Transcript
Adrienne
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. We are going to go ahead and get this thing started in a couple of minutes here, but in the meantime, just feel free to hang out. I will call everyone back together as we get ready to kick this off. Thanks for being here.
Hey, I'm seeing our numbers kind of slowly start trickling in at a slower rate. So I'm going to go ahead and get us kicked off. Thank you so much for being here. Today, we are so excited to share some of our learnings with you. As a reminder, in case you forgot what you signed up for. This is a webinar where we on the Uncharted team and some of our partners are going to share what we've learned and takeaways from our most recent recruitment application and selection process for the economic inequality cohort. My name is Adrian respin. I'm the Director of Strategy and insights here at Uncharted. I'll be moderating today's panel discussion. As we get started, let's kick things off with the agenda. And I'm going to open up this poll, and we would love to know a little bit about who's in the audience today. So please go ahead and feel free to fill that out as you trickle in. And I'm going to go through the agenda. So we're gonna spend a couple of minutes here talking about our plan and goals. For the next hour, I am going to share some initial remarks and context about the ecosystem, you know, broadly written and what's going on at Uncharted. We are going to have a panel discussion, there will be time for audience q&a at the end. And then I'm going to close this out with some remarks. So seeing a number of people answer in the polls looks like about 30% of you represent the funder community, about 48% coming in from some peer organizations, other fellowships and incubators and accelerators, a couple of social entrepreneurs in the audience. And some people generally who are, you know, general public, people who are interested in this work. So, for the next hour, our goals today are really to share some insights. We just want to we had a real learning experience and Uncharted as a learning organization, we want to share some of those learnings with you about our, like I said, our recruitment application and selection process. And we want to hear different perspectives. So we have a couple of different people who participated in that process. And it's important that that's a process that works for everyone. So we want to hear from all of those different perspectives. And then most importantly, we want to hear, we want to share some learnings and insights with all of you that you can take back to your own work, whether that's questions, you have insights, whether you run a similar process or you're just hiring somebody, I think there's there's a lot to be gleaned here that's not specific to a particular realm or field. So kind of final numbers, looking at about 30% funders, 50% peer organizations, 13% social entrepreneurs, and about 20% of the audience is from our general public. Thank you so much for filling that out. So I want to jump right here into our next slide which is around no kind of some context-setting Uncharted as a social impact accelerator. For those of you who are not aware, we support early-stage ventures that are tackling economic inequality. And as you can see here, we've decided to focus this program on four different wealth gaps around race, gender, generation. And class, I'm not going to go over these definitions or statistics. But suffice it to say that one of the things that that we see in the United States is that our economy is out of balance. You can see for yourself kind of what that means, through the numbers. And then to get specific for a moment about this early-stage ecosystem of ventures that we work with, when you look at the money that's flowing to those early-stage ventures, it's pretty out of whack. We're talking like single-digit percentages of both philanthropic and venture capital funding going to organizations that are headed by BIPOC, female and non-binary individuals. And when we think about it, like, if we're doing that poorly at the start of the funnel, of course, we're going to see those results cascade down, as we get further and further along. So this is something that Uncharted cares deeply about. And moreover, you know, the persistence of economic inequalities like these. It's not by accident, it's by design. It is the natural result of centuries of policies, attitudes, and power structures that have resulted in where we are today that have systematically quite frankly tilted the playing field in favor of some people at the expense of others. So this is really what we're trying to address through our programs. Next up, I want to talk a little bit about the Uncharted program for a moment.
There are many incubators and accelerator programs out there. Ours is different for a couple of reasons. First, is that we are incorporation agnostic. At moments in our history, we have worked exclusively with social entrepreneurs for-profit ventures, we've expanded to work with nonprofits. And what we've learned is that at their earliest stages, ventures shouldn't be restricted to a particular type of program based on how they file their taxes. So we went incorporation agnostic, we accept for-profits, nonprofits, B-corps, co-ops, individuals who have an idea but haven't yet incorporated policy experiments, anyone can apply. We think there's a lot of value in giving the time, space and resources to people at their earliest stages. To really like, try stuff on see what works. I mentioned early stage, we have gotten hyper-specific we got general around the incorporation type, but specific about the stage. We've always supported early-stage entrepreneurs. And we believe that accelerators, incubators, and funders, like VC funders and philanthropy have not only the ability but the obligation to take on more risk than traditional funders are willing or able to, we have to be willing to support ventures at that early stage to figure things out. And for this program, Uncharted really wants to be the first organization to believe in somebody. Third, we are specifically interested in supporting founders who are closest to the issues that they're addressing. We believe that the ecosystem we exist in has overvalued, learned experience, and undervalued lived experience. It isn't to say that we don't value entered experience. But we want to equalize that playing field by really designing our program for underrepresented founders, specifically, in this case, BIPOC women and non-binary founders. Next, we have a focus on economic inequality. And you'll notice, you know, we weren't brought on incorporation type narrow on stage and kind of hit in the middle on the topic that we're focused on. We think that economic inequality is the right altitude, specifically focused on those four wealth gaps around race, gender, generation, and class. Because what we're looking for, and this relates to what I just spoke about on, you know, founders being close to the issues that they're addressing is we want, we think that that the founders themselves are the people who are best situated to tell us how their solution relates to economic inequality, as opposed to us dictating a particular solution. That's the right way to address economic inequality. We don't see ourselves as subject matter experts. Instead, we we have sort of handed off that responsibility to the people that should be with who are the founders themselves? It's, you know, we don't believe that like a coding boot camp is a way out of poverty, for example, we think it is a way out of poverty. We also think that there is value in bringing together There are founders who are working on the same issues from very different perspectives. We think there's value in bringing together somebody who is working on a coding boot camp would say somebody who is working on making homeownership accessible to more people. Finally, this last key differentiator, we honestly, we didn't think about this as a key differentiator. But it is, and we hope it is not a key differentiator over the long term is that we took an explicit equity approach because we think, you know, it's not enough just to say you're seeking out different types of applicants, you actually have to take a look at yourself as an organization and say, what changes do I have to make to my work to my organization to my application process, to make this actually something that is accessible to a lot of different people, you have to be willing to make changes, you have to be willing to face hard truths about yourself. And you, you know, you have to be doing, you have to be able to do the work yourself. And so that's kind of really where our focus is today. It's what our panelists are going to talk to us about, and I'm so excited to be able to introduce them in just a moment.
