Why does tech build inferior products?

- Hello everyone. I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, and welcome to the next episode of "Here to Help." At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us going all day. And what powers that mission is people. "Here to Help" is a look at how experienced strength and hope inspires people to want to help others. Today is the first episode of 2023 and the first episode of season four of "Here to Help," and I'm incredibly excited to have as my first guest, Matt Stephenson. Matt is the CEO and co-founder of Code2College, based right here in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2016, Code2College focuses on preparing minority and low-income high school students with the technical and professional skills necessary to enter and excel in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, undergraduate majors and careers. Underrepresented groups who initially declare a STEM field when entering college, exit those fields in disproportionate numbers, either by switching to a non-STEM major or dropping out of college altogether. Since 2016, Code2College has served 3000 high school students and secured 300 of them paid summer internships. Indeed has partnered with Code2College since the very beginning, and we've been very fortunate to have placed some of the Code2College graduates in full-time roles right here at Indeed. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.

- Thanks so much for having me. Chris.

- Before we dive in, for those who may be listening or who are hearing impaired, I'll start with a quick visual description. I'm a middle-aged man, bald, wearing dark glasses and a black sweater and behind me is the North Austin skyline.

- I am a handsome bald male who is sitting in a button-up dress shirt with a bookshelf in the background.

- All right, well let's start where we always start these conversations, how are you doing right now?

- I'm great. Yesterday was my birthday. I got to spend it with my wife and two kids and they made dinner for me and got me my favorite type of ice cream cake that you usually can only get back in New York. So I'm feeling good.

- That is fantastic. Happy birthday. Well, so let's start by talking about Code2College. Can you just explain for those folks who are not familiar with it, what does Code2College do?

- Sure, Code2College is an education and workforce development nonprofit that closes the gap between tech talent demand and tech opportunity within minoritized communities. And we do this through a three-pillar program model based on education, exposure, and experience that really reaches students and fills in the gap for much of what leads to that STEM attrition that you mentioned at the outset. And so for education, we deliver, at this point, seven different technical curricula that are all focused on coding and project-based to enhance what students are learning in their curricular experience. Exposure, we believe that if you can't see it, you can't be it. And so we have a pretty intensive model that has professional skills workshops as well as STEM industry case competitions that introduce students to everything from software engineering to private equity. And then finally, experience. We are the foremost organization placing high school students and actually the first to place them into paid technical internships with leading tech companies and we've been doing so for the last seven years.

- Fantastic, so we have a lot to dive into to understand the challenges that exist in the industry and exactly how you're going about solving them. But you have a really interesting story for how you got, you didn't start in the nonprofit space. Can you talk a little bit about what brought you here and to getting Code2College started?

- Sure. So my family's from Jamaica. I was raised in New York, but education and service have always been key to who I am and my family's upbringing of me. And you know, as I was leaving church one day, right as I was graduating from high school, one of the elders had asked me what I was looking to pursue once I got to college. And you know, I had at the time I had said, you know, "Business, generally speaking," and she said, "Do computers." And you know, I didn't know what she meant. I don't think she knew what she meant either. But I ultimately pursued a dual degree in finance and information systems. And it changed my life. I learned how to code my freshman year, and throughout my undergraduate experience, I was able to take on a number of jobs on the side as well as internships where that coding skillset was critical. And I was able to defray half of my college expenses as a result. And so I knew early on in my undergraduate and professional career that there was something here. And so over the last 15 to 20 years, there have just been a number of experiences where I've continued to think about how can we offer up this skillset with really low barriers to entry, but just immense professional, academic, economic opportunities to students who otherwise don't have this level of access and opportunity. And, you know, from working for an organization that placed undergraduate students of color into front-office roles from way-off-target schools to being a teacher at a charter high school that was also Title 1 serving mostly low-income students. Once we moved here to Austin, just realized that there was this incredible opportunity because you've got this thriving tech hub, yet so many communities who were just a stones throw away from the Indeeds and the other major tech giants and would never consider that they could work there, let alone as an engineer. And so that first year started to make the rounds to different tech meetups, met engineers and other technologists, and asked them if they wanted to offer their skillset to students after school. And having worked in the private sector myself, knew that there were just few opportunities where you could do so and they jumped at the chance and Code2College was born, at this point, seven years ago.

- So you started your career, you studied finance and you started your career actually working in finance. And what was the shift to wanting to be able to do things to help people, but working in a different field to deciding that you wanted to dedicate your life and change your field and make this your vocation?

