[silence] okay. Its like the perfect, perfect 30second friendship. All right. Lets come back. This is a kind of audience. I hope you guys are like this when it comes to Live Audience questions that would be good. Well, in extremely kiting news, youre actually at only the second event to take place in this auditorium. That is worth, worth a round of applause. We are freshly moved into our brangd new home at 110, 140 years old and weve been renting and incredibly excited and really possible because doneesers and members and attendees like you so thank you for showing up anding us a reason to build a brand new building anyones first time here at the club . So for people who dont though were a nonprofit to only do this and 400 programs year with our members and our donors and our volunteers so membership includes parks like discounts on tickets to event leak this and various Exciting Events like next week and other benefits so if youre interested we have friends happy to talk or you can check your emails tomorrow for a little discount codes on membership. Other great things coming up october 24th actress and entrepreneurial gabrielle yon entrepreneur and on 9th hearing from artist writer about drone warfare so we really cover all of the bases here at the club. Now, tonight like i said all you talk to folk who is have questions for lyla and in last 15 minutes theres a microphone and hear lora give you a remindinger to start lining up if youre not familiar with questionses theyre short and dont include personal stories and end with question marks. So lora is professor i have a feeling shell crack down if you get long winded were live streams tonight on facebook for any of your pretends feel free to share it on common club on facebook and live tweeting. Lyla and lar la handle as well as ours is on right to left so please chime in and who you really want to hear from i would love to introduce to the stage please welcome lyla and tyson. [applause] good evening its really nice to be inaugural event in such a lovely space. Ive been in San Francisco a long time and when i first came years ago i did do newel rows things with the Commonwealth Club so lovely to continue that tradition. Its a great pleasure to serve as your moderator tonight we have outstanding entrepreneur ceo, and founder of a Nonprofit Organization but also ceo and coceo and founder of lix immediate wasnt clear if you use acronym or okay and so were here today to talk about her work in both areas. And also to help her launch her new book which we have here. Im married it a writer it is very important that we buy books. So i will be [laughter] i will be buying a book. And i hope that well get a preview of whats in the book in our conversation. So following the discussion, there will be a reception and there will be books available. There are so many questions that one could ask lyla. Sheaccomplished so much in sucha shorter amount of time, and just in my conversation with her backstage, shes already thinking about next steps and what and what she can do so shes a great inspiration. I want to start with et company that you first founded the one that gets a lot of attention deservedly so that is the source and i really want to start with if you were doing elevator fitch to describe the source and its mission so that everybody has the kiefs sense of what it is. That this is trying to do can you give us that . Sure i have head of communications here in front so this is a live [laughter] it means equal or balanced in the script and or mission is to connect low income people to work through the interpret and move them out of poverty. And we do that in really interesting way, we work with Large Data Services or Large Technology enterprises to provide data service ises things like image tagging and other content Services Boost their Product Offerings so doing image tagging that powers selfdriving cars, or a few prominent automakers. So giving that mission you have to link pup to a number of different organizations. You have to link up, you have to link to the individuals who you want to help find these jobs. You have to find them, train them, link them to and then you have to find all of those other organizations and their jobs so talk a little and youre using the internet so talk a little bit about the challenges or way you go about that and find a set of jobs to find people that you want to help train. Sure. Well ill start on this side of the people that we help train so i got into this, ive been working in africa for many years, and studied Development Exhibition and felt like most proferl way to help people was to give them living wage jobs and one of the best ways to do that in modern era is through technology because all of a sudden you have a way to connect someone living in a very is poor party of the world with a job and a rich part of the world that means they can make a lot more money than they could make doing anything else selling to a local market so theoretically very powerful so i thought to myself what if i created a company that only recruited people who came from very poor backgrounds which is, obviously, an unusual recruiting criteria are. [laughter] might even be illegal recruiting criteria in our case we only recute people who make less than two or three dollars a day average income of workers at source is if 2. 