Alright, so a couple of data points for you. This is kind of on the left, you'll see some historical data about unshared IDs programs. On the right, you'll see some data about this latest program that we're offering right now around economic inequality. But quick note, as you're looking at this data, we changed how we measure data. So you'll see some disparities here. On the left, you'll see that we measured percentages based on having at least one founder from each venture. Whereas we've changed now and we're measuring, we're kind of keeping track of everybody who's participating in our programs. But I've included the analogous historical comparison. So you can just see where we've, where we've been and where we're going. Alright, don't expect anybody to read this all but as we get into the q&a, this is our inaugural cohort, we have 10 Really, really impressive, wonderful organizations that are participating, we're wrapping up the first phase of our six-month program, taking a break for the holidays, before we come back for what we're calling phase two very originally named. So I'm gonna put a link in the chat here in a moment if you have interest in checking out any of those and getting a little bit more information. So without further ado, I am delighted to be able to introduce our delightful panel today. So first up, I am really excited to introduce you all to O'Meara PuTTYgen, who is a current member of our inaugural economic inequality cohort. She is a resident fellow with the Aspen Institute's program on philanthropy and social innovation and the founder and CEO of Thrive, a social enterprise that uses technology to spark citizen engagement and government and root out systemic racism and local government spending policies. Prior to founding thrive. O'Meara worked for DCS juvenile justice agency, the Milton S, Eisenhower Foundation, and the NA E. Casey Foundation at the intersections of youth development, applied research, and philanthropy. Her background in research evaluation performance improvement in scaling, evidence-based programs informed the work she does today with thrive, helping to increase a commitment to equity and innovation in public systems to improve outcomes for America's most vulnerable populations. And if that wasn't enough, she's also finishing up her Ph.D. while she's doing all of this. Next up, I'm really excited to introduce you to Cesar de vie, who is a member of the uncharted Selection Committee. He is the director of global partnerships at Candide, where he is responsible for building maintaining, and establishing strategic relationships. And I've just lost my notes with philanthropic organizations, governmental agencies, multilateral agencies, and the broader social sector. Cesar brings nearly two decades of entrepreneurial startup and development experience to his work. He's a global citizen, having lived or worked in eight countries on five different continents. And throughout his career, Cesar has worked at a number of social impact organizations including Katchafire, the Hult Prize Foundation, golden Mar solutions, and as a founder of a social enterprise tackling food insecurity himself as a member of the nine-person selection committee for Uncharted two economic inequality initiative. We were really grateful to have Cesar's entrepreneurial mindset is experienced growing programs and scaling solutions for different markets, and a spirit of curiosity and thoughtful inquiry. Finally, I'm delighted to introduce to you all Christina Lera, who is a program manager at Uncharted and a key architect and executor of some of Uncharted's most innovative programs. Christina designed and ran Uncharted first bilingual first community-driven accelerator to help local Denver organizations ensure consistent healthy food access to underserved communities in the early days of COVID. Christina is a student of the world she was born in Bogota, Colombia has lived in Canada, the United States, and France, and her global perspective experience designing community-centric projects and her passion for ensuring everyone has access to economic prosperity guide her work on Uncharted economic inequality initiative. So I'm really excited to get this conversation going and stop sharing my screen.
Some of you, I noticed have already started using the zoom features that we have. We've got a q&a, we've got a chat function, feel free to liberally use those during our conversation to have conversations with each other to submit questions. As I mentioned, we have time for q&a at the end of all of this, but if you're like me, and you forget what great and brilliant ideas you have, in your mind, feel free to submit those at any time. And so without further ado, I am going to just launch us straight into our q&a, our panelist's discussion. So I'm going to start with a question we're going to follow a rough format of you know, we're going to take us through the journey from recruitment to application to selection. And so I'd love to start with you. I'm Olara. And just here, how did you hear about this program?