- Career working at Goldman Sachs in credit-risk management, and I've loved math since I was in second grade and had a great time with statistics and probabilities and assessing and managing risk, but realized that, effectively, if you were to think of a bank as a sports team, I was on defense. I was just saving them a lot of money, which while it was fun and interesting and I learned a great deal while I was there, it was taking me away from my core, which was serving the community. And so I spent probably about the next 10 years looking for ways to put my own skills to use and everything from, I took a side job while I was at Goldman working for Princeton Review because it got me into the classroom, to I started a financial literacy program for my church. And all of this was to, in iterative steps, get me closer to figure out how can I use my skillset to serve others. And I would say it wasn't really until I had finished up business school at Wharton and just saw how we were able to leverage volunteer talent in a meaningful way through several initiatives that I was involved in at that time that I started to think, the experience that I had working for that other nonprofit, that this could be used to go deeper at an earlier intervention point instead of undergraduate at high school. And to put the skills of technologists and engineers to use for the betterment of minoritized and underrepresented communities. And I would say that it truly crystallized once we moved here to Austin because there are just so many resources here in Austin, Texas, and that only continues to move up and to the right. But I just, after meeting with so many of our organizations and so many leaders in the space, so that there were very few genuine opportunities to connect these two communities, those that had and those that had not.

- So I want to dive into the details about some of the problems that exist in industry, but maybe just to set the stage first, and this might seem obvious, but I'd love to talk about why representation matters, particularly in tech. Clearly representation matters, but within technology, there's a couple things I think, I guess from my perspective, and I really want to hear your point of view, but you know, number one, clearly these are very good jobs that pay well. And when we're talking about opportunity and trying to address wealth inequity, creating access to good paying jobs and careers and careers that are potentially wealth building, it is really important. But the other thing is that in tech, we build systems that impact people's lives. And the lack of representation shows up often in how those systems are designed from AI facial recognition systems that are trained on primarily white faces and therefore perform considerably worse on the faces of people of color, which then can have an impact on things like how they're used by law enforcement or TSA or things like that. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about why we're even focused on representation in this space.

- I think I know, and I've seen that representation has a compounding effect. I myself, I always think of, this was something similar to the example that you gave with AI. You know, I work out at Orange Theory Fitness and love the program, love the studio, but I remember this one time, not even this one time, it happened several times, I would go to get water using their automatic dispenser. And there were several times I had seen somebody use it and then when I went to use it, it would stop working. And I told the manager, I said, "I think there's something wrong." And they tried it themselves, it worked just fine. The next person tried it, every time I tried it, until I realized after reading an article that many of those dispensers, they don't work well with people of color, right? They don't recognize because of the color of my skin that there is an object there and I actually have to turn it so that it just faces my bottle, right? Similar thing happened with the heart rate monitors with my skin, that it was not picking up the heart rate, again, because it was photosensitive. And those are things, I mean, one could say that's a minor inconvenience, but that compounds because that has now happened in two instances at the same venue. If you multiply that by every other vendor shop interaction that I have over the course of the day, what message is that reinforcing for me as a person of color? How much more time, how much more cost is added to my experience and my wellbeing as a result of that? And so when we don't have representation with product, with design, with engineering, we're making for inferior products, right? And so that is on the receiving end, sort of the end user's experience. And I would also say to your point, which I think you articulated really well, is that we have this really unique opportunity to start to build wealth. I can't tell you how many of our students have gone through our program and about 40%, so I'll just give you some specifics, About 3/4 of our students, they identify as Black or Hispanic. About half are girls and about half of them are on free/reduced price lunch. And I cannot tell you how many of those students, because of that intersectionality are realizing the positive benefits of the compounding effect of having worked in tech. They are making a multiple of what their peers are making over the course of the summer while they're in these tech internships. And as a result, they're able to plow back into household earnings, they're able to save for college, they're able to pay for immediate needs. You know, one of the things that I thought about when I negotiated the agreements with all of our partners was this has to be competitive with the job that they would otherwise take in service or retail because they have very immediate needs. I cannot tell a student who has to contribute to household earnings, "This is going to be good for your future." It also has to be good for your present. Like very good for your present. So there's just a great opportunity that we have here to serve. And there's also, as I mentioned before, there's an extreme tech talent demand gap here that we face. And rather than companies continue to fight for the same talent and pay premiums for the exact same talent, they should instead be investing in the future to build the pie. This is great for our economy, this is great for individual communities at the micro level as well, and then this is also fantastic for these companies who are looking to build a much more diverse and representative workforce.