20 a day. Which means that prior to working with pus they are if theyre employed at all it is informal economy doing things like literally working in a query breaking rocks and selling stuff bit side of the road or another worker who used to brew a mine shine and sell it on the street to make a buck 50 a day. So before they join us we recruit them and partser in with many local nonprofits a abundance where we work, and we train in basic computer skills and then of that group we pull some people in to work for us fulltime. Okay. On the other side here in San Francisco companies who are who are sales team cringes when i get into thing backgrounds because the story they pitch to our clients is, we are a you know a very high quality Data Services pirm we provide Training Data to the best companies in silicon valley, and to the most advance Machine Learning teams working at the forefront of the technology. So for example, the worker that i mention that used to brew moon shine tag image for one of the most prominent autocompanies in the country working on selfdriving cars. And that work believe it or not we can train someone to do in a relatively short period of time because weve broken down projects into small units of work so thats how it works so our front facing operation here in the bay area is focused on high quality delivering results, you know being a really competitive enterprise, and then on the back end it looks very derchght from what people might panel in the sense that were only recruiting people from very poor backgrounds to do the work and were paying living wages along the way. So when you when youre jotward facing lane here so these companies have big projects. They have lots of ways they might source labor. I assume most of this labor thats being sourced is being sourced on a project basis these are not longterm Employment Contracts theyre basically to do promotes so why qowld they whats your fitch for why they should come to you they must be other ways you can source this kind of talent. Sure. Well i used to say fight poforts and get your work done and that, obviously, didnt work very well for project managers in bay area. [laughter] so so luckily i got wise enough to hire better salespeople than me who peghted me how we win contracts so our, you know, the first Value Proposition we put forward is were Higher Quality service provider. Interestingly when you hire people from marginalized iting backgrounds where we work theres no other formal Work Opportunities and they take this extremely seriously. They will e shough up early to work. They are interestingly like people often ask isnt it hard to train freem background how do they show up . Least of our problems is our work force it is incredible these are most motivated people. Theyre loyal to an employer thats willing to quickly pay, you know, far and above what they would make doing anything else so as a result quality is something that we can sell as a major, you know, attribute and we dont really the social mission piece comes in after we have convinced client that we offer the best you know best services. In terms of cost were not the cheapest option. But increasingly for someone who then charge of developing the next selfdriving trial or developing, you know, a smart chip for your phone to recognize faces and images that person is more concerned with quality often than cost. And wants to make sure that data thats going into training this algorithm is good data thats how we win and what most should focus on rather than selling the customer on the social mission we have to talk about it as trojan horse you have to sneak in social impact or sustainability and its a its a nice to have it is icing on the cake. Thats a really interesting point because you also inier work talk about the importance of a term i think ive not heard before so pill give you credits for it impact sourcing which is try that there are companies out there that actually for whom the social mission say of sourcing this job through this population or sourcing for some positive mission has become more important. So its interesting that youre saying essentially that secondary and i guess it should be to the quality of the labor. You can make the social case but the social case is an addon you get highly professional, committed well train individual to be part of a team. And in addition youre youre addressing a social mission. I think it makes it sticky to be honest all other things being equal as long as youre sure that this vend her give you quality result why not choose vender which is fighting poverty and what we find is once people are in these contracts with us ive had so many stories of people who work many Big Tech Companies who tell me i was about to quit i was demotivated i wanted to do something more meaningful with my life rather than work at a Big Tech Company and then we hired the souse and i started working directly with people moving out of poverty from, you know, from places like kenya, inked why and haiti i have purpose when i come into work and i can name names of bheem stayed two years longer at their Product Management job that Big Companies because they felt more motivate ared to come to work every day. I think at some point we should tell that to our customers. That is really exciting because we have your book sites and probably people in this room no there are lots of statistics indicating for millennials that meaningfulness of their work as well as the the technical challenges of their work but those things determine the stickiness whether theyre loyal to the company and to the job so here you have an opportunity some of these were some of these project workers in the Tech Companies may have as you said left but combining mission with the work is important and particularly for millennial for younger generations. I often use the statistic but cone Communication Survey millennials in work portion and found that 80 of millennials only want to work for a company that has a strong socially mission. And increasingly thanks to technology, were able to discern Whose Mission is full of fluff and who is already deliver egg and more and more we can show what factory on the floor looks like and show result of Income Survey for if workers in that factory that becomes Heart Diseaser and harder to, you know, to