Omolara
First of all, thank you for doing this. This is awesome. I love the way Uncharted kind of builds in public having worked in philanthropy, I can share that this doesn't always happen. So this is innovative and amazing. And I'm so glad to be a part of this discussion. I learned about Uncharted from exactly one person in the most serendipitous way possible. So I happen to be an accelerator at the Kennedy School at our big showcase a former Uncharted employee was there. And then like DM to me in the chat, like, Hey, you should apply to the target. And that's literally the only way that I found out about this amazing program. And it happened to be at a Harvard Kennedy School kind of incubator. And so it may very well be that like I'm in all the wrong places, or I'm not in enough places. But I think one area of feedback I would share is that I would love to see everyone know about Uncharted. I've been telling black female founders and founders in general about your organization, just because I don't know if they know about you, guys.
Adrienne
Thanks so much. Yeah, I think recruitment is always one of those tough nuts to crack. I think, you know, in this kind of day and age, a lot of us are really prone to just like putting something on the internet and hoping that the right person sees it. And it's not quite so simple as that. So, you know, Christina, I'm going to turn it over to you. You know, I mentioned in my opening remarks that we opened this program up to any incorporation status, and that's a divergence from things that Uncharted has done in the past. We wanted to go super early stage, we wanted to be the first people to believe in somebody and find those entrepreneurs that maybe hadn't participated in a program before. And that meant that we needed a different strategy from some of the recruitment tactics that we had used before. What are some of the things that you did differently for this particular program?
Cristina
Yeah, I think in general, our pipeline partners have always been a huge support for recruitment. This time around, we worked really hard on expanding pipeline partners beyond accelerator peers and ecosystem partners. And we focus on organizations with economic inequality as a theme as well as organizations working, frankly, in geographic areas very different from traditional pipeline accelerators. We tried to move away from the coasts and big cities and work with small community organizations that supported more grassroots efforts. And we also look to recruit from programs like Community College entrepreneurship groups, Facebook groups of underrepresented founders. And one question I've frequently asked myself during recruitment was where small businesses and organizations were looking for support. So forums, pro bono legal offices, Small Business Resource Centers, and this is something that we want to keep expanding on and building relationships with, for future programs as well.
Adrienne
Do you have any thoughts about like, or, you know, any, any learnings you want to share with everybody about like, why recruitment is such an important step in this process? Actually, I'll toss that question to anybody. Anybody should feel free to answer this one.
Cristina
Yeah, definitely. I'll get started by saying that as an accelerator, I think it's really important for us to find the people who are working on the solutions. We don't have those solutions ourselves and the people who are closest to them are going to be the ones that really carried forward the work of economics are closing wealth gaps in the United States and making our economy more just. And so it's really important to find those people who are working at various different levels. And Adrian, as you mentioned, different incorporation statuses coming from a bunch of different angles.
Adrienne
Yeah, it also sort of strikes me that this process looks really similar to like opening up a hiring process for a new candidate. If you're, if you're looking for a particular type of person, but you're always posting in the same forums, you're always going to get the same people until you start looking at those others, you know, where would I find the people that I'm looking for? And if it's, if you're not getting them out of, I don't know, let's just say like an idealist. What are the other forums that you need to be posting in? Who are the people that can make those connections for you? The other thing that I'll note, as before we kind of move on is that recruitment is always like direct outreach, and, and recruitment is something that yields us the best candidates, I'm trying to remember what percentage and maybe Christina, you can help me what percentage of our current cohort comes from referrals? Actually, no, I think I've got it's 31% of our, our current cohort or 31% of our applications came from referrals, and the number gets even higher for who's in our current cohort. So definitely an important part of that process. Switching gears a little bit, is a question for everybody. If you've been part of an application process before, I guess, like you probably all have, whether that's in reviewing or applying, you know, sitting on either side of that bench, what kinds of things are either the same or different about the process that you experienced going through this, this selection process? Like what was your personal experience going through in turn its application process.
Cesar
I'm happy to kick us off with a couple of thoughts, at least for myself, I think one of the ways I always think about is that there's just a big delta between intention and action, what's being said, and where we're really investing efforts and resources. And, you know, listening to Christina speak about the recruitment and adding more to it. Adrian, you know, you're talking about the importance of it, you first started by highlighting kind of the inequities that have been very intentional over the last many decades and beyond. You could focus on having a very equitable process. But if your recruitment and your talent pipeline are not diverse from the outset, then everything else, you know, cascades down, as you put it, going back to kind of the intention versus action perspective, I've been part of other application review processes, where there is an intention of being equitable, there is an intention of being consensus-driven. But then maybe perhaps it sparks debate and dialogue. But ultimately, someone still takes kind of the final decision. I think in this case, it didn't seem like that, to me whatsoever. There wasn't an internal power dynamic, per se, where there was a final voice. It wasn't like we would have a hearty conversation and then go to a fairly rigid scoring rubric. And then whatever was spat out, that was the final determinant, I think we had several conversations with, where perhaps candidates or applicants were looked at as exceptional. But with a hardier debate, looking at really the intended impact beneficiaries, how they themselves are living the values of equity. It really modified our own perspective as a selection committee. And similarly, an organization that may be scoring very low, with a further conversation around why one individual was really passionate about why they should have more visibility, was able to elevate. So I think that living the values was something that I found to be fairly exceptional from the inside out this time around.