- Yeah, that's really a powerful vision and also the work that you're doing. And so let's get into that and let's start by, you hinted at at the very beginning and when I saw these numbers originally from you, I think it's really stark. So we look at the problems of representation in tech. You know, they're here now and you have to kind of back up to each step of the funnel to see where the problems are. But if you go back, there's a critical part where there have been some gains in getting more students of color to enter into STEM fields, but what you're seeing is that there's a disproportionate drop off from entering into a STEM major to actually graduating with that degree. Can you talk about some of those numbers?

- Absolutely. So 50% of low-income students, 50% of women, 2/3 thirds of Hispanic, and about 3/4 of Black undergraduate students who initially select a STEM major, once they get to college, either switch to a liberal arts degree or drop out completely. And that's the majority of those changes are happening in their freshman year. I think for many of us who did pursue and complete an undergraduate degree, you'll remember that your freshman year, you'll have many of what they call sort of weed-out courses where they are putting you through the gauntlet to, you know, look to your left, look to your right, you know, one of those people will not be here at the end of the semester. And while that's the reality, what's worse than that is the fact that the students who excel or at least persist within those majors their first time getting exposed to those fields, them making the decision that they wanted to pursue those fields as majors. That didn't happen the day they set foot on campus. That happened oftentimes many years before. And it's because of their networks, it's because of household income, it's because of proximity to careers that they were able to have that advantage. And so when you look at representation as it stands today, it's no wonder that about 4.5% of the engineering talent is Black and about 10% is Hispanic relative to, I mean, that is about 1/3 of the U.S. Black population and about less than 1/2 of the US Hispanic population. But I mean, it's by design. And so what we need to do is focus at an earlier intervention point. Oftentimes people ask me, "Well Matt, why didn't you start Code2College at the undergraduate level? I mean, they've already decided to pursue a college degree. Why not continue to to push them?" It's because we've already lost so many students before that. If a student has made the decision that they want to pursue a college degree, that's fantastic. They have so many resources typically at the college, if they made it to college, they may have many resources and access around them. It's not to say that things are perfect for them, but they're certainly much more privileged than many of the students who drop off and either don't consider college as an option or start college and then drop out. And so if we start at the high school level when they are still in a traditional secondary educational program and we compliment or supplement what they're already getting in school, that dramatically enhances not only their opportunity, but also the likelihood that they persist and excel once they get to college and beyond.

- Yeah, and I think, you know, the analogy that sort of makes so much sense is it would be like showing up at college never having played a sport before and trying to walk onto an NCAA team when all of your counterparts, most of whom are probably coming from more wealthy neighborhoods and schools, had been doing club sports since they were five years old. It seems fairly obvious there and it's actually kind of amazing that we don't have more programs like Code2College all over the place doing this. So can you talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how this work? When do you actually first start with the students? What do the programs look like and how are you actually preparing them?

- So we have a partnership with about 50 high schools across the country, though we started here in Austin, we actually used the pandemic as an opportunity to blitz scale. And we did not need effectively boots on the ground and forged partnerships all over the country. Mostly in Middle America, cities like Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, but also some on the East Coast. And once a student finds out about us through their administration, through the larger student body, they can apply online. The barrier to entry is actually quite low. We try to make it so because we are intentionally trying to reach students who either don't see themselves in these types of careers or they may be demotivated in school and we see Code2College as an opportunity to turn that around. Once they apply and are admitted to the program, they enter a 10-week course. We start out with a foundational course where they learn the fundamentals of coding in Python, but all of its project based. So rather than teaching principles, we teach them jobs. So how to create a click handler, how to create this text-based game. They are going to also build up their GitHub profiles and accounts. And so at the end of that 10-week course, they have an active account with a repo or several repos to speak of and they're able to speak fluidly about the type of work that they're doing. If they continue with our courses, there are actually three courses that they would need to take to be considered for an internship. In addition to that, and that's the education pillar, as I mentioned before, the exposure pillar, we have several workshops that they must attend after school. They are typically anywhere for one to two hours in length and they'll cover developing their first resume with us. So it does not matter if they're 14, 15-years-old and a freshman, they've got some experience to speak of and if they don't, we're going to help them with that. In addition to that, we work with them on interview skills, everything from behavioral to whiteboarding. We're in a virtual space, so they're also using Miro and then a battery of STEM industry case competitions that they can elect to sign up for so they can learn more about different industries, whether it be FinTech with one of our FinTech partners, we're here in Austin, so we've got several semiconductor partners as well. And then finally, if they complete those three introductory courses successfully, they can then apply to our elite internship program, which then prepares them for a lot of the basics. Everything from Jira ticketing to using Slack to email communication best practices. Basically, think of what are the things that add a lot of friction your first couple of weeks when starting any internship. We try to address that before they even meet with prospective employers. They then interview during the springtime. So we're actually about four weeks away from interview season. And then once they're selected, we continue to work with them on specific projects to prepare them ahead of their summer internships. So it is, students are working with us no fewer than about six months and sometimes as much as two years before they meet with their prospective employer and then start their summer internships.

