The Build #6: Impossible

Yasmine Mustafa talks about the challenges of growing two companies and a thriving nonprofit, and about a trip she took that could change how women think about their personal security. On this episode of The Build, it’s the journey of ROAR for Good.

Transcript

Announcer:
From 2820 Radio in Philadelphia, it's The Build. Conversations with entrepreneurs and innovators about their dreams, their triumphs, and their challenges.

Joe:
Impossible. It's a word that Yasmine Mustafa's been hearing since she was 9 years old. It's impossible to get a job when you're an immigrant. It's impossible for a woman to break into technology. It's impossible for an entrepreneur from Philadelphia to find an investment. Yet, for this socially oriented entrepreneur, working on her second full-time company impossible is a word that she simply doesn't seem to recognize. Today on The Build I'm talking to Yasmine about the challenges of growing 2 companies and a thriving non-profit, and about a trip she took that could change how women think about their personal safety. That's the story of Roar for Good up next on The Build.

Announcer:
The Build is made possible with support from 2820 Press, providing business consulting and content strategy services to customer obsessed companies nationwide. More information at 2820press.com.

Joe:
It's The Build. I'm Joe Taylor Jr. Joined today by Yasmine Mustafa, founder of Roar for Good. Welcome.

Yasmine:
Thank you.

Joe:
We'd love to collect origin stories on the show. Tell us about ... This is technically your second company that you've founded. Bring us back a year and a half to the point where you're thinking about diving into entrepreneur for a second time.

Yasmine:
Sure. Well, I'll actually even go back because a lot of people say this is, I have an interesting back story. It's always interesting once someone says that about your life but to go way back I'll actually go back to when I was 8. We are refugees of the Persian Gulf War when the Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait back in 1990 and how we ended up here with just a complete fluke. My Dad had a business trip here in Philly, my Mom tagged along because she's never been. She was 6 months pregnant and she ended up having my little baby brother here. Then a month after they came back to Kuwait Saddam invaded and we're actually sitting in a bomb shelter one day when these 2 men came in asking for my little brother. It turned out they were there to extract all American citizens outside of the country for their safety and they brought us here to Philly.

Joe:
This was not planned that your brother was born on US soil.

Yasmine:
Nope.

Joe:
Because we see in the news a live conversations about anchor babies. That wasn't the plan, right?

Yasmine:
I've never even heard that term before.

Joe:
Yeah. The term refers to folks that try to deliberately have that happen which triggers a variety of exemptions and things like that. From parents who have the intention of wanting to stay in the United States. It doesn't sound like it was what your parents were attempting to do. It just happened to, happened that ...

Yasmine:
Yeah, as far as I know. Yeah.

Joe:
Because kids pop out when they're ready most of the time.

Yasmine:
Yeah. The reason I preface with that story is because it just led to circumstances beyond our control that got me to where I am today. Which basically when my family came here I was 8 at the time. My Dad was a renowned engineer in Kuwait and when he came here he had to start all over because his educational degree didn't transfer. He ended up not being able to find a job and buying a 7-11 store. It was a 24-hour business and we all have to work there, it became a family business. It was my first forte into entrepreneurship. Basically my Dad ran this business, he acquired it and we all worked there as a result. I got a taste of that when I was young. Then when I was 18 he actually ended up selling it and then he ended up leaving. He actually, he got really tired of us. He felt we were becoming too Americanized and he was like, "Nope, I need to leave," and he actually ended up hopping on a one-way flight to Jordan. He ended up taking all the family savings with him.

Joe:
Wow.

Yasmine:
It ended up being ... We have a second start like, "Oh, my gosh. Okay, what do we do now?" It was right at that time when we actually found out we were considered illegal aliens. Even though we have been brought here as refugees by the US Embassy it turned out that we had had a year to apply for citizenship but no one had ever told my parents. We didn't do it and when I started applying for colleges they started asking me for all these paperwork that I didn't have.

Joe:
Yeah. Because you don't know who to ask for it.

