when I was graduating from Stanford
University there is a sophomore there
who was in computer science classes just
like me who was in many ways a perfectly
average college sophomore like many
other 19 year olds he was really
interested in flirting with girls and
was trying to figure out ways to do it
better but unlike other 19 year olds he
built an app he built an app that made
it so that when you sent a message to
somebody it would disappear after they
had read it
his name was Evan Spiegel and the app
that he built became snapchat snapchat
recently went public as a company called
snap valued at over 20 billion dollars
which is more than the GDP of Nicaragua
now there’s something wrong with
snapchat I use it myself
but what if I told you that the
technology behind snapchat could also
solve some of America and the world’s
most pressing social problems that’s
what I want to talk about here using
technology to solve social challenges
snapchat is a great example of how
people solve the problems that they
understand and when Evan was a sophomore
at Stanford he understood a very
specific set of problems and he used the
tools at his disposal to solve those
problems in 2017 the people who start
software companies tend to have a
certain set of backgrounds they are
disproportionately young they’re
disproportionately male they tend to
live in cities on the coasts and they
tend to have some money that’s part of
why there are so many apps and so many
companies out there that are trying to
make it easier for you to purchase lunch
or to call a cab
but what if you are a 50 year old single
mother who’s living in Kansas maybe
you’re on food stamps to support your
family and maybe you struggle to pay
your bills in 2017 you probably have a
smartphone in fact when you look at the
statistics 70 percent of Americans who
live below the federal poverty line
today have access to a smartphone that
can access the Internet so who’s
building the software that meets their
needs this is a picture of the line
outside the Food Stamp office in
Brooklyn I left my job as a product
manager at Facebook three years ago to
start a software company called propel
that aims to use modern Silicon Valley
style software to fight poverty at the
very start of propell we spent a lot of
time at this Food Stamp office in
Brooklyn trying to learn more about the
challenges of applying for food stamps
and being low-income one of the things
that we learned at the Food Stamp office
is that there are hundreds of people all
waiting in line many of them waiting to
see a human social worker and fill out a
paper form and most of them are passing
the time with a smartphone in their hand
so in a single snapshot here’s the
opportunity the possibility and
capabilities of modern software and
modern tech have far outpaced with the
social services sectors capable of
providing and as a result the social
services we have in the United States
don’t feel modern so that’s what propel
aims to solve we build software that
makes America’s safety net more user
friendly so more about propell in a
second but first back to snapchat one of
the things that was actually
revolutionary about snapchat when it
came out was it was one of the first
first social networks that was really
built specifically for the smartphone
snapchat imagine a world where everybody
had a camera in their pocket and asked
what kind of social network would that
look like snapchat doesn’t have a
website that you can access from your
computer because it assumes that
everyone’s got a phone with a camera at
propell we build something called fresh
EBT which is a free smartphone app that
helps people on food stamps to manage
their benefits plan their grocery
shopping trips and save money on food
like snapchat freshly Vitti is a smart
phone app and not a website but we build
it as a smart phone app because a lot of
our users don’t have access to
computers at home and in fact for a lot
of our users their smartphone is their
primary means of accessing the Internet
so for both snapchat and fresh EBT these
are products that are made possible by
the proliferation of smartphones
throughout the United States here’s
another example of how a technology
makes a variety of different things
possible
this is tinder tinder is a very popular
online dating platform and you know
single people looking to pair off is
nothing new but one of the innovations
that tinder brought to the market was
that you know instead of seeing a list
of different profiles it showed you
people one by one based on a machine
learning algorithm they would try to
detect who you might be most interested
in meeting and every time you swipe left
and right that’s data that feeds back
into the machine learning algorithm to
make tinder smarter about what type of
person you might be interested in but
what if you took the machine learning
algorithm out of tinder and applied the
foundations to something else this is
Bayes impact a nonprofit based in San
Francisco that has built a dashboard for
hospitals and health systems it uses a
machine learning algorithm to classify
new entrants into the emergency room by
the risk of readmission
and so Bayes impact is applying the same
guts to the same machine learning
algorithm that tinder uses to match up
singles and it’s using it to make the
health system more efficient and more
effective you know the idea of software
companies especially in Silicon Valley
that solve problems that are not very
meaningful has become so popular in
society that there’s a show on HBO all
about it it’s called Silicon Valley and
in this show the protagonists start a
new software company that builds a file
compression system file compression is
taking a large file and making it much
smaller which makes it capable of being
stored on a small computer or streamed
over a low connection so the core use
case that they think of for their
software is they want to stream a
marketing stunt for the soft drink
company but file compression can also
change the way that education works in
rural Tanzania there’s a nonprofit
called powering potential that finds
villages in rural Tanzania that don’t
have access to the Internet or even
access to
electricity sends them a solar panel and
a $35 computer that’s chock-full of math
and science videos from Khan Academy and
it’s able to fit all of this onto a $35
computer because modern file compression
makes it so that you can take lots of
these videos and store them onto a small
hard drive the same technology being
applied for one purpose or another look
there’s nothing wrong with disappearing
photos or online dating or silly videos
on the internet if we didn’t have those
things life would be really boring but I
think we sell short the possibility of
what technology can provide if we see it
as just a toy modern software is already
being used to help low-income Americans
put food on the table it’s being used to
make our health system more efficient
and it’s being used to transform
education in Tanzania since we can only
solve the problems that we understand if
we can broaden our understanding of what
problems tech might solve the tools are
already at our fingertips the technology
itself is agnostic the tools are at our
fingertips let’s use it to solve
problems that are really worth solving
thank you
you
