Monday, October 14, 2019
Interview with Michele Ruiz and Dan Gould, BiasSync
How do you create a tool to help address unconscious bias in the workplace—and why would you create a new startup in that area? Los Angeles-based BiasSync (www.biassync.com) was founded by three, very experienced serial entrepreneurs--Michele Ruiz (broadcast journalism), Robin Richards (CareerArc, Internships.com, NTI Group, MP3), and Dan Gould (former VP of Technology for Tinder). We caught up with Michele and Dan to better understand why they founded the company, and why this market was such an interest to them.
What is BiasSync?
Michele Ruiz: BiasSync provides a solution for companies, state and federal agencies, school districts, and organizations to assess and manage unconscious bias in the workplace. Our purpose is to create a more fair and respectful workplace, through conscious management of unconscious bias. We have developed a tool that takes scientific, validated methodologies from academia, and use that to assess unconscious bias around race, gender, age, and other personality attributes, in the workplace. Our online solution combines both scientific methodology, as well as highly produced, entertaining, professional development content around education and awareness of unconscious bias. The third pillar of our solution, is an ongoing mitigation strategy to make sure a company is achieving diversity and inclusion objectives. Most companies have not been able to address unconscious bias in a meaningful way. Most are not even addressing it, and even in the instances they are, the typical format is to have a specialist come in for a workshop, to train just small percentage of an organization. Sometimes, it's just content presented online.
The real challenge is related to how do you mitigate this on an ongoing basis. I call that providing habits—monthly habits—to help individuals do better, make better decisions, and who need strategy and strategic implementation of this on regular basis. That's what we do over the course of our two year contract. It's education, measurement, analysis, and ongoing mitigation strategy. Organizational leaders also get a dashboard, a state-of-the-state, which is one of our differentiators. We've created a solution for leaders, which for the first time, gives them a visual, dashboard level of the unconscious bias in a workplace, which they can slice and dice. You have to have at least fifty people in an organization, because the reason is we provide anonymized, aggregated data. We don't provide specifics of how you did with your level of unconscious bias, but as a member of a certain demographic category, your information shows up in a bucket along with forty nine other people. That measurement of data allows organizations to really focus on things that need additional attention. That data gives them a clear understanding of additional things that need to happen.
How did the three of you connect?
Michele Ruiz: Robin Richards and I formed the company, after he approached me, after having been a business mentor for me for fifteen years. The company was based on Robin's observation of the astoundingly poor quality of diversity and inclusion solutions. He approached me to help figure it out, and to create something that was better than what was already in the marketplace. I realized we could help measure and address unconscious bias. Once we decided to do this, we started looking for a Dan. Robin knew Dan from his previous entrepreneurial ventures, and we needed someone with Dan's background. We actually approached him for a referral, and when he saw the work we were setting out to do, he referred himself. He became our third co-founder, and the company came together.
Dan Gould: When Robin called me, he knew I still had an earn-out at Tinder. Robin had been an investor in our previous companies. He said, I know you can't leave, but we need to find someone to do this. After seeing it, I believed in what Michele and Robin were doing so much, I left Tinder. I had been there for three and a half years. Given how well Tinder has done, I actually left stock on the table.
Where is the company now?
Michele Ruiz: In the last year and a half, we have been putting together our product and content. We ran our beta, and once we completed our beta and validated our methodology, we started selling approximately two months ago. We already have clients, and are in the process of finalizing some contracts with Fortune 50 companies. One is a Fortune 10 company, and we're in various stages of contract approval with school districts, police departments, and larger corporations.
How did you decide this needed to be a combination of software and content?
Dan Gould: Michele is too modest. She's actually won five Emmys, and knows how to produce content. The key to the LA tech scene is finding people who really understand content, and funding people in content who understand technology, and getting together. It's a great example of a made-in-LA thing. Michelle, having won five Emmys, knows how to take compelling news-like content, which people understand, and use that to tell a story while communicating the message. My side of this, has been taking a bunch of academic research, and turning that into software. We're basically putting those two pieces together.