Yasmine:
I have no idea. I didn't even know what a social security number was. I was like, "What are you talking about? I have no idea what you're ..."

Joe:
Your brother has all these.

Yasmine:
He has all these.

Joe:
You and your mother don't have any of these?

Yasmine:
I have 5 siblings so besides my little brother there's 4 of us that are ... There's 5 total that don't have citizenship and my parents don't have citizenship as well. It was a very sensitive time for us and especially after my Dad left we realized that we had no money, we had nothing to our name. We couldn't actually go and get real jobs. We were stuck in a bind and we ended up getting under the table jobs, the only types of jobs that we could.

Joe:
Full on hustle.

Yasmine:
Full on hustle. You're making, you make half as much and you work twice as much. That's just the way it is. There's no other choice and you just have to deal with it. That, I would say that was the second moment for me that I was like, "I want to be an entrepreneur," because working with the bosses that I had they knew they had power over us. They knew we had to do whatever they told us or there was somebody else waiting in line to take the job that we had. I worked as a hostess making $5 an hour for a really, really long time, as a waitress where actually my tips were even guarded like they would take part of my tips. I worked at the dry cleaner, I worked in many, many, many different places. Then 9/11 happened. In 9/11 I was 18 at the time, and 9/11, if you were of Arab descent all your applications were halted.

Yasmine:
We had applied but then, of course, after everything that happened our paperwork was put on hold. I walked actually walked to work the next day and the boss turned to me and said, "Yasmine, you don't know how to fly planes, do you?" I was fired. The discrimination that my family and I faced post 9/11 was another point in my life that I was like, "I need to do something on my own." It gave me more fire, more motivation to want to be my own boss because then I decide the people I'm around I decide my destiny. I have more financial freedom and that kind of stuff. To go all the way back those [inaudible 00:06:17] of events fueled why I'm an entrepreneur today especially a senior entrepreneur. Just this whole concept of owning your own company and your own project and having the freedom to do what you want, when you want, and treating people the way you want to be treated and leading people the way you want to be treated. That kind of accumulated into why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Joe:
Thinking about that and your particular perspective on having to settle for less than ideal jobs with fairly exploitative employers. How does that inform how you operate when you're selecting talent, when you're finding people to work with you on projects?

Yasmine:
Yeah. I think I'm overly empathetic as a result of all these experiences. As a result of my background I feel like I take great care in building a culture that attracts great talent and retains great talent. I know we're getting into Roar for Good in a little bit, part of what's been amazing with Roar for Good is that I don't necessarily need to do recruiting. People that resonate with the message and the mission come to us. It's not what typical companies where you have to go find certain people that's more like, "Oh, my gosh. Look at all these people interested. Let's see which one works best for what we need."

Joe:
Take me back to the first company that you founded. Because I love to look at some of the parallels and some of the distinctions between the two. The first company was very focused on what we now call advertising technology. It has a whole vertical, right?

Yasmine:
Yes. Yeah, and that stemmed from so I was working, I had an internship at a very early stage consulting company working with entrepreneurs. We help them with their business plans, with their funding, with their go to market strategies and I started dabbling in a blog for the company to get the word out about what we did. I took it, I started taking it more seriously because I found I have a knack for it. I grew it to be one of the top 100,000 blogs according to Technorati and at the time that was a really famous popular blog directory. Then one day someone said, "You know you could money while you're blogging." I'm like, "Wait, what? You could make money from what you're already doing?" As someone who was still financially strapped I was like, "Oh, my gosh. I should look into this."

Yasmine:
I did and I put some ads up but I remember thinking I don't know if I did this right. I don't know if it worked. This is very cumbersome, it's very, it was a very convoluted process." A couple of months later I wrote this silly blog post that today is probably my most popular blog post. I put together this post called Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes. Of course that's the one that takes off, the one that took me 20 minutes to write versus the normal 3 hours. It was in the front page of Digg and StumbleUpon and all these sites. A month after that I got two checks in the mail from those ad networks that I have used. I was like, "Wait, what?" It took me a few minutes to put this code in and now I have these checks that are couple of hundred dollars. Man, I should think more seriously about this. I started looking into it more. It was basically an 8-step process to go to an ad network, apply, get approved, take the code, add it to your site.