Cristina
And I'd like to add a little bit there too from the design of the application process and, from the beginning of recruitment, one of the things that we really highlighted was the idea of opting in instead of opting out. And I think a lot of times, women, people of color tend to opt out of opportunities because of a variety of different things. And what I remember one of my first projects, in the design phase of the economic inequality initiative was really understanding the psychology of opting in and opting out and why people do that. I think that research really informed the ways in which we continue to design the process and try to remove those barriers and have people really feel like they had a place to apply and not be selfish. Selecting out even before giving the given the opportunity to talk to us because as Cesar mentioned, a lot of the time, through conversations, a lot of information came out that was really valuable that we would never have gotten if someone had selected out of the application at the beginning.
Omolara
I can jump in as an applicant just to provide, you know, one perspective, I was stoked that there was something I could actually apply for, right. And even though a former Uncharted employee kind of told me about this program, I asked her Are you sure as a for-profit I can apply? And so I know, Adrienne, you already talked about this in your opening remarks. But we all know, there's a positive capital available for kind of for-profit entities led by women and people of color. And we are kind of left out of the philanthropic grant, even while our social ventures really speak to the inherent needs of our communities. Right. And so there's this inherent conundrum of you know, I'm a black female founder, I've got this, you know, great social mission around the kind of eliminating systemic racism from government spending, and I need to iterate which cost money, right. And so I just the very fact that you were open to all types of, you know, hybrid organizations, for-profit organizations, I really just want to underscore that it is sometimes hard to actually find things that as an as a C Corp I in the social impact space that I qualify for.
Adrienne
Thanks for sharing about your various experiences. I'm so I think, you know, this next question, I'm going to talk to Christina to just talk a little bit more, can you get into like some of the changes that we made around how we redesigned our application? You know, I think we made a lot of changes to our program all at once, which forced us to really examine everything we did, from top to bottom. I think a lot of times as organizations that have been around for a while, we are prone, and perhaps as humans, even I'll expand this, we are prone to doing things the way we've done before we've done them before because we've done them before. As opposed to the kind of taking that moment of pause to think about just because something is working, doesn't mean it can't be working better, or actually even to take a step even further back and say, Is this working? And who is it working for? And so, in designing this new initiative, it really gave us both the opportunity and forced us to create new processes to create new systems and to re-examine everything we've always done and re-examine everything we think we know. So I'm wondering if you can just share a little bit of insight with everybody around the redesign of the application process, including any new considerations, how we decided to apply that equity approach? You know, I think I loved your point about, thinking at every step along the way about how do we get people to opt-in instead of opting out. And if there are just some specifics that you can share a little bit more about, like distinct changes we made?
Cristina
Yeah, I'd love to start off by saying that throughout kind of this process of changing up a lot of things, we knew that we were going to learn a lot, and not everything was going to work out. But I'm really glad we tried a bunch of different things. And we now have a lot of learning for next time. Some of the things that we did differently, I think to start off with the application, for example, is that we simplified the application great amount the application was designed to take anywhere between I think applicants took five minutes to three hours if they really wanted to think about it. But that wide range. And the amount of time it took didn't really depend on the quality of answers that we got everyone was really able to apply. One of the things that we did with the application as well looked at it and translate it into simple English, which is something that we learned from our at the table initiative as well, that was bilingual, we use the translator who specializes in familiar language for that. And so with this process, we really looked at it and said, How can we remove all of the jargon and also in the places where we couldn't we had a glossary for applicants as well, where they could really see what terms we had in there that might be a little bit jargony. But how we were defining all of those so that we kind of had an equal playing field there as well. In advance of all of the interviews, we also shared our scoring rubric with applicants, which included different parts of the breakdown, how it related to our values, questions that we would be asking related to those pieces of the scoring rubric. We hosted webinars and application workshops where people could literally come in and ask us, what is this question mean? Is this answer okay? And really kind of remove that information asymmetry in terms of what we're looking for. So those applicants were given a better chance of really applying to something that they wanted to be a part of. And as I said, we also like to continue to learn through this, we're not going to get it 100% right this time, but we really wanted to stand by the principle of a lack of understanding on our part was an invitation for more information and not a disqualification. And so I think this really helped us to make it a more inclusive and equitable process so that we didn't discard anything, just because on our end, we weren't understanding.