University there is a sophomore there
who was in computer science classes just
like me who was in many ways a perfectly
average college sophomore like many
other 19 year olds he was really
interested in flirting with girls and
was trying to figure out ways to do it
better but unlike other 19 year olds he
built an app he built an app that made
it so that when you sent a message to
somebody it would disappear after they
had read it
his name was Evan Spiegel and the app
that he built became snapchat snapchat
recently went public as a company called
snap valued at over 20 billion dollars
which is more than the GDP of Nicaragua
now there’s something wrong with
snapchat I use it myself
but what if I told you that the
technology behind snapchat could also
solve some of America and the world’s
most pressing social problems that’s
what I want to talk about here using
technology to solve social challenges
snapchat is a great example of how
people solve the problems that they
understand and when Evan was a sophomore
at Stanford he understood a very
specific set of problems and he used the
tools at his disposal to solve those
problems in 2017 the people who start
software companies tend to have a
certain set of backgrounds they are
disproportionately young they’re
disproportionately male they tend to
live in cities on the coasts and they
tend to have some money that’s part of
why there are so many apps and so many
companies out there that are trying to
make it easier for you to purchase lunch
or to call a cab
but what if you are a 50 year old single
mother who’s living in Kansas maybe
you’re on food stamps to support your
family and maybe you struggle to pay
your bills in 2017 you probably have a
smartphone in fact when you look at the
statistics 70 percent of Americans who
live below the federal poverty line
today have access to a smartphone that
can access the Internet so who’s
building the software that meets their
needs this is a picture of the line
outside the Food Stamp office in
Brooklyn I left my job as a product
manager at Facebook three years ago to
start a software company called propel
that aims to use modern Silicon Valley
style software to fight poverty at the
very start of propell we spent a lot of
time at this Food Stamp office in
Brooklyn trying to learn more about the
challenges of applying for food stamps
and being low-income one of the things
that we learned at the Food Stamp office
is that there are hundreds of people all
waiting in line many of them waiting to
see a human social worker and fill out a
paper form and most of them are passing
the time with a smartphone in their hand
so in a single snapshot here’s the
opportunity the possibility and
capabilities of modern software and
modern tech have far outpaced with the
social services sectors capable of
providing and as a result the social
services we have in the United States
don’t feel modern so that’s what propel
aims to solve we build software that
makes America’s safety net more user
friendly so more about propell in a
second but first back to snapchat one of
the things that was actually
revolutionary about snapchat when it
came out was it was one of the first
first social networks that was really
built specifically for the smartphone
snapchat imagine a world where everybody
had a camera in their pocket and asked
what kind of social network would that
look like snapchat doesn’t have a
website that you can access from your
computer because it assumes that
everyone’s got a phone with a camera at
propell we build something called fresh
EBT which is a free smartphone app that
helps people on food stamps to manage
their benefits plan their grocery
shopping trips and save money on food
like snapchat freshly Vitti is a smart
phone app and not a website but we build
it as a smart phone app because a lot of
our users don’t have access to
computers at home and in fact for a lot
of our users their smartphone is their
primary means of accessing the Internet
so for both snapchat and fresh EBT these
are products that are made possible by
the proliferation of smartphones
throughout the United States here’s
another example of how a technology
makes a variety of different things
possible
this is tinder tinder is a very popular
online dating platform and you know
single people looking to pair off is
nothing new but one of the innovations
that tinder brought to the market was
that you know instead of seeing a list
of different profiles it showed you
people one by one based on a machine
learning algorithm they would try to
detect who you might be most interested
in meeting and every time you swipe left
and right that’s data that feeds back
into the machine learning algorithm to
make tinder smarter about what type of
person you might be interested in but
what if you took the machine learning
algorithm out of tinder and applied the
foundations to something else this is
Bayes impact a nonprofit based in San
Francisco that has built a dashboard for
hospitals and health systems it uses a
machine learning algorithm to classify
new entrants into the emergency room by
the risk of readmission
and so Bayes impact is applying the same
guts to the same machine learning
algorithm that tinder uses to match up
singles and it’s using it to make the
health system more efficient and more
effective you know the idea of software
companies especially in Silicon Valley
that solve problems that are not very
meaningful has become so popular in
society that there’s a show on HBO all
about it it’s called Silicon Valley and
in this show the protagonists start a
new software company that builds a file
compression system file compression is
taking a large file and making it much
smaller which makes it capable of being
stored on a small computer or streamed
over a low connection so the core use
case that they think of for their
software is they want to stream a
marketing stunt for the soft drink
company but file compression can also
change the way that education works in
rural Tanzania there’s a nonprofit
called powering potential that finds
villages in rural Tanzania that don’t
have access to the Internet or even
access to
electricity sends them a solar panel and
a $35 computer that’s chock-full of math
and science videos from Khan Academy and
it’s able to fit all of this onto a $35
computer because modern file compression
makes it so that you can take lots of
these videos and store them onto a small
hard drive the same technology being
applied for one purpose or another look
there’s nothing wrong with disappearing
photos or online dating or silly videos
on the internet if we didn’t have those
things life would be really boring but I
think we sell short the possibility of
what technology can provide if we see it
as just a toy modern software is already
being used to help low-income Americans
put food on the table it’s being used to
make our health system more efficient
and it’s being used to transform
education in Tanzania since we can only
solve the problems that we understand if
we can broaden our understanding of what
problems tech might solve the tools are
already at our fingertips the technology
itself is agnostic the tools are at our
fingertips let’s use it to solve
problems that are really worth solving
thank you
you
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