Yasmine:
I remember thinking, "There has to be an easier way." When I couldn't find it I was like, "Okay, that's my first business. I want to do this full-time." Basically what we did the business was called 123 Link It and the whole idea was to help bloggers make money from affiliate ads which basically is we would scan your content we would book for product keywords. Anytime we found one we would automatically link it to that product site. If someone purchased something you got a kickback and we took a portion of it.

Joe:
Going back to the time for listeners that maybe take some of the stuff for granted now it wasn't as easy as just plugging in a piece of code from Google. Up until that point you had to really just research every individual vendor or advertiser. You had to get on the phone and make calls. This actually really streamlined that process for folks who really just wanted to focus on creating great blogs, creating great stories.

Yasmine:
Exactly.

Joe:
Tell us a little bit about how that grew, how it flourished, and what your ultimate exit was for that.

Yasmine:
Sure. I started with that it was actually April 1, 2009. I thought that was funny, that was on an April Fool's Day, and I started by myself. I like to say that you have to be, you have to have, you have to be a little naïve to start a business. At least I really was. I thought that here I have this idea, let me just go and get it build and go and I'll be off to the races. It was actually around that time that I realized how difficult it was for me to start a tech company not having any tech background whatsoever. I was business marketing person, I had never really touched code before, and I actually thought coding was like this magical process where you took your idea to someone that knew how to code. You told him what you wanted, they come back to you and then you say bye-bye, and you just go off and you're like, "Okay," you know, "I have this." That's not how it works at all.

Joe:
There's no code hut, there's no Papa John's for code.

Yasmine:
No. I didn't realize that, I really didn't know that. I had a lot of trouble communicating with developers and retaining developers because as you can imagine here's a non-code, non technology going to someone and being like, "Hey, here's what I want." They're like ... They would ask me, "Do you want it this way or this way? Or that way or this way? What are your long term plans?" I just, I had no idea, for the most part, how to answer their questions. There would be a lot of things they would say to me that I would be like, "Hey, can you explain this to me in layman terms? I just don't understand what you're saying." That could be frustrating as you can imagine.

Yasmine:
It was actually during that time I actually started something else. I found that learning how to code was not something that I could do on my own and I learned about Girl Develop at Philadelphia. Girl Develop New York is when it's started and I would actually take the bus there and back two hour drive there and back for a two hour class and I just loved it and I started learning how to make websites and learning HTML and CSS and Javascript. Then I brought it here to Philly and the whole intention of that is just empowering women to learn how to code. Usually women self-select and self-select out of technology and it was a way to help to learn these new skills in a judgement-free zone and make it really affordable.

Yasmine:
That helped me a lot in terms of hiring developers. I found my CTO after that and then from there we decided to focus on WordPress because it's the number one blogging platform. Grew that to be the number one WordPress affiliate plugin. Then one of my advisers actually kept bugging me about white labeling what we were doing for his company. We just didn't have enough resources. I remember we were about to miss our deadline and we called them up and said, "Hey, Dave what if we use your tech team to white label this. Can we do something together versus us take the full burden on? He said, "Well, I don't think we can do that." We started talking about an acquisition and that's how that happened.

Joe:
One of the things I find compelling when I talk to entrepreneurs for this show specifically I hear one or the other. It rarely falls in the middle. Folks start off with a very clear idea that they're going to build a business to flip it or sell it or get it acquired and other folks start a business and they think they're going to run forever. This business is it. At the point where you're starting to talk about an acquisition what's going through your head and your heart? Are you feeling like this is my baby. I don't want to give it up? Or are you thinking like yay hooray. I can only focus on the things I love to do and outsource all this other stuff.

