YouSaid · the spoken record

Pierre Paul

lines on the record: 20
first: 2021-05-11
most recent: 2021-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We win the pitch competition. That's the jump, you know, because we're still working full time, we're still worth working at our full time jobs. I think this would be the jump that we need to transition into full-time. Part of that money would go towards kind of sustaining ourselves. And then part of it will also go towards web development. You know, I've been making it all myself just learning how to code slash not code. That money would definitely go towards web development and building out a more solid web software product and us going full-time.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're a very mission driven business, right? And I'm very excited to have a team of people that are equally invested in solving this problem that Damabe and I started this company for.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think this entire time it's been myself and my sister. And a lot of the conversation that we have with Troy was around like managing a team. You know, I haven't really, I'm the CEO. I wouldn't say that I've been managing my sister's work. She's CMO. She runs everything that you see about Chesi and news or social media or anything like that. She runs. So I haven't necessarily been managing her, but I'm actively thinking about now eventually we're going to get a CTO on. We're going to get some product people on. We're going to get some designers. Like we're going to have a team of people that I'm kind of going to be responsible for leading and pointing in the right direction. I think that was my biggest takeaway is just like how to be a good leader, how to choice at something along the lines of like, you know, you want to get people in that can do a role and just take off.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not super conducive with being a founder and running a business where you don't know what you're doing. So a lot of it is just been Having the conviction to say, like, we're doing this, we're going to try it for three months. If it doesn't work, we learn something, we move on to the next thing.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hardest part for me in this year, year and a half that we've been on it has been the ambiguity. You know, we had an idea that we were going to be this glassroom for minorities and we would just put this idea out there and it would take off. Like literally, I thought that we would hit publish the next day. It'd be one of those crazy success stories. We had 100,000 hits on all these stories. That did not happen. And I think that we've been at a consistent crossroads between, you know, like do we create something that job seekers love or do we create something that can be very viable to businesses? Because it kind of seems like we almost have to choose, at least in this initial stage, like, do we have companies? Do we help job seekers? We can't necessarily do both right away. And then we just had so many discussions about like, should we focus all in all on these stories? Should we offer a consulting arm? We just have no idea what we're doing. And I think the hardest part is that ambiguity of what actually should I do, right? And how do I kind of move forward? I am very much a planner. Like I'm the person that maps out his itinerary for a trip and everything like that. So like.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So we're actively thinking about how we can make this story and view process part of our business. Yes, that probably means that we have fewer stories than another review site, but we can guarantee you that the information that you find from the stories that we do have will be insightful and powerful and much more useful during your job search.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So people can go on, like you could go on guide and post about NPR if you wanted to tomorrow. Most of the stories that we gathered have been through this story interview process. And I realize that it isn't super scalable. But we, my sister and I have had conversations to say, like, what if this was scalable? We get a very complete picture of someone's experience here through these story interviews. And to me, 10,000 of these very complete, insightful stories is worth more than 100,000. It's bad. It's good. My manager sucked reviews that you might see on other sites.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not the case. A lot of the stories that we've gathered are positive. And what we found is that there are small details that people wish were improved. They wish their manager would give them more space to speak up in a meeting. They wish that their company would be a little bit more intentional about the diversity programs that they're doing, like things like that, that companies that are actually valuable insights for companies to know that, oh, we actually, we're doing an overall a pretty good job, an okay job. There are just some smaller things about our employee experience that we need to improve upon.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for these initial reviews that we've gotten, we've actually just called up people. Literally, so we've done a lot of, we call them story interviews. So I've spoken to people from those companies that I mentioned before, and I'll ask them a number of questions about their experience with promotions and their relationship with the managers and diversity programs. What we found is that, one, it's very easy to validate that someone works at a company because obviously they're posting anonymously, but with the conversations that we have are very one-to-one and intimate like we're having right now. But then two, we get a very much more complete picture of their job experience. And I realize that when people hear about think of like a glass door before minorities, they immediately think like people are coming here to bash their companies.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so all of our stories are anonymous. The only kind of identifying piece of it is you can choose to display or provide as much information as you want in terms of your portrait. You just have to provide one portrait so I could fill out blackmail 21 to 30 heterosexual, disabled, or not disabled, not a veteran. Or I could just say black. And the idea behind that is obviously if you work at a 200 person company and there's three black people, it's really easy to identify who it is that submitted this review or this story. So yeah, we took that into consideration and made it try to make it as anonymous and kind of identity protecting as possible”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the idea behind this community feature is we want to get job seekers a way to interact with the people that are already at a company and kind of like get a feel for the culture and message them, talk to them directly. But also we want to give companies a way to go past the post and pray kind of models, what I call it, of recruiting, where every company right now is trying to recruit diverse talent, but they're all just kind of like posting some jobs over here, some jobs over here, some jobs over here, and hoping that they get found. This is kind of a way for them to be more proactive about the recruiting and like putting their culture out there by making their internal communities of talent, diverse talent, more accessible to candidates.