create a glossy pang that isnt translate to what company is doing. So we should more and work too on these metrics i agree with you theyre compelling. Before we move on to to other questions i want to talk a little bit about what i think is something called a school which is way it is a source, and maybe involved in doing similar activities in the u. S. And i think that given the conversations going on in the u. S. About the ability to create meaningful jobs for work percent in various rule and far plunge and often poverty places in the u. S. , is the school involved in that and how . Im sew glad you brought it up and my team will laugh but i own domain we have just source . School, so School Started several yearsing ago it actually has a funny origin o opinion story and weve been running ads on hulu Internet Tv Service that run a pilot which i thought was inspiring train these ferry refugees to do work for Big Tech Companies with a really cute Public Service announcement that ran on this channel and i got the thatsiest nastyist email from a guy in ohio. Guy in ohio. He is emailing everyone at some point. Thats right not joe the plumber. [laughter] less charismatic joe from ohio wrote an email that subject line was you are ruining america. And then it said, you know, people, people you and your kind your kind are, you know, ruining their stealing jobs sending them to africa and middle of rescission how dare you do this and i reads pee mail, of course, my First Response was like i was so lived at the time i was literally source is none profit i was sleeping on my exboyfriends futon at one point it was so poor myself. I thought he thinks im some sort of like millionaire sitting in my mansion in San Francisco, enjoying all of the profits im ranking in from sending jobs to refugee camps and i where a nasty email to him and then slept on the advice of it. And next morning i deleted i email i said joe ive looked at unemployment statistics in ohio i get where youre coming from maybe we can adopt to maybe work here. Believe it or not joe wrote back the nicest response he said thank you so much forren willing im really sorry about the tone of my last email i lost my job recently. And i just, you know, your ad just is really made me upset because i want to do more to create jobs here in america and i feel like we were getting left behind. It was interesting precursor to what has been happening. And so it inspired me to go to board so say maybe we can do something in the u. S. I think it is important for International Organizations to not be stay silo we have a distinction between people who work for foreign mgo and domestic poverty and it is tragic because it is the same issue and same bad guys so question need to Work Together more. So we try a couple of different experiments working in the u. S. And cap the similar molds to overseas here and it didnt work. It didnt work because xans have been outsourcing this work for a very long time already to places i understood why and china so trying to get that basic data service to come back onis shore i think is phyts. P futile so what can we do to make sense for america and we looked at economy so net improvement growth and it came all growth between 2005 and 2015 in the u. S. Has been in the independent work arena so that is you know, contract work basically. Including all of these new gig economy platforms yet our Work Force Training in america has no instructions for workers on how to benefit from this. How you benefit, connect. Teaching people to do jobs that have gone away, ten years ago. And so we said well what if we focus on applying learning in tech world to creating curriculum to teach people to benefit from new platforms which sometimes get a bad rep and look the data speaks speaks for itsee not going to shift the whole economy by boycotting one or two labor platforms instead lets work with them and figure how to provide portable benefits and living wages and importantly how we can prepare the most marginalized people in our society to actually benefit from these platforms. And so thats what the school does. We have the first gig economy training, or independent, you know, worker training, for low income americans deployed in San Francisco and city we signed a contract with office of education and work force development. And so that raining now going out to people here and weve seen amazing Success Stories people going from eight an hour you know midge retail jobs where they have no flexibility, no online reputation theyre not get any longterm benefits from doing these jobs. To making 25 or 30 an hour on a plat porm like field nation or grab it where not only do they get the money but benefit of having onis line reputation. If you do a good job on your task you get well. Get rated well and more clients. Yep. That reputational equity is something that white collar workingers are used to having through linkedin through employer reference checks and i think thats actually the future of job training in this country. So really interesting that story right now so youre working with the city of San Francisco. I actually think that one of the interesting ways to imagine this happening is mayors and cities actually really working to connect because you have to have you have to have the connecting organization as well. You said in your work in the developing economy if you often work with nonprofits because youve got to find a way to connect to the communities of workers that youre serving okay and they help you do that. And i think in this case having the Mayors Office involved in this may actually help bring more opportunities to the workers who are going through this i think thats really we can do things like first of all i think there should be incentives for every City Government to procure from social enterprises so procurem