Yasmine:
I would say it was conflicting because I had reached the point where I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with it yet. I knew for sure that as a solo founder that I was getting tired of doing everything myself. That was on the one hand and on the other hand it was like I had sacrificed everything in my life to run this company. It was my everything. It was really hard giving it up. One of the things that Dave and I talked about was this whole idea of what the company would do that acquired us, what they would do to keep it and how we would make it flourish and grow and none of that ended up happening, but that was also part of what sold the vision for the acquisition.

Joe:
You move in with this other company. You're at the same time running Girl Develop It in parallel and so now the idea for the new company kicks in at some point?

Yasmine:
No, good question. What happened was I had a contract to stay for a year with them and I would get a bonus if I did. I stayed. I actually stayed for a year and a half with Netline and then I became an American citizen during that process and that was really exciting for me just because of all the challenges that we had through that and also because I felt like finally I'm official. I can never be deported. There's no threat hanging over me. I can vote. I can have a say. I can travel and not worry about not being able to come back. That had been a worry within my family.

Joe:
That's a thing because realistically you were operating, you're launching and running a company at a point where you don't necessarily have all the things that American citizens take for granted. You couldn't necessarily ...

Yasmine:
Grants.

Joe:
... hop on a plane and go speak at a conference or go meet with an investor without that potential threat of what if that happens on a day where ICE is just rounding up people.

Yasmine:
We were really scared just because we had heard some stories about people going away and going on an overseas vacation or something and not being able to come back. We were very conservative and being like okay we don't want to risk any of that so let's not go anywhere. We had a green card. Technically with a green card you can travel. We just didn't want to chance it for any particular reason. Really where it affected me the most was college because I put myself through college and it was really, really difficult because I also had two jobs. It was either work or going to school. It took me 7-1/2 years to graduate and I couldn't apply for scholarships because I wasn't ...

Joe:
You went to school where?

Yasmine:
I started at Montgomery County Community College, got my associates there. Did a brief stint at Drexel and then hopped over to Temple and I graduated from Temple in 2006. I had a 3.8 GPA and I could not apply for scholarships. I remember my friends would be like, "Yasmine, just go apply." I'm like, "I can't. You don't understand. I can't. You have to be a citizen. Even though I have really good grades and I'm working my butt off I can't."

Joe:
This whole time you're slugging it out, hustling for tips whatever at odd jobs you can pick up when you're sitting in class with folks who are rolling with student loans, aids, grants, scholarships.

Yasmine:
I was that annoying girl that would turn around when someone was talking and be like, "Shh." I just remember being like, "Hey, I'm paying my way through school, man. I'm taking this seriously. I got to be here." I was that person that sat at the front of the class. I was very dedicated.

Joe:
How do you go through that in a mindset where you are able to focus that energy outward and not let it become bitter? How do you go through and not let that turn into something negative?

Yasmine:
It was the only choice I had at the time. I realized, and I'm going to get to this in a little bit with what inspired Roar, I realized I did have a chip on my shoulder for people that didn't have to earn what they had. I felt like I had to earn everything and people that took things for granted I just had this, "Ugh, if only you knew. If only you experienced this." I just knew I wanted something more. I wanted something better. That's what drove me to starting a business and working hard and all that stuff.

Joe:
In the meantime with Girl Develop It, you're thinking about what you can do to help other potential future technology professionals who might be in similar situations but feel for whatever reason that they can't get involved or their opportunities are not open for them.

Yasmine:
Right. I actually didn't realize how bad it was for women in tech, the stats in terms of how few women get into technology or how many women go and get technology degrees and then don't work in that field and I didn't know about the stereotypes. I didn't know a lot and once I learned that, took an interest in this organization and bringing it here and then brought other co leaders on board to help with the vision, but the whole idea is, "Yes, a lot of women don't feel comfortable getting into technology. They have all these stereotypes about it, all these misconceptions about it and they don't get into it." This whole idea is have classes that are easy to follow, easy to learn and affordable where you can be like, "Okay, I want to learn how to make a web site." Or, "I want to learn how to make a mobile app." Come to the classes and you can do it.

Joe:
Our team talked with Sylvester Mogoli who has been doing Coded by Kids, Coded by You.

Yasmine:
I sit on the board.

Joe:
Oh, yeah. One of the things that he and I have talked about that we're both pretty passionate about is this concept that technology seems like it would be a very altruistic thing where if you just have a portfolio of great code you should be able to go anywhere with it. When you see folks come through Girl Develop It, what are the elements that they pick up there that mean they'll actually be able to get a job in technology? What's the missing factor that they're not getting from traditional schooling or education?

Yasmine:
In terms of if their schooling doesn't offer coding to begin with.

Joe:
Sure.

Yasmine:
We have a lot of women that come in that want to transition careers and they want to do so because there's a huge demand for tech jobs and they hear hey if I do this I'll get better pay. I'll have more flexible hours. I can do a lot more. We actually have specific tracks, like a front end track, a back end track, a mobile track that if you follow all the classes on those tracks you get a good foundation to go get a job in that field. The biggest hurdle is finding an employer that will take a chance on someone that's starting off for the very first time. Hiring a junior level front end person can be challenging for some employers, having someone that will take the chance and say okay yes I know that you're just starting out. I know you're just learning. You can come in here. We'll mentor you. We'll cultivate that talent into becoming more experienced.

Joe:
Tell me about some of the outcomes that you've seen from that organization. what are some of your favorite success stories?

Yasmine:
Yeah, sure. My friend Ashley was a receptionist at this video editing company. She actually tried to move over to the tech department in that company and she was pigeonholed as the secretary. Like what are you doing? You should be here answering phones. You shouldn't be trying to do this. She started taking our classes and going to hackathons and I think it was 9 months later she got her first tech job making a lot more than she was making and she was a developer. Her whole standard of living completely changed.

Yasmine:
I met one of my best friends through Girl Develop It, Lisa, and she was working at a nonprofit for 15 years where she was still 1099'd, didn't have insurance and I think a year and a half later she started taking all these classes, went to the art school, what is that art school right here?

Joe:
U Arts?

Yasmine:
U Arts, and then got her job and doubled her salary. Those kind of stories are really, really cool to hear.

Joe:
It's extraordinary to see the disparity in wages offered between "entry level jobs" and developer jobs when my experience is the reality is someone very determined can usually pick up a language or a skillset in a relatively short amount of time. It's just a matter of finding someone that is willing to let you experiment or let you explore.

Yasmine:
Yeah, and I don't know if it's always like within a short period of time. I think it's someone with grit and determination that's like, "You know what? I know that it's going to get hard before it's going to get easier but I'm going to stick it out and push through it because I want to do this."

Joe:
How long do the tracks typically last? Someone coming in right now goes through how long before you feel like they're ready to start shopping around to employers?

Yasmine:
It depends on how much time they put into it. It's not just taking the class. It's going to different events. It's self learning that you have to do. We have some students that will actually meet in study groups together to hold each other accountable to learn things together. It's so much more, but I would say what I've typically seen is about a year then getting into getting a job.

Joe:
At that point are they mentoring folks that are coming through in future classes? What happens with alumni of Girl Develop It?

Yasmine:
What's really cool with Girl Develop It is a lot of, we have a lot of women that start off as students and then they become teacher aides. The come back. Because every class there is one teacher usually, sometimes 2, probably about 25 students and then we try to do a 5 to 1 TA student ratio where we actually have assistants. Whenever someone has their hand up, maybe they're stuck on something or they want extra help, a TA will jump in and help versus stopping the whole class to answer that question. That's been great. Then we've also have had them come back and become teachers. It's been a cycle.

Joe:
Are these volunteers? Are they staff? Is this some mix?

Yasmine:
The teachers, we pay typical developer rates for teachers. We're very proud of that. The TAs are volunteers and a lot of people volunteer either because they want a refresher on what they know and what they do or they want to become teacher and then students ... Our rates are anywhere between $10 to $13 an hour. It's really, really cheap.