Adrienne
Thank you for that very robust answer. So I want to hone in on that, like the last point that you just made about how a lack of information was not an invitation to disqualify but an invitation to ask more questions. Because I think that that was, it was one of the things that I'm really proud of. And it's one of the areas that I think we have the most room for improvement on. Because it led to, it led to us doing a lot of interviews, like I don't want to gloss over that this is not that this is like a process that is particularly easy. But I think it is important to kind of spend a little bit of time and say, Okay, if we're making things easy for applicants, how does that have reverberations and effects for people who are reviewing? And so you know, Cesar, I'd be curious to hear from you about your experience, going through the application review process. And any, you have some really interesting insights about like, where we could do better. What are the things that were confusing? There were some parts that just like, early on in the process, I know everybody who was on the selection committee was just tired, just plain tired. So any thoughts you want to share about your experience, going through what it meant to be a reviewer for so many applications?
Cesar
Yeah, happy to share a couple of thoughts. And I just want to double down again, on what you're lifting up on missing information is an invitation that is like radical in its simplicity, again, talking about differentiation with other selection processes. Oftentimes, it's just that's how we discount and that's how we eliminate because we don't see a high bar as it pertains to how the applicant is presenting themselves. And from the outset, it was a mind shift. That is, again, it's radical in its simplicity, which means that it's challenging, and then its complexity to actually execute upon it. Missing Information is an invitation to engage in dialogue. It's just again, so easily said very difficult to live. And I think you mentioned it before, around how you try to really dismantle the process that you had beforehand. And with this initiative, looking at yourselves as an organization, you know, I think for myself, I think that almost applies to the individual as well. I think that we have to kind of look at ourselves and think about well, how, what are our thought, our decision-making processes? To your point, you know, is if it's working, who is it working for, and how I know, for me coming on board on the selection committee, I felt like it was almost like a speed boot camp as it pertained to biases and bias training, you all laid out a tremendous amount of context and details around the different biases that show up going beyond just some of the more discussed around confirmation, bias, etc. And it wasn't just, you know, here's an FYI. So that we're all mindful of biases. But it was also very clearly here are the mitigation strategies that we're employing within our selection process to ensure that we're not only mindful of it, but that we're already thinking about resolutions that moving forward on it. So just a huge, huge hat tip to ensuring that we have a lot of uniformity on how we're thinking about bias from the outset in order to really have more consensus-driven approach. And, and that's all, as I said, challenging. You know, again, missing information is an invitation to engage the dialogue. I think that is the most beautiful design principle at the outset of a selection. And it is also one of the most challenging when you're getting into the final selection process because we're never going to have 100% of the information. And we all have our personal identities and our lived experiences. And we're curious oftentimes about silos. You know, some of us may be thinking, what's the financial sustainability in the financial business model of this organization? Many of us are focusing on what's the impact or the intended benefits He's, and then when you really look at it, we're juggling so many different variables. At the end of the selection process, you started speaking about gender class generation race, you start speaking about the agnostic aspects of the organizations. But at the same time, there's intentionality. We didn't want to have 100% nonprofits, we didn't want to have 100% social enterprises. Nor did we want to have 100% of solely female founders or solely male founders. And so a lot of the intention, it's difficult once you're starting to get into smaller numbers, I think the design principles that you're that are employed are beautiful at the outset, they create a lot of alignment and uniformity in the way that we're looking at selection criteria. But then at the end, it's really where it becomes a lot more of a challenge. And I think that's your point around where are their opportunities to improve? I think it's just ensuring that we're all beginning the process by looking at ourselves, how do we typically make decisions, not just as a committee, but as an individual. And I think that I believe, personally, that I came out of it much, much improved as the way that I looked at the world because I took part in that process. So I appreciate that. And I think that more selection processes, whether they be grantmaking, whether they be accelerators, can learn from a lot of these. And so I appreciate you all sharing a lot of his wisdom publicly as well.
Adrienne
Thanks, is there, I want to kind of flip the question on its head and turn it back over to you I'm Olara. You know, you are an applicant. We obviously put a lot of work in behind the scenes to try and make this process as transparent and accessible and equitable as possible. But where the rubber meets the road is how that actually plays out for the people who are applying. So you know, obviously diversity and ease of application is not just we're not just talking about racial diversity, we're talking about diversity in a variety of different, you know, formats, we're talking about lived experience, we're talking about educational attainment, we're talking about language, we're talking about a lot of different things. You know Christina mentioned, we did a couple of things ahead of time, like sharing our scoring rubric and glossary and things like that. But how was the application and interview process for you? How did you perceive it in terms of transparency in terms of equity? And what are some things you know, Cesar mentioned, we're never going to have 100% information. And so there's always going to be that discrepancy between the information we have and the information we wish we had. So if you can just tell us a little bit about you know, from an applicant perspective, what was your experience?