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Tesie, we are live. We have about 1,400 stories from companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Facebook. We have about 1,200 people signed up for our platform, maybe on 1,250. I haven't checked today. And we actually just launched a new community feature. So if you recall the lyph story that I told you, part of me was trying to figure out what it's like to be black at a company, but also part of me was trying to kind of find other black people that I could connect with in my search.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we actually launched as Diversify I don't even know how we came up with that name, but it was spelled D-Y-V-E-R-S-I-F-I. And then in January of this year, we kind of decided to rebrand Techzi. So again, we're Nigerian. My sister and I are Nigerian. We're of the Igbo tribe. So Chezi is the Ebo word for reflect. And it kind of just symbolizes, you know, the idea of job seekers doing some self-reflection and figuring out what it is that I want out of a workplace, but also companies doing reflection to say like, are we serving our employees properly? What can we do to improve that sort of thing?”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our story specific to the person that's trying to find this information. So we added what we call portraits to them. So like I can go on and find stories with portraits of black men, you know, 21 to 30 not disabled, et cetera, like, or you can just, you know, any combination of those. And the idea is that you're finding stories from people that identify similarly to you with our platform.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. It was. I mean, everyone uses Glassdoor, but I think Glassdoor is just very, it's very one-size-fits-all. You know, a lot of the reviews that they have are very hot or cold. It's very much like I didn't get the job. This company sucks. Don't ever work here. Or it's like, it almost seems like the people were like paid to put a positive review. They're like so glowing. It's like this doesn't seem realistic. But the biggest thing is that, you know, you don't know who submitted the review and therefore it's kind of hard to put yourselves in the shoes of that person. So we kind of really wanted to make our reviews. We call them stories.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was difficult because it was like laborious for me to go through LinkedIn every time like that and kind of figure to ultimately just kind of figure out what it's like to be black there. And I kind of took that sentiment to my sister and just said, you know, there's not really a way for you to know what it's like to be black or, you know, in her case, a black woman or gay or disabled or whatever at a company. And that was kind of the impetus for actually us wanting to start Chessey was that experience, at least for me, was that experience of literally wanting to get this information for myself at Lyft and not being able to.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember I found a job at Lyft. I didn't have anyone in my network that worked at Lyft. So I went on LinkedIn and I was just looking up people like people that work at Lyft in New York City. And I found myself looking to speak to black people because I figured that their experiences would be most similar to mine. And I also was kind of like, you know, trying to find like my community or like my tribe or people in the office at the Atlant before I decided to apply.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's not what I thought, actually. I thought that, so typically people go into consulting and they work two to three years and then they go somewhere else, right? They go into what we call industry. So I was actually thinking, okay, I've done my two years. So I was really applying to a bunch of diversity and inclusion analysts, program manager, jobs like that. And this is three years ago before everything happened last summer. So like, you know, there were jobs out there, but companies weren't really serious about hiring for it.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was exactly my plan. I thought that I would get here and get experience in retail and finance and all these other kind of industries. And that was not the case. I got kind of put into utilities and power generation almost from the beginning. And it was just, you know, kind of difficult to get out, kind of established my network there. And, you know, our projects are a year, a year and a half long. So that's kind of how it ended up working. But I was really focused on finding a way to get back to UNC. So I got involved with the diversity recruiting team because, you know, this was like my opportunity to go back to campus every now and then and help other black students get this job that I'd been so fortunate to get. And that's actually kind of how I got into diversity and inclusion work. I just kind of realized that I had a passion for like creating opportunities or just helping people realize the opportunities that were out there for them, especially people that look like me or people from other historically underrepresented groups. So that's kind of where the interest came from.”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew I wanted to be in business as soon as I got to school. I was like good at math and the typical Nigerian tracks are lawyer, doctor, or business person. And I ruled out lawyers. I don't like reading like that much. And I hate science. So I rolled out being a doctor. And I chose business. So I knew I was. And also, my dad was in consulting. So I graduated from UNC and moved to Boston to start working in management consulting. And I spent three years in Boston and then actually moved to New York City, shifting a little bit more into people-oriented diversity and inclusion kind of work. And then the pandemic hit. So I actually moved out of New York City, moved back home to North Carolina, and then now to Georgia”
2021-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Meet The HIBT Fellows: Pierre Paul & Toby Egbuna · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT