an easy journey. It takes a lot more support and we need champions to do these types of initiatives. So, we feel really grateful that there are initiatives like this that we're able to participate and I truly urge other founders to seek out opportunities just like this.

Michael Young:

Yeah, that's incredible. And Ahva, unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it here. But this has been a great conversation. I was so excited to get to know you and we're going to keep a close eye on you and I'm going to figure out how we can do better with our internship program through Symba. So, thank you so much for spending some time with me today.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Of course. It's been my pleasure. I’m so grateful to be able to share my story and grateful for this opportunity. Thank you again to the Tata Consultancy Services and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation for this opportunity.

Michael Young:

All right. We will talk to you soon. Thank you.

Ahva Sadeghi:

Thank you.

Conclusion:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.

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