Omolara
For sure. I actually didn't know that you guys are Christina leading the redesign of the application, I found the application extremely easy and straightforward, to complete in a very short amount of time, which I appreciated immensely. And I don't know if this was by design, but I did want to elevate that. Think back to the college days and the common application, it really did feel like the incubators and fellowships are kind of collecting similar types of information, you know, What's your why, you know, asking for similar kind of character limits, brief answers, brief responses, and it just makes it super easy for an applicant to copy and paste and do some modest edits to precisely answer a question, but you're not starting from square one every single time. And so I was very, very grateful for just the ease of applying. super grateful for the rubric in advance of the interviews, I will share my interviews that felt different. And now that I'm hearing you guys talk about kind of infighting dialogue, I'm realizing that maybe just because of how I've been socialized how I experienced that kind of interview one. And so interview, one felt like peppering with questions, or have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? What about this? What about that, and so immediately, being a for-profit venture, it felt like a pitch competition, right? You kind of talk about your attraction, and you kind of lift up everything. That's amazing. And you know, this person's peppering you with questions, because they're trying to rank you down on it. Yeah, you have to filter people in some way. And that's kind of how I received that process. And it definitely does not sound like that was the intention behind the design. I just found that interesting. And then when we got to the second interview, it definitely felt more like I might be adopted might be brought into the family. It felt more casual, and I don't recall if there were differences if it was a different combination of folks In the interview, I don't know if this is by design, but I just wanted to share kind of how I experienced interview one and interview two. And the last thing I'll say, I'll be brief is that super grateful for the communication? So you guys communicated? Oh, you know, we're a week late or it wasn't even that big of a deal. But just knowing that, you know, you're still in the runnings and you guys were actively kind of communicating with us, you know, where you were and what the new timeline was, I was just grateful for being kept in the loop.
Adrienne
Thank you for those kind words. I think. I think it was, I think you bring up a lot of really good points. And I'm really encouraged to hear like your perception that you know, somebody who's applied to a lot of different things that the field seems to be moving more toward, you know, briefer answers a common app kind of perspective. Because I think about how much time people who are applying to things. I mean, our acceptance rate to this program is like 3%, we're saying no, to vastly more people than we're saying yes to. And we're asking a lot from every applicant, you know, even though we designed our application to be as short and easy to fill out as possible, even though we made certain questions optional. There is still a time commitment involved for know, you know, I mean, I don't know what college acceptance rates are right now for, you know, elite institutions. But I would say that getting into a program like ours is on par with getting into like a Harvard or an MIT at this point. And so it's incumbent upon us as, as people who are in positions of power to do everything we can to make this process as simple and seamless as possible for the people who are, who are asking for help for the people who are putting themselves out there, you know, potentially time and time again. I think, you know, one, one thing that we learned out of this was that because you know, there are trade-offs, of course, the more information we ask for in an application, the better, the better able we are to kind of make those early evaluative decisions. And I think one of the things that we learned throughout this process was that oftentimes, we just didn't have enough information to make a decision. And you know, what, what we talked about a little bit earlier, lack of information is actually an invitation to ask a question meant that we, we had a lot of interviews. And we actually ended up I think, considering the interviews as like application, part two, as opposed to like an interview, which I think is a little bit of a double-edged sword. Of course, it meant that we spent a lot of time doing this. But it also meant that we were able to talk to people, not everyone is good at writing. Let's, let's just be 100% clear about that. And so the opportunity to kind of go into interview one and ask those questions that we wanted to get deeper on from the application was a real, it was a real boon for us. It also meant that we spent a lot of time in interviews. And it also probably meant that the interview experience was a little bit rocky, for applicants, you know, there are definitely some lessons learned there. So I want to own a wrap-up this, this panel kind of discussion here. And, you know, Uncharted likes to learn in public, we like to bear all of our flaws. And so we spent a lot of time talking about what worked. I would love to hear from each one of the panelists, as we kind of wrap up this piece. About, you know, what are some things that that didn't work? And I know there are a bunch of things that we have, we have a whole list we actually catalog at every stage of, of our program, what worked what was missing? What was confusing, what was wrong, what are we going to try next time. So if I could just invite each of you to share a few takeaways and lessons learned so that everybody in the audience today can learn from our mistakes as they take this back to their own work.
Cristina
I'm happy to kick it off. I think I've personally learned a lot and have reflected a lot internally with our team, I'm happy to to be to have the opportunity to share that as well today. I think one of the things that I'd love for us to continue to improve on is increased clarity for what we're seeking in terms of our programs. I think we learned a lot from reading over 340 applications interviewing a lot. I think we've been able to like hone in better as to what we're looking for. And now we're hopeful gonna continue to put that into words and share that out to be transparent so that people can really understand what this program is for and where we can best add value, I think that was something that we really wanted to do is, is accept people where we could add value to them as well so that they're using their time wisely as part of this program. One of the biggest learnings from as well was, was really understanding the balance between time and the levels of equity that we wanted to provide. So increasing the amount of time for a lot of things is going to be really important, I think so that we can continue to read the applications continue to have the interviews that we need to have and really discover that with the applicants is, is really important for me, so that we don't have to sacrifice equity, for ease, or for the speed of the process.
Omolara
I think those are great points. Christina. You know, this may be because I wasn't super familiar with Uncharted before. But I would, to the extent possible, I would love to see the application reflect Uncharted kind of culture and personality, it helps me to understand the type of organization that I'm endeavoring to join. So for example, you know, you guys are building in public and showing your words, and I'm assuming that translates to, you know, inviting applicants to Yeah, show us all your stats and your attraction and everything that you're building? And also, like, what do you have trouble with, right. And I think, if that is something you're looking for in, in the early-stage venture, you don't have to paper over everything kind of tell us what you need, I would love to, in some way be able to understand that culture of the organization kind of as early as possible. I definitely think it came through with the scoring rubric, at some point in the interview process, but I don't recall if I had that understanding at the very, very beginning.
