“Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”
When I first heard this, it really struck me. I always thought people were naturally good. Yes, people have their off days — you cut someone off on the freeway once in a while, you forget to hold the door open— but when it comes down to it, I always thought people were naturally good. It took me a while to realize what the quote meant, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t good, it’s just that people are lazy. But give someone the opportunity and the tools to do good, and they will. At work, I wanted to bring together the hacker and social good worlds, and apply some design thinking to the process.

My story

I actually have a funny story of how I stumbled into my current job. I graduated from UC Berkeley two years ago, and I was excited because I was on my way to the Peace Corps. But the tough part about the Peace Corps is the application process, I had reached the final stages and I was waiting for my invitation to volunteer. Graduation was approaching and I had nothing lined up, other than massive anxiety about when my Peace Corps invitation would come.
It was terrifying.
After lots of research and minor crises here and there, I happened on an opportunity atKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). At the time I knew nothing about the firm — nothing about it’s incredible history in backing world-changing companies, nothing about the brilliant minds who go to work there everyday. I took a chance. And then they took a chance on me. And wow, am I grateful.
What I’ve learned from working at KPCB is the true power of technology. Being at a venture firm like Kleiner, I get to see whole industries from a bird’s eye view. The firm and it’s people are at the apex of change.
There’s this one question from one of the partners, Beth Seidenberg (in this video), that I think about almost everyday:
“How many times in your life do you have an opportunity to be part of a transformation of an industry?”
The answer is that many people don’t get to be a part of change like this. And what’s really causing all this change is technology. The ability to reach and touch peoples lives is made easier by technology. The way we think about providing clinical care is being re-thought because of technology. The methodologies that we use to teach children are being completely turned upside down with technology. The opportunity to be a part of the tech revolution, no matter what industry you are in, is truly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. That is what I learned and keep learning at Kleiner.
With access to such a unique opportunity, I ended up declining my Peace Corps invitation to Ethiopia, but my drive and interest in social good never stopped, and because I think that making an impact and being in tech can be combined. Since then, I’ve been thinking of creative ways to combine the two worlds and am especially proud of a project I got to lead called the KPCB Fellows Challenge.

The process

People are flocking into the tech industry, the pace at which the industry is growing is incomparable to anything that you can think of. New companies and products are being created everyday and demand for talented technical folks is skyrocketing. At Kleiner, John Doerr has this powerful motto of backing “missionary” entrepreneurs, people who driven by their values to create companies and impact.
Companies with missionary founders are the most successful because of their incredibly passion for the products and businesses they are building. With the KPCB Fellows Challenge, I wanted to help college hackers/makers find something that they can easily care about and build for. It resulted in this: http://kpcbfellows.com/build-for-good/challenges

Inspiration/research

Our biggest inspiration for starting our “build for good” initiative was our fellows. At Kleiner, we have a program that brings the brightest young engineering, design and product minds from across the country into our portfolio companies. It’s called theKPCB Fellows Program.
After a summer full of events and a great work experience with the fellows, I began to gather feedback. I learned that the events that the fellows valued most were the ones where they were building and making together. Beyond that what I kept hearing over and over was that they wanted to work on problems with impact. The summer ended and my mind was reeling on how I could make the program better. That’s sort of where the idea of the challenge was born.

Brainstorming/synthesis/ideation

We began with three simple, but powerful principles:
Solving tough problems with creative solutions
Above most else, our fellows —nearly all of the engineers, designers and product managers — told us they love to solve tough problems.
Impact
What the fellows also found valuable about their skills and work, is the ability to make an impact. With the ability to code, design and build software that could potentially reach thousands, millions of people, the depth and breadth of their impact really matters.
Community
Community is a huge value for the fellows. Finding partnerships in the college hacker community and building up a community of hackers interested in solving problems for social good was also important. I especially wanted to leverage community and encourage people to build solutions on top of other solutions, sort of like this:
We came up with a lot of different ideas on how to incorporate all these principles. And after creating mock ups…
And gathering feedback, we settled on a set of open innovation challenges that we would gather from nonprofit partners. The idea being that we help spread the message of the challenges through our fellows and share the challenges with the collegiate hackathon community.

Building a team

Luckily for us, we had an awesome group of people who loved the idea: the fellows. Thanks to Ali Altaf, Yang Su, Vijay Rajaram, Sal Testa, and Jen Wibowo we were able to create a ton of really great assets and build relationships with our starting group of nonprofits.

Partnerships

We had a huge list of nonprofits that we wanted to talk to, but we wanted to start small. We identified a few that were technical in nature and interested in working with us.
Our fellows worked with their technical teams to help identify organizational pain points and to build a challenge for each. It was incredible to learn about each organizations incredible purpose and to understand what ways they and we thought technology/innovation could help.

Website

After we had some rough challenges, our team went to work building the website and we continued to refine the challenges.

Hackathons

And now we’re at the point where everything is up and running. We’ve just begun reaching out to hackathon organizer friends to encourage people to hack for good. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Now what?

We’re continuing to gather feedback and telling people about the challenges. The whole process may be a bit simpler and linear compared to the messy process that we actually used to make it happen, but I’m still proud of it nonetheless! It definitely wasn’t as pretty as the design thinking frameworks we went over in class, but I didn’t expect it to be.
Thanks Peter, Josh and Annie for an amazing class.
One last thing, if you are a hacker or maker, you should definitely build something to solve one of these challenges. What I loved most about this project was learning about the organizations and what they are doing everyday to make life better for others. You can create a mobile app to help SamaHope better fund surgeries for those in need or build a mobile messaging hub for Medic Mobile to help health workers better reach their constitutents. There’s so much power in what you have the ability to do, and that’s why I challenge you to build for good.

by Justin Sayarath Analyst @ Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers