#65 - Funding Is an Outcome of Building a Good Business - Porter Braswell of Jopwell

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Porter Braswell. Porter's the CEO and co-founder of Jopwell, which was in the summer 2015 batch.
Jopwell is a career advancement platform for black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals. And you can find them at jopwell.com, and Porter's on Twitter at Porter underscore Braswell. All right, here we go.
Maybe the best place to start would be, let's explain what Jopwell is, and then we can kind of go back in time and get to where we are now. Cool. Cool, so also thanks for coming in.

**Porter Braswell** (0:36)
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

**Craig Cannon** (0:38)
Yeah.

**Porter Braswell** (0:39)
So Jopwell is a career advancement platform built specifically for black, Latinx, and Native American students and professionals. And we basically allow companies to diversify their applicant funnels before they hire the best people for the job. We got really frustrated when companies would say, you know, we can't find this talent.
It doesn't exist. And for us, me being a part of the community, it was kind of like BS, it definitely does.

**Craig Cannon** (1:08)
I exist.

**Porter Braswell** (1:08)
I'm here.
And there are 44 million black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American students and professionals in the workforce that exist as well. And so we wanted to create a platform so companies can no longer say, oh, this is like a pipeline issue. We can't find this talent. They exist and they're on Jopwell.

**Craig Cannon** (1:25)
And what made this problem obvious to you when you were at Goldman?

**Porter Braswell** (1:29)
So it starts actually before Goldman and actually goes back to kind of where I'm from and kind of how I grew up. Let's do it. So my dad's from the Bronx originally and he was the first person in his family to go to college and work in corporate America. He became a general counsel for a publicly traded utility company.
And so I grew up in the type of household where to be successful, and I put air quotes around that, you have to be a doctor, you have to be a lawyer, you can go into finance and that's it.
And I felt this large responsibility to kind of move the family forward, as my dad did. And it was kind of like this thing that I grew up in this middle class family where that was like a responsibility that my sister and I both felt. And so when I was in high school, Morgan Stanley was offering a diversity internship program. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, this is like that finance industry. You should pay attention to it. And I got lucky. I applied. I got the internship and I started working there. My junior, senior summers in high school, went on to college, went to Yale, played basketball there. And instead of playing basketball in the summers, I continued in a really early access pipeline focused around diversity recruiting. And I spent three summers interning at Goldman Sachs. And I started my career there. And I was there for three years buying and selling currencies.
And so while my background was getting early access, really starting when I was about 15 or 16 years old, and I found my way into buying and selling currencies, I recognized how unusual my path was, how fortunate my path was. And it struck me that despite me finding my way to my seat, I knew that a lot of other people weren't finding their way to a similar seat. And I had kind of looked around and realized that it wasn't just a finance challenge when it comes to recruitment of people of color, it was really all industries. And at that time, the summer of 2014, right before I left, all the tech companies came out with the stats of the lack of diversity, which is something we all knew.
But it was the first time it became really a national conversation.
And so my co-founder and I decided that we can make a solution for this. We can build a platform of people of color, and we can leverage technology to directly connect them with opportunities that historically we haven't been exposed to and create that authentic connection between the employers and potential employees. And so that was really how we started. We wanted to make impact. And as a result of that impact, we also wanted to be able to build a profitable, successful business on top of it. So we set out from the start to build it as a for-profit entity and not a non-profit, which there are many amazing non-profits that focus on diversity recruitment. But we just took their approach to leverage technology, do it at scale and solve a problem. Going back to the whole YC mantra stuff.