Monday, August 3, 2020
Interview wth Deevee Kashi, HelpWith Black Equity and Deed
A few weeks ago, Help With Black Equity (www.helpwithblackequity.com) launched an effort to help connect volunteers with efforts to help with addressing racial disparities, including here in Southern California. To learn more about the effort, we spoke with Deevee Kashi, CEO of Deed(www.joindeed.com), to learn more about how the project came up, and how it's actually an open source project based on Help With COVID, another effort to help connect volunteers to help address issues with the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is HelpWithBlackEquity?
Deevee Kashi: This started as HelpWithCovid. We had a team of dedicated volunteers led by Sam Altman, which wanted to help in the COVID crisis by tapping the talent of the tech community, first in San Francisco, and then elsewhere. HelpWithCovid helped connect over 16,000 volunteers over some 750 COVID-19 specific projects, including contact tracing apps, mental health resources, and medical information databases. With this incredible racial justice movement we are witnessing, they wanted to leverage the technology they had built, this open source technology, to support racial equity projects in various ways. Deed partnered with a team of volunteers to take over and shepherd this project, through the HelpWith Foundation, which is a 501c(3) nonprofit. The entity now guides both HelpWithCOVID and HelpWithBlackEquity. HelpWithBlackEquity will take on projects related to racial justice and social reform, as well as a directory of black funded businesses seeking support and resources. That way, we can connect them with people willing to help with racial equity, and also raise awareness and drive resources to black owned business.
Why is that Deed got involved, and what is the relationship?
Deevee Kashi: Deed started off as a consumer app to connect people with volunteering opportunities in their local community. We set out to make doing good accessible, and make it more accessible to younger people and make it culturally relevant to do good things. We built an awesome community of socially conscious people in New York City. Organically, we started getting approached by companies and realized that Corporate Social Responsibility is a real thing. Companies need technology to manage those programs, as they align with the values of their customers and employees, building a more purpose built environment and purpose built brands. We provide companies a platform that allows them to share their resources, their time, skills, and money, with causes they champion and their employees care about. HelpWithCOVID was really in line with our ethos, because our mission is to empower people to do good, and obviously that aligns with the HelpWith initiative. That allows us to dedicate resources to this that the volunteer team was really looking for.
Is the HelpWith platform maintained as part of Deed, or is that separate?
Deevee Kashi: Right now, the HelpWith platform is completely open source. We encourage people to fork the platform to create localized version for HelpWithCOVID. We encourage peopel to contribute their time or monetary resources, however we also encourage them to use the technology to create HelpWiths of their owns, for crisis they might be championing. It's a separate entity, under Deed's nonprofit arm, and Deed has a separate platform to serve corporation. In the future we intend to keep HelpWith open source.
How does a company like yours justify putting the resources into an open source project like this?
Deevee Kashi: It's a great question and one we deliberated on very meticulously before agreeing to do so. We believe in the project, and felt it aligned with our ethos. We still maintain our consumer, volunteer and donor community, because it's part of our mission and why we started the company in the first place. We thought it made a lot of sense, which is why we partnered very early on. We also saw, that it's an intensive process to be part of, and it needs to be nurtured. The beauty of the foundation is we have the original team of volunteers, who continue to be very heavily involved, but we also aren't spearheading everything. For example, with HelpWithBlackEquity, we have a People of Color steering committee we have in place, of YC founders and professionals in the tech space we believe are the crux and driving force of the project. We're here to support with additional resources and know-how and technology that aligns with our product, but we have a team of volunteers and a steering committee . We justify our resources because it aligns with our core ethos and mission, which is empowering people to do good, whether a corporation, nonprofit, or an individual.
As a company starting in the middle of a pandemic, have you found anythign that has been particularly useful to running a company in this kind of strange, socially distanced environment?
Deevee Kashi: For us, it's unique, because before Deed was an enterprise product, we had people reaching out to us. Because we were bootstrapping, we were constrained to people who were willing to work for free at the beginning, so we had a distributed mind set from the beginning. We carried that into the COVID crisis even in spite of raising money, and opening up a brick and mortar office, we had to revert back to connecting with people remotely. We do things like virtual happy hours every week, we come up with different games we play, and it might sound really cheesy, but they are important. We overcommunicate. We have stand-ups every single day. We have one-on-ones with the team, and obviously we're small, so as CEO I talk with every single person on the team weekly or biweekly. Making sure that you have as many touchpoints as possible, understand that it's wierd, and it's especially hard for people in hard hit areas. Part of our team is in New York City, and we had people who didn't leave their houses for months. Ensuring that you're very attentive and understanding of the difference between now and what is was before COVID as a manager, is really important. Leading into that are the apps and worksflow technology like Slack, like Zoom, etc. and accept that as the main way to communicate.
Thanks!