Cesar
I'll just share really briefly since I know we're kind of short on time, but um, I think there's a lot of places that that that can be improved and a lot of learnings. One of the things, you know, back to a prior question around what was kind of similar what was different. I've recognized, you know, Christina, speaking about the trade-offs with a lot of these decisions. We are short on time, we are short on resources a lot of the time, and we are trying to accelerate a decision-making process, one of the things I would have loved to see knows that from just a numbers perspective, it's very difficult to provide feedback to every individual applicants and candidate, especially on a round by round basis. And we have to be focused on you know, trying to move applicants forward. And we're not able to provide the level of feedback there that so many candidates are hungry for in order for them to improve. There's a way to kind of build in additional time and resources to provide feedback, I think that even for those that are not selected, at least are coming away with something of value and a better understanding as to why perhaps they weren't selected. And again, trade-offs, you know, one of the things I'd like to lift up is the fact that I was even able to take part in the selection committee as an outsider from Uncharted. For me, that's kind of, you know, akin to what we're seeing in the grant-making world right now around participatory grantmaking, which I think is extraordinary in which we should really be doubling down on, which is, how can we ensure that those that are are making decisions on where is our grantmaking dollars going? Who was being selected for programs and additional support? What are their lived experiences, I found myself struggling oftentimes because I had so much compassion and sympathy for those that we were speaking with? But it was clear that the work they were doing was not aligned with a specific initiative. So it's difficult, but I think we need to have that level of personal compassion and understanding letter to really humanize what we're trying to do. So there's always going to be some trade-offs there. And then just sharing again, doubling down on a best practice that I think is extraordinary. I don't know if we've said it explicitly. But every single decision that was taken whether it be reviewing an applicant, whether it be interviewing, we always had multiple parties there. We always had multiple individuals from the selection committee. And I think that's really, really powerful and really important to ensure that we are dismantling that power dynamic, right? Because if it's a single person that we have so much more subjectivity, if it's multiple parties, multiple AIS, that are deciding, we really have to share with a lot more neutrality, why we think this is a strong candidate. So always going to be trade-offs, but I think excellent things that are being done and a lot of learnings that could be shared through the sector at large
Adrienne
Thank you so much for those candid pieces of feedback. We also kind of close out this portion, and then open it up to the q&a. So definitely use that q&a feature. There are a lot of good questions coming in. So now's the moment if you have any other questions to start filling those ones out. But we ask, we ask for feedback at every step along the way. And we ask for feedback from every single person we interact with. So we asked for feedback from our selection committee from applicants, we do an internal post mortem after every kind of section of our, of, of our process to think about, like, what can we do differently. So I just wanted to share a couple of pieces of feedback that we got, you know, admittedly, it's from we got 49 out of 344 responses. So that's a 14% response rate. So we'll just keep that in mind. But we did get some really great notes and feedback, I want to echo one thing that Cesar said, about, about feedback, which is, we talked to more people than we can help. And oftentimes, you know, even after like an interview, even after we spoke face to face with somebody, we conducted 111 interviews and you know, for this round, we just didn't have the capacity to share feedback with everybody that we wanted to. In the future, we'd really like to be able to figure out how to do that. Moreover, we would like to be able to figure out, are there interim things that we can do to support the many people who applied even if they don't get into the program? Like, are there resources and support? Can we direct them to other programs? Can we start sharing some of our information online, you know, even if it's just a recording of a webinar, some of those things, because, as I said, we have a 3% acceptance rate? We also, I think one of the learnings that that was really instrumental for us is that as we went broad on a couple of different places, accepting applications from anyone, we got some feedback that it was confusing to figure out like, is this actually for me. So maybe we went a little too far on the opting in, instead of opting out, you know, we got some applications that were like, clearly not a fit for this program. And so we need to do a better job. And I think this goes, you know, hand in hand, similar with what you had said, about, like, we need to show a little bit more of ourselves. And we need to be more explicit in saying, This is who we are, this is what we care about. And this is what we're looking for. And also, if you think it's not for you take the 15 minutes and fill out the thing anyway because it might just be how do you kind of hold those two things in tension? So I'm going to shift over into the q&a at this point and just go through some questions here. You know, one of the early questions that we got in here is like, so how do we continue to hold equity by not coaching organizations that opt-out to application workshops, like coaching those who show up to the application work stops versus those who don't? This is a great question. And something that we talked a lot about internally, I'm going to throw it over to Christina to answer that, because we did this came up a number of times for us.
Cristina
Yeah, I think this was something we thought about because we tried to, first of all, hold the application workshops and webinars at various different times before work after work during work so that people who had different circumstances could attend. I also compiled all of the answers that we got, all the questions that we received, and all the answers that we gave into a document and continue to send that out to our full application list. The people who had started applications already, and had provided their email all received those same answers to try to make sure that everyone had the same information, if they couldn't, kind of join, join the same, the same opportunities, and just be really clear and transparent and public, with everything that we were receiving from applicants as well. So that was out there.