Michele Ruiz: The only thing I would add, is this is a software-as-a-service solution—everything is on our online platform. Why that it is important, is the metrics associated with this is are how scalable it is. The challenge of diversity and inclusion training, and unconscious bias training, is that in-person training only touches a small percentage of the organization. For things to be fair and respectful, everyone in an organization has to have some baseline of unconscious bias training. We've set out to solve that, and figured out how to deliver that in a scalable solution.
Can you talk a bit more about how the content and software work together?
Dan Gould: In the education world, the system you use, the content management system (CMS) for education, is called a LMS, Learning Management System. If you look for that off-the-shelf, building in interactivity is not something that has existing in the right form, off the shelf. Robin mandated to me, that this has to be a Rolls Royce. Using educational tools from LMSs, off the shelf, you know you are just going to get get old, boring corporate software, and you're in for a bad experience. He told me, this has to feel amazing. My background is in consumer software. With consumer software, you have individuals who are buying this on their own. Because of that, Tinder spent a lot of time on the product, and thinking about the product, to make it as simple as possible. Here, we wanted to build a Netflix-like experience for this. We have built our own system for managing and serving video, for the interactive components, and likewise, for the test and assessments. These look nothing like the boring tools that are used in typical psychological research. Those feel like you're running 2.0. We've modernized those, too, so it feels like a compelling experience. It's the idea of bringing a modern web experience to this. Lots of our engineering team has worked on consumer facing websites, mostly LA local companies, like Tinder, Ticketmaster, and a bunch of other local areas, and are people who are used to building a great consumer experience. That's normally something that is an afterthought.
Michele Ruiz: In terms of content, it's very much like news programming, which is my background. It started first, with consulting a few implicit bias experts and learning experts, and determining what was important for people in a work environment to know and understand. Once you can impact that key learning, identify the right experts, you can create stories around those experts. That allows us to deliver teachable moments in the content, and that also allows us to create hidden camera experience we set up or where we can use very creative approaches. Think Dateline, the Discovery Channel, and Netflix. Once we figured out what needed to be taught, what the take-aways needed to be for the modules, we were able to architect stories around that and help reinforce learning. That's our approach to content, which we think will be highly successful.
Dan Gould: I'll mention, it was really interesting to learn how to work together for us. It's clear that Hollywood people speak a different language from technology people. When we had added our first interactive elements, there were definitely times we had to recut them 20 times until we all learned how to speak the same language, to be able to explain what we needed to be cut right, at this frame, and what needed to be on the screen. There was definitely some work to get all of the technology folks, who had not worked in content production, working with the people in production. And, the production folks had never worked on anything but delivery of a video before, so there was definitely some learning we had there.
Michele Ruiz: It was a great marriage of experience from Dan and I.
Dan, you mentioned you walked away from options at Tinder to work on this; what was it that convinced you to make the switch?
Dan Gould: What we are saying at this point, was we wanted to have a visionary company, and want to change the world. We wanted to bring to bear all of what we've learned through our careers, and want to impact millions and millions of people. The best way to do that, is by building technology that scales. That's what we've done, built businesses to scale. We want to build a business that scales, as a way to impact millions of people.
Finally, what's next and what should we be paying attention to now?
Michele Ruiz: Where we are in our entrepreneurial journey, is we have started our sales and now have good traction. Our focus right now is sales, between now and the beginning of Q2 next year. From there, we will have all the learning we need from the sales process, such as if we have the price right and all those sorts of things. Our early adopters are in every industry, and we are learning a lot from them. We are now gathering feedback to architect, iterate, add new content, and new features. For example, some of our early customers are in oil and gas, technology, and school districts, and they all have some unique characteristics to provide us feedback. We are continuing to iterate and evolve our product, and provide the next level of assessment. From there, we will focus on ramping up our sales, and foresee by Q2 we will really build out our sales. That's why we are currently raising capital for that purpose.
Thanks, and good luck!