“P.S. I love it here” — How Narrativ is Accelerating Diversity in Tech

Research shows that diverse teams are more effective problem solvers who outperform their competitors by 35%. Women make companies smarter, yet they represent just 15% of the engineering workforce. Thought leaders from BBG Ventures to Grand Central Tech and Code to Work are making it easy to access diverse pools of talent.

So why are some in Silicon Valley still bemoaning the growth of women in tech?

Narrativ is taking action to diversify and strengthen our recruiting pipeline by looking beyond traditional hiring practices. To start, we forged a relationship with Code to Work, a GCT educational partner that was offering access to a diverse group of student engineers looking for start up experience.

The selection process for our summer internship program was simple: send our standard code test and accept the three candidates with the highest scores. I stopped by to meet our new interns on their first day — Ada, Abigail, and Clara. There was initial surprise, then quiet celebration that the three who made the cut happened to be female engineers.

As the summer progressed, our interns shared the exhilarating task of refactoring front-end code. Ada stood out with her elegant solutions and calm leadership. At the time, we were actively interviewing experienced developers (not junior engineers) to handle the increasing scale and machine learning capabilities of our platform.

But Ada’s quick ramp got me thinking.

We knew experienced engineers bring learnings from past jobs and may solve harder problems more quickly, but recruiting truly great developers is difficult and costly. Even senior engineers take 3–6 months to familiarize themselves with how a new system works — Ada was already two months ahead.

Narrativ is a female-led tech startup, so challenging the status quo is in our DNA. We believe in the power of investing in diverse young talent, so we extended Ada a full-time offer to join our team. Two days ago, I slacked her to see how things were going:

We’re not stopping here. In the next 3 months, Narrativ is committed to:

• Fixing the Pipeline: 20% of engineering resumes we read last month were from female candidates. We’re diversifying our recruiting pipeline to bring this to at least 50%, with new resources like Women Who Code, In Her Sight, Hire Tech Ladies, The Muse, Power to Fly, Werk, and more.
• Including Everyone: At the suggestion of Nessa, our lead frontend engineer, half of our team (both male and female) will be teaching programming workshops to NYC students with Code Now, a non-profit that provides opportunities for underrepresented high schoolers to learn how to code.
• Shining a Spotlight: It’s why I’m writing this post, and why I’ll share all the resources at my disposal with my Grand Central Tech community and beyond. The math speaks for itself: every new hire in an early stage start up has exponential impact on company culture and diversity.

My own career has been propelled faster and in directions I’d never considered by mentors who believed in me. Leaders at McKinsey and Moda Operandi let me run with crazy ideas, giving frank feedback and encouragement along the way. It took hard work to cultivate each opportunity into tangible results, but without mentors to open doors and take chances on me, I would have been throwing my effort against a wall.

This year I joined the Liberty Interactive WeCN class of 2016–2017 and had the opportunity to meet Susan Lyne (President of BBG Ventures). “It took me 40 years to get to where I am,” she said, “If I can accelerate today’s female founders, I will.”

Let’s solve this together. To my fellow early stage founders: What’s one thing you can do to accelerate the growth of diversity in tech for your teams?

—

Shirley Chen is the Founder and CEO of Narrativ, a venture backed start-up disrupting the world’s largest commerce pipeline. Her current team is 53% women and has a combined ethnic heritage from 10 different countries.