Adrienne
This is an easy question. Do Uncharted share decision biases and mitigate its uses with its applicants? And the answer is no, but I'm not sure why not. That's a great idea. Thank you so much. That is something that we think can easily include in the future. It's, you know, I think there are a lot of things that we try to do, you know, there's inherent, there's an inherent power imbalance anytime you are somebody who is offering something and you anytime you are somebody who is applying for something. And I think one of the things that we can do to kind of shrink that imbalance is to be as transparent as possible. So as we look to the future, certainly like yeah, let's, let's all take a look at like, what are the things that we have internally as tools and does it make sense and can we share Have them externally how do we continue to level that playing field and shrink those imbalances of power? Let me see here. All right. So question here. How large is your team that interviews and internally go through this process? The person who submitted this question has shared that their team is five people. And curious about our bandwidth with having 111 interviews. How many weeks do we interview prior to accepting? I'm going to toss this one to Christina as well.
Cristina
Yeah, so we had nine individuals on the selection committee. Five of those were external contractors, some of them had previous experience working on Uncharted. So they knew the process, others were completely external to the organization. We set aside, I believe it was eight weeks total, we interviewed the first round, and we started reading applications. Basically, when they close, we gave about two weeks for reading applications. After that, it was about four weeks for first-round interviews. And then two weeks for second-round interviews after that. So as I mentioned, I think extending the process is going to be something that we'll look into for next time because there was a lot of cramming and I think that also negatively affected applicants as well with turnaround times for second round interviews, as well as kind of decisions that were made, and giving people enough preparation. But it was definitely a huge balance because we didn't want to open up a process and then have people find out three months later that they were accepted, as well.
Adrienne
Yeah, and as Cesar mentioned, we had, we had at least two reviewers for each stage of the process and did deliberations as a full group, I'll say one of the other kinds of learnings that we had, and one of the mistakes that we made, quite frankly, was not paying more attention to who the groupings were. I think because this process was a little frenetic. For us we are, our primary concern was about scheduling people based on their availability, which is from an equity process, not so great. And, you know, given that power dynamic, I think one of the biggest lessons learned that we had was this information asymmetry when it came to applicants knowing who was on the selection committee because oftentimes applicants would be exposed to they didn't even know who until they showed up for the interview. And, you know, as we're looking at being more equitable, you know, we had a diverse selection committee, it was very diverse in a number of different measures. But sometimes maybe you would show up to an interview, and it would be, you know, to white current and former Uncharted staff. And if you don't know who else is on the selection committee, and you don't know who else is making those decisions, it's, it's not a good look, number one. And number two, it's not equitable. It's it is putting two people into a room in a position of power that, you know, reflects a current, you know, a status quo, quite frankly, where two white people are making the decision about, you know, the potential future of let's just say, a person of color, who is kind of baring their soul to you. And that was a real Miss for us. So that's something that we are certainly giving more thought to as we go into future selection processes. The question here in the chat is an easy one to answer. And I'm going to close on it because I would love to plug our current cohort in just a moment. I'm going to veer is wondering, the face photographs on the link shared in the chat. There are more than 10. The question is, are the photos more than one person from each selected cohort? Or, you know, is this the selection committee? Or who is it? We have 10 Ventures and we have multiple participants potentially from each venture. So the faces that you see are all of the faces of the individuals that make up the ventures who are currently participating in our inaugural cohort. So we've got one more minute, I'm going to try and keep things really brief. I'm going to share my screen once more with all of you. I would love for everybody to just drop into let's use that chat feature. If everyone can drop into the chat, something they've learned or an aha moment or a takeaway or remaining question, you have to close us out. I would love that. And I'm going to go over. You know, we want this to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end. So this is you know, this is uncharted. So we're gonna take a moment to talk about ourselves for a minute. How do you if you liked what you heard here today? How can you continue to be involved? We have opportunities for mentorship in our programs working directly with the ventures. Our ventures need funding. Omar, I spoke to this everybody needs money. So if you want to fund them, come talk to us. We will have events coming up. Email me to learn about what those are get added to the list. If you want to become a recruitment partner, if you've got a network that's extremely large, and you're talking to the kinds of people that we want to be talking to, we would love to partner with you. If you are an entrepreneur, yourself, apply to an uncharted program. Opt-in, don't opt-out. We're recording today. So share. Share this webinar with others who you think might be interested. Uncharted is ourselves. We occupy an odd space. Sometimes we give out money and sometimes we ask for it. We ourselves are a nonprofit, so fund our work. And if you learned something today, let's not kid ourselves and think that everything we shared today is everything we have to offer. So if you are looking at building an equitable selection process, or program and you want to learn more hire us, we are more than willing to have that conversation. And otherwise, I want to thank Olara, Christina, and Cesar for their time and their wisdom today and I want to thank all of you for the hour that you gave to us. I hope you have a great rest of your day and have a happy holiday season. And with that, we'll say goodbye thank you
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