Joe:
At this point you have merged your first company. You are running Girl Develop It in Philadelphia. Now when does the bug kick in? When do you decide, what happens that you say, "Oh, I'll do this crazy thing again."

Yasmine:
May of 2013 I booked a 6-month trip across South America. It was 2 months after I became, actually it was a month after I became a US citizen. It's so funny. I became a US citizen and I bolted.

Joe:
I got my passport. I'm out.

Yasmine:
I was at that point where it was a year and a half after the acquisition and I just felt completely burned out. I felt like all I've done is just hustle, hustle, hustle and I've been working since I was 9. I started working at the 7-11 when I was really, really young. I remember I was standing on top of a milk crate at the register to cash people out. I just got tired. I said, "You know what? I haven't really had a 'normal life' and I just need to get away." I used the money from the acquisition to go traveling through South American and I picked South America because I love the food. I've heard so much about the culture and it's really cheap to travel there. I ended up in Ecuador for my first month and I did full Spanish immersion where I went to Spanish school, stayed with a Spanish family, learned Spanish. Then I went to Columbia, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Spent about a month in each country and it was amazing. It was actually during that time that I figured out I had a chip on my shoulder for people who I thought things came easy. I just learned a lot about myself.

Yasmine:
One of the things that was interesting was it took me 5 months to learn how to dine alone. You'd think that would be ... I didn't think it would ...

Joe:
It's interesting because what you're describing is this very solo entrepreneurial journey but then to hear that you don't know how to dine alone. Were you always surrounding yourself with other people or family? Tell me more about that.

Yasmine:
If you imagined a 6-month trip, I didn't know anybody. I wasn't meeting any particular person that I knew from the past. It was all meeting people as I went along and there was a lot of time alone. There's a lot of time for you to contemplate about things. I think with today and how ubiquitous technology is and social media it's like there's a lot of distractions. During this trip there wasn't as many distractions. There's a lot of me and me staring back at me. I learned a lot about myself and what I wanted and didn't want and just some things that I had blocked out that I just needed to deal with and go through and dining alone was just an example in terms of it's just not something I imagined would be difficult without a book or a phone. To be at peace with yourself and to be alone without being lonely really took a long time to get used to.

Yasmine:
While I was traveling I kept hearing stories of times women had been attacked, either second hand or first hand. I stayed at Couch Surfing, hostels, hotels and these stories just everywhere that I went I would hear of these stories. A week after I came back to Philly, I came back in November of 2013, there was a really brutal incident a block from my apartment where a woman went out to feed her meter and she was grabbed from behind, dragged into an alley, beaten and raped. When I read the news story the next day it was just like a light bulb went off and I was like something has to be done. That's when Roar was born. I actually called up my friend who was my co founder and I said, "Hey, here's what's been happening. Here's this idea. What do you think?" He came on board and we started working on it earlier in the year.

Joe:
You come with this concept of needing to do something but this product, service you don't even know what shape it's going to take?

Yasmine:
Yeah, I knew I wanted to do something in the social impact space I just didn't know what it was. I knew I wanted to do something like gave back. I've always had this fascination with wanting to change the world and doing something and it sounds really odd but I think about what I want people to say at my funeral. I want to know that I made some type of impact. I knew I wanted to do that. I just didn't know it would be that specifically and when that assault happened a block from my apartment it was a trigger that just put everything in motion.

Joe:
How do you start to build a business around a concept like that? What did your early brainstorming and prototyping look like?

Yasmine:
I did a lot of research. The first idea was when I read the news story I started thinking what do women do now to protect themselves? Usually they carry pepper spray, tasers maybe knives and I thought well what's wrong with those? It's that you have to pull them out of your pocket or your purse. You're not going to have it right there in your hand when something happens. The idea that I had was to take self defense tools and make them wearable. I thought it was genius. I came up with this product named the macelet, mace in a bracelet. I thought it was such a great idea. Then I started doing a lot of surveys and talking to women, not telling them my idea just saying hey what do you use to protect yourself? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it and if you don't use something why? I learned a lot through that. I learned that most women actually find self defense tools intimidating and difficult to use. They're afraid they're going to use it on themselves and the number one complaint I heard was, "I'm afraid I'll be overpowered and my own self defense tool will be used as a weapon against me."

Yasmine:
That was just eye opening because I'd never thought of self defense tools are basically disguised as weapons. Most women don't like that and don't want that and they're afraid of those type of tools. Went back to the drawing board and said okay we need to make something that cannot harm the use, that can still act as a deterrent and another thing we found out through our studies is that if it looked nice women were more likely to have it on them. We shifted gears and we are right now developing basically fashionable jewelry that can help you in case of an attack. The way it works is it has two modes, a silent mode and an alarm mode. For aggressive situations you press and hold the button in the device and it will emit an 85 decibel alarm to use the element of surprise against someone. It will then sync up with your phone and message friends and family with your location and then we're also working on a way for it to call 911. Then the second one, the silent mode is more the just in case situations, the hairs on the back of your neck kind of are standing up and you want someone to come get you and you tap the button 3 times and it will message a friend or family member.

Joe:
The transition from working entirely in code to actually building physical products.

Yasmine:
Yeah.

Joe:
Tell me about the experience of actually getting the first prototype in your hands.

Yasmine:
It was surreal. I've never done drugs, but I imagine if I did that would be the feeling that I had wash over me when I 3D printed the first prototype and I held it in my hand thinking, looking at it and thinking, "Oh, my God. You were just an idea a few months ago and now you're a thing that I'm holding." I got a complete God complex. It's interesting because I built 123 Link It without a software background. I'm building ROAR for Good without a hardware background and what I've found is that you find the team that has the skill sets that you're missing. You have to be a little naïve. Again, you just have to be a little naïve to start a business. My co founder Anthony Gould comes out of Unisys and he comes out of the software development/hardware world. He was a huge asset and help for building this. I have a friend, [Costys 00:32:12] who also helped with the early prototypes. It was basically we built prototypes and we went and tested them. I went to a lot of sororities, speaking to sisters about their experiences and testing the prototypes with them.

Yasmine:
Basically, what I would do most of the time is I would come in, I'd have them take a survey on their phones so there's no group bias. I would tell them what I do and then I would have some questions on the screen and I would ask them to fill out a survey with their thoughts on the questions and then have a group discussion. A lot of my questions were more focused on what don't you like about this. What do you see not working with this? Can you picture a scenario where this would have not helped? Can you picture a scenario where this would have helped? Just taking all that information, dissecting it, analyzing it and then coming up with other iterations on the product was basically how we built the physical device.

Yasmine:
A big part of ROAR isn't just, I said it was a social impact company. It's a B corp. We really, really want to make a difference and we don't want the onus to be on the women to protect themselves and we really want to transform society views and we spent a lot of time talking to researchers [inaudible 00:33:22]. We found that at the underlying core it's lack of empathy that's triggering attacks. We actually take proceeds and invest them in nonprofits that teach empathy and respect and healthy relationships to young boys and girls when they're most impressionable. That's the overall business. Is ROAR for Good. We're making hardware but we're also investing it in education to try, we want our devices to be obsolete. That's our goal.

Joe:
I was just going to say the interesting thing I find with B Corps is that they tend to not be afraid to envision a day where there product is not needed anymore. Does that give you a freedom as a company leader compared to if you were beholden to a typical venture capital investor or to shareholders?

Yasmine:
We are planning on actually raising [inaudible 00:34:14] money early next year, but there's a huge benefit to being a B corp versus being a nonprofit for example because nonprofits you're relying on donations. Your hands are tied with a lot of things. Whereas, being a B corp, being able to focus on profitability but also being able to give back as a result because if you think about it, if you can focus on profit the more profitable you are the more of a difference you can make. That's just not something you can do with a nonprofit for example.

Joe:
It seems like it's also a filter to weed out potential partners and investors that probably wouldn't make great partners for the long run.

Yasmine:
Yeah, absolutely. We've actually raised almost a quarter of a million and all our investors believe in our vision and like the story, like the whole mission aspect part of the company.

Joe:
When you approach a potential investor what do you tell them to get them involved, excited, exhilarated about partnership with you?

Yasmine:
We have been lucky in fundraising actually because it was easy for us. We actually did raise all from Philly investors. For us we got introductions to key people that were focused on social impact. Our lead investor for example was introduced to us by Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin invested. They introduced us to this social impact investor. After one meeting he asked for our terms sheet and a week later we got the hundred thousand dollars. When I was talking earlier about we don't have trouble recruiting I feel like when you are creating something people are passionate about they come to you. That's been what we've found and it's made things a lot easier.

Joe:
What's your dream for this organization as it grows? Let's say five years from now we talk again about what happened in the five years since. What's the organization look like? Who's in there?

Yasmine:
I'm hoping that you can find our safety devices at local stores, that you can find women wearing them and more importantly that there has been enough invested in the education and building awareness about the issue that attacks become less common place. That is the end goal. Our tagline is live your life boldly without fear. That's the future I envision. Unfortunately, it will take much more than five years, twenty years, fifty years for that to happen, but that's the overall goal.

Joe:
Where do you think we start to chip away at that challenge of building empathy?

Yasmine:
It's interesting. When I tell people that empathy has decreased 40% over the last 30 years people look at me with surprised looks on their faces and a lot of people don't know the dilemma on whether or not empathy is innate or whether it's a learned skill and regardless of that it is decreasing and as technology becomes more ubiquitous as more people are actually using social media as we're reading less as we're living more in isolation than we ever have we're relating to people differently. When you look at online tools for examples and they always say don't read the comments, that is a huge concern in terms of what could occur as a result of that. I'm surprised more organizations aren't focused on it. I think there's some great ones out there that are, but it is worrisome when you think about it and I don't know why empathy isn't taught in elementary school for example. It should be. It should be a skill that we all learn and cultivate at an early age because if you relate to people you're more likely to be kind to people and treat others the way you want to be treated.

Joe:
Is this something that's endemic to the United States or is this something that you see happening in other cultures around the world?

Yasmine:
That's a good question. I don't know. The studies that I read were specifically to the United States and I imagine because we're advanced check wise than a lot of developing countries. I would be curious as to what the disparity is there. Someone should do a study and publish it to see if there's a direct correlation between that.

Joe:
In terms of we talked about the vision 5 years from now, in terms of next steps who are the people that you want to meet? Who are the people that are going to help you get to this next goal?

Yasmine:
We just finished a crowd funding campaign. Our goal was to raise $40,000 to help us get to manufacturing. We raised almost $270,000 and that speaks a lot to the demand and people resonating with the story, which we're really excited about and next steps for us is manufacturing. We're actually looking to hire hardware people and manufacturing people and then we want to do fundraising. We want to raise a couple million, not quite sure yet. Putting together the plan on exactly how much that is so that we can use the money for marketing and production and all that stuff to get the word out and get into retail. That's our vision.

Joe:
Let's say, thinking back to you at age 18. You encounter another entrepreneur, lots of challenges, lots of things going on, what's your advice to someone that wants to start down a path like yours?

Yasmine:
I would say things are never going to go the way you plan them and it's not about ... You need a plan but it's really more about adapting. I had this vision of where things were going to go and it didn't go anywhere close and I wish someone would have told me that a long time ago. It's just that way with life too. It doesn't matter what your plans are. Other things are going to come up and it's really more just adapting to the challenges that arise. Then I would say definitely getting a mentor. That was a huge thing for me. In college at Temple I met someone who became my mentor and he really encouraged me and pushed me and I don't know what my life would be like if I had not had him to do that for me and not being afraid to ask for help.

Joe:
Fantastic.

Yasmine:
Yeah.

Joe:
Thanks for coming on The Build. We're so glad to have you.

Yasmine:
Yeah, thank you for having me.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Build.