- So Indeed is very proud to have been, I believe your first partner. Can you talk a little bit about how our partnership came about and what that has meant for Code2College and your students?

- Absolutely. So we, let's see, so we started in the fall of 2016 and I remember early on just making the rounds, and so one of our strengths is the fact that we run on volunteer power. And so we worked with, probably, at this point, over 500 volunteers globally. Again, what a beautiful thing the pandemic was. There were many opportunities there and silver linings. But one of our volunteers was an Indeedian and had said, "I think you need to meet this person," who ended up being one of your VPs of engineering at the time. And when we spoke, he himself had been an intern and he had worked in a prior role at another company with interns and saw the value in it. He also saw the value in mentorship and we also had several Indeedians working with us as volunteers and they brought up the proposal to host an intern or two and we said we would love it and we prepared for it. And that summer, Indeed was our very first, what we call Visionary Partners and hosted two of our interns and both of them were asked to return the following summer. And we have now had this relationship for, this'll be our seventh summer with Indeed. And I'm proud to share that two of those interns who started with you as high school interns and continued with you all the way through undergraduate have now gotten their full-time offers and will be starting this spring as full-time software engineers at Indeed. And it has meant a tremendous amount to me personally and professionally and to Code2College to have Indeed as our first Visionary Partner, you know, hopefully, you know that indeed is is the gold standard for software engineering here in Austin and I'm sure beyond and being able to say that Indeed was the first company to take the leap and say, "We will hire high school software engineering interns," meant so much. I can't tell you how many engineering leaders, once they heard the response to their question, "Who's on board now?" When they heard Indeed, sort of took a step back and even if they were skeptical, were more willing to have the conversation or how many of those led to a much quicker, "Yes." So I'm honored and humbled that we continue this great partnership and really excited to continue to deepen it further.

- Well, it's meant a great deal to us as well. And we're really excited about where we're going, especially with these full-time hires coming on board and what the future holds here. I think it's important to point out here, and this is a great opportunity that that's not an anomaly, so your numbers in terms of the kind of feedback that your interns get as high school students, can you talk about some of some of those numbers? 'Cause it's pretty amazing.

- Absolutely. So we started to hear from our prospective partners, or I've been hearing for a number of years, actually, when I propose this is something that your company should do, they say, "Matt, this sounds great, but help me understand, I don't know what a high school intern can do. I know what an undergraduate intern should be expected to do, but what about a high school intern?" And so we asked that this past summer of our hiring managers, how did our interns fare, especially, compare to your undergraduate interns? So we created a rubric and 80% of our hiring managers rated our interns from this past summer as scoring a four or a five out of five. And a five, effectively, think of it as they did everything that was asked of them and more and a four being they did everything asked of them and on time, and 85% actually said that they performed at or above the level of undergraduate interns, so at or above the level of an undergraduate intern. So they have not taken an intro to CS class, they don't know what the big O is yet. And still, they performed at or above the level of an undergrad intern. And the majority of our interns are anywhere between the ages of 15 and and 16. You know, they're not, you know, a legion of 18-year-olds who just graduated from high school. Like many of these students are going right back to high school after the summer. And so that says a lot, especially when you think of sort of that compounding effect, like the two full-timers that you've got coming on board, Anna-Karen, and Teelo, they've been with Indeed since the summer of 2018. So think of, they know the culture so well, they know the system so well. They've built up a network and they are on fire for Indeed, right? Which is a contrast when you think of the typical undergraduate intern or the stereotypical one who may sort of bounce around from different companies. They are fired up about the culture and the work at Indeed and they're right back there. And we've got so many high schoolers who are feeling the same way about their employers as well, and they're doing great work for them as well.

- Amazing. Can you talk a little bit about your Vision 2024 program?

- Absolutely. So 2020 was really an incubatory year for us. There's a lot that we did in response to, I should actually take a step back, when in March of 2020 when lockdown was announced, we had a number of partners sort of retract their offers to host interns for that summer. It was a very uncertain time. And given that 40% of our revenue, we are again a nonprofit, but I have made it a mission to make the largest portion of our revenue be focused on earned and that that has had its strengths, but in 2020 we took a pretty significant hit, and I will say when lockdown was announced, we had about three weeks of runway. And so it was a very busy time for us as it was for many organizations. One of the things that came out of that was that we also wanted to prioritize the largest portion of our student population, which we knew were at risk of attrition, and that's our Black and brown girls. And so what we did was we created an initiative called Vision 2024, which was focused on supporting, developing and placing 200 black and Latina girls into STEM roles by the year 2024. And so these young ladies get everything from priority access to our technical curricula, they get technical mentors who are women in STEM, they get executive mentors who are senior leaders in their respective organization. So we've got VPs of engineering, CTOs, some CEOs who work with them on a quarterly basis. We've got a monthly workshop series where they're hearing from women of color in a variety of fields. We've had physicians come to speak with them, investment bankers come to speak with them about what they do and why they should see themselves in these fields. And then of course, we've got that mandate of placement into either an internship or full-time role, but either way, some STEM placement by 2024. To date, we have launched five cohorts and we are well on our way to surpassing that number of 200 girls by next year. And really excited that several of those, we call them legacies because of what they mean to their communities and for themselves. but several of the young ladies from Vision 2024 have worked at Indeed as well.

- That's amazing. So you mentioned 2020 and, you know, we're entering a time now of some economic uncertainty. Can you talk about maybe how important a program like this in encouraging more opportunities for folks in STEM given an economic climate like we're in right now?

- Absolutely. So I think that having been through these types of economic cycles several times, I have a different perspective on on this as I think there's been a lot of reactionary activity, a lot of quick pullbacks and disinvestment and reallocation and having seen this type of an economic hit many times before, this is actually exactly the time that we need to deepen our investment in software engineering education and STEM education, particularly within these communities. You know, I mentioned before, the opportunity for wealth building and creation that has been afforded to students through the Code2College program. And I would say irrespective of ChatGPT, irrespective of the layoffs that we see in this industry, that tech is a sector or a part of the entire economy. It is not the entire economy. There are still a number of opportunities and open roles for software engineers and other engineers and other technologists throughout the economy. And we need to ensure that students and that communities who otherwise don't have this type of access are getting that type of access and getting the education and that we don't use this as an opportunity to get back to status quo. In many ways, we've actually taken several steps back from where we were at 2020 post-George Floyd, and we need to be steadfast in our commitment to these communities. And when I say we, I really mean the companies who have extended themselves and have committed to a change in racial equity and in wealth equity and opportunity. We need to stay steadfast and redouble our efforts to ensure that what we have seen in the past is not repeated because this is not the first economic downturn we've seen and it's not going to be the last one that we've seen. And what's been missing, to your point earlier when you said, "I don't understand why there aren't more Code2Colleges out there," that's what's been missing is the education and the exposure.

- So I think I know the answer, but I'd like to hear, as I've heard you say before that you actually hope that Code2College doesn't exist at some point. Can you talk about what you mean by that?

- Yeah, so I think that there is a, again, if we were going to say stereotypical, there's a stereotypical conception of nonprofits and it's that they are these massive organizations that have 12-month cycles of, you know, we're going to ask you for money towards fiscal year end, we're probably going to have a gala, and our objective is to exist and to get bigger hopefully. And if we're serving more beneficiaries than we did last year, then we're doing things right. And I would contest that that is absolutely not how it should be. And that there's this concept of, there's this white paper that was released that I can share with the team about the end game and the way to think about a nonprofit, which is not a for-profit. We're not looking to maximize profits, we're not looking to maximize shareholder revenue or shareholder value. We are looking to solve some social issue, right? And so the end game talks about how you go from an organization that is testing out some idea and iterating on it to some terminal solution. And what we're trying to solve here is equity and opportunity within our economy and within the space so that minoritized communities, if they are interested in tech, if they are aware of tech, and we need to make sure that that happens too, that they can enter tech and enter other STEM fields. That is solvable. Like, and I know it's solvable because we're doing it right now. And so now it's about scaling what we're doing on a national level. And I would say, and I've said this before, to prospective funders and prospective partners that, you know, if Code2College is around, if I'm still the CEO of Code2College and we still exist and we're doing this in, you know, 10 years, and I would say even less than that, then we did it wrong, right? That means we should not go from, "We've served 3000 students as of 2023," to, "We've served 30,000 students in 2033." I mean, that's more, but, there're over 325 million people in the United States. And we should be talking about the millions of students who don't have access, who we have then extended that access to and who are now able to enter and address that talent demand that that we have, right? As opposed to, "We've served even more than we did before." So I would say, I said 2033, let's say if we exist in our current form by 2030, we did it wrong. So let's check back.

- All right. So in order to make that happen, there's a couple things that you need, but one of the biggest ones is more employers to get involved. So if someone is listening here who's an employer and says, "Wow, this sounds amazing, I want to find a way to get these amazing interns and hire these people," how do employers get involved?

- So if employers reach out to me directly, Matt, M-A-T-T, @Code2College.org. Let's talk about this summer. This summer, we are planning to place more than double what we placed last year. We placed 130 high school interns last year, over 80% of them were invited to return. And what that tells me, again, from my finance background is that we're a bit too conservative. We should be placing far more than we currently are. And I would say even 300 is still a paltry amount relative to the number of students we could place. And so reach out to me, let's talk about the many innovative curricula that we've developed. Everything from embedded systems, mobile app development, we've got a Unity course, and we just got an incredible track record. I can put you in touch with existing partners who will rave about the work that their interns do and oftentimes is still in production. But reach out to me, we can get this done in short order.

- Fantastic, and Indeed can certainly vouch for that experience. And people are definitely welcome to reach out to us as well. So what about other folks who are listening who might want to find out more, or especially people who might want to get involved as a mentor?

- So reach out to us or visit us at Code2College.org. On our website you can learn more about us as an organization. We share some of our stats. You can learn about some of our students. We've got a great blog that we've been posting on pretty regularly as well. And then if someone is interested in volunteering with us, we have a special page dedicated to volunteers where we talk a little bit more about the different opportunities and we've got our intake form on there as well. It is about a four-minute process to fill out that form. One of our team members will get in touch with you within 24 business hours and get you started, whether you're looking to be an instructor, resume reviewer, mentor to one of our undergrads or to a high school student, host a workshop. We've got about a dozen different volunteer opportunities for you with varying time commitments.

- Fantastic, well, I could keep this conversation going for a long time, this is really amazing but as we come to a close, I'll ask the same question that we always close out with, which is: we've been through an extraordinary time of challenge over the last two and a half plus years. And in that, can you talk about anything that you've seen or experienced that in the face of all that challenge has left you with some hope for the future?

- So one of the things that guides me, and I think with any CEO, you have to have, and I also say this about founders, you have to have irrational optimism. And so I oftentimes start out my day reminding myself that for every nine nos, there's one yes, it's about getting to that yes. There's usually fewer nos than you think. So I usually don't make it to that ninth no, but one of the things that I have to sort of pinch myself every day, because I love the work that I do, is remind myself that these are 14 through 18-year-olds who are doing incredible work for global tech companies. And it's reinforced when I think about what was I doing when I was 14, 15 years old. I was running track and coming home and doing homework. I wasn't putting my homework aside, logging into a Zoom to learn how to code, and then afterwards doing my homework and being a great student and then preparing for a summer internship. The first time I interned was still before some of my peers, it was 18, but I wasn't 14 or 15-years-old and doing great work and getting college... They're doing mind-blowing work and that to me is one source of optimism. The other is the fact that we're in an economic downturn, yet I still have CEOs like Chris Hyams inviting me to speak on the Indeed "Here to Help" podcast. And I have other CEOs and other senior leaders who are saying, "How can I help?" And that means, one, that we're doing something right, and two, that means we are not dead in the water. In fact, we are thriving and there's a lot more work to do. So if they are here to help, I still got work to do.

- Well Matt, thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation and thank you for everything that you're doing and really looking forward to a long and continuing fruitful partnership.

- Same here. Thank you so much for having me, Chris, and happy New Year.

- If you liked this interview and want to hear more, hit subscribe. Catch up on any "Here to Help" episodes you might have missed, like my conversation with Matt Stephenson and get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Matt Stephenson after this break. "Here to Help" is a production of Indeed. Today's episode was produced by Aidan McLaughlin, Eavan Fallon, VernaLee James, and David Hartstein, Shelby Hadden, and the Blue Suitcase Productions team in Austin, Texas with technical support from Edward Blizniak and Jacob Bennett. Thanks for listening to "Here to Help." Don't forget to like, subscribe and download the podcast to stay up to date with the latest episodes. Until next time.