“Don’t Be Evil” Isn’t Good Enough

A Framework to Evaluate Your Next Opportunity in Social Impact Technology

As cofounder of Pavilion, I regularly meet talented technologists who are hungry for greater social impact. Beyond giving to causes, they’re considering volunteering their skills, or even changing their full-time job to pivot from “don’t be evil” to “do good.”

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

My own path on this journey has been a winding one. Along the way, I’ve learned some important lessons about work at the intersection of technology and social impact. I’ve translated these lessons into four questions that I hope can help you evaluate your next opportunity:

1. Is the mission a true north star?
2. Is it really a technology problem?
3. How is it funded?
4. Is it a great place to work?

I’ll go into each in more detail and share how they can be helpful as you evaluate opportunities in this space.

But first, some context

I became a software engineer because I enjoy building things and having impact at scale. As an early engineer at Dropbox, the products I worked on touched hundreds of millions of people. After 5 years at the company, I’d learned a ton about building products and growing an organization, and I wanted to apply those learnings to have even greater social impact. This was 2016, as more and more of my friends left Silicon Valley for DC to work in govtech. I’d just had a baby, so moving cross-country was out of the question.

Instead, I took a role at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a tech-centric philanthropic organization. Across projects in criminal justice reform, elections, and education, I got a good look at government bureaucracies, political campaigns, activism and movements, philanthropic organizations, and nonprofits.

When leaving CZI, I also spent months interviewing with mission-oriented tech companies. I hit so many dead ends that I was about to give up on social impact altogether. That’s when I met Mari Reed, who was just starting Pavilion. As we talked more about her idea, all the concerns I’d had about social impact tech fell away one by one, and I could see a straight line to massive positive change. I had finally found a way to achieve social impact with the scale of government, at the speed of a tech startup. I’d just had my second kid and wasn’t looking to join an early-stage startup, much less start one, but given the alignment, it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I decided to join as cofounder of Pavilion, and I’m happy to report that the exciting potential of what we imagined is turning into reality.

You may not need to start your own company to find the right combination of tech and social impact. In my experience so far, these questions can help you evaluate potential paths forward.

1. Is the mission a true north star?

Not all company missions are explicitly social impact oriented, and even when they are, they may not truly guide the company’s decision-making or culture. Common failure modes here are:

• The mission is just marketing. There are many ways to run a successful company that aren’t strictly better for the world, and strategies change over time. Be clear on whether social impact is truly the company’s priority, or if the company is just selling itself as mission-driven to attract candidates like yourself.
• The mission is a north star for your team, but not the organization. When your team is aimed at social impact, but it’s not the priority of the company leadership, conflicts of interest will hamstring your progress. Heck, your entire division might be scrapped for parts if it’s not sufficiently contributing to the bottom line. This is especially common on mission-focused teams of large, for-profit companies.
• Everyone means well, but impact is not rigorously measured. This is the most insidious: everyone’s hearts are in the right place, but there’s little validation that your work is having the intended impact. Instead, decisions are often made on principles, anecdotes, or measurements of activity rather than hard data on outcomes.

2. Is it really a technology problem?

When you’re a technologist, you think all problems can be solved, or at least helped along, by technology. Unfortunately, iterating on your product generally will not help pass legislation, win elections, change public policy, get FDA approval, or change hearts and minds.

That’s not to say you should avoid these kinds of initiatives. These are still very important efforts. You should simply be clear about when technology is the right tool to apply over others like activism or lobbying, and on the timeline required to make progress. When it comes to non-technology problems, progress is usually measured in years or decades rather than sprints.

Additionally, non-tech-focused organizations tend have a very different culture from what technologists are used to. Many of us take for granted that our coworkers will subscribe to concepts like user-centered design, minimum viable product, agile development, and engineering efficiency. Outside of tech-focused organizations, be prepared to personally evangelize these concepts to leadership, or live without.

3. How is it funded?

Be prepared for trade-offs based on the funding model of the organization you join:

• Nonprofit: Nonprofit funding is not directly tied to user value the way it generally is in for-profit companies. This means catering to donors and serving end-users are often at cross purposes, and fundraising is a constant distraction and constraint. There’s no such thing as hockey-stick growth, because funding does not scale as products or services scale.
• User-funded tech company: Most companies generate revenue by charging their users for a product or service. Mission-oriented companies using this model often fail to make enough money to survive, or end up catering to populations that can afford to pay more, thus weakening the company’s original mission (e.g. an edtech company that moves away from providing free courses to the jobless to focus on upskilling the already-employed).
• Govtech company: If you take funding from the government in order to serve more vulnerable or impoverished populations, you’ll need to brace yourself for long sales cycles to win this funding. Multi-year procurement cycles are especially challenging for young startups, which can run out of money before they can grow.
• Government: The entire nonprofit sector is 5.4% of US GDP while government is about 17%. Government has massive scale and the mandate to serve vulnerable populations, and you can make the leap from tech directly into government with programs like the US Digital Service and 18F. But if you choose to go this route, brace yourself for bureaucracy and a pace that can feel glacial.
• Volunteer Organization: Can’t find funding? Don’t pay people! But there’s a serious limit to what can be accomplished by volunteers. Meaningful change needs sustained effort over long periods of time, and usually requires the trust of established institutions. Hospitals, schools, and governments are not willing to deeply integrate a team of volunteers, but deep integration is what’s needed for effective impact.

4. Is it a great place to work?

At the end of the day, in order for the organization to achieve its mission and for you to be happy there, it still has to check the usual boxes for being a great place to work. Wanting to do good in the world does not make up for fundamental flaws in an organization, so you should be looking for a place that has a sound product and funding strategy, strong leaders, a team of amazingly talented employees, and a great culture. Two commonly overlooked areas:

• A strong foundation for product-market fit: Just because something contributes to the greater good does not mean it will achieve mass adoption. Is your idea great for students, but hated by teachers or school administrators? Better for citizens, but worse for public servants? You’ll be pushing that boulder uphill forever.
• The right DNA in the early team: Too often, you’ll find a bunch of technologists who don’t really understand the status quo, or a group of domain experts who have no idea how to make software. Look for a balance of folks that have lived the problem and have great technology chops.

You vet other career opportunities rigorously. Don’t skip your diligence or write off bad behavior just because everyone involved is trying to make the world a better place.

So are there any good options out there?

Ultimately, there are so many headwinds that many people become disillusioned and take a break from trying to fight for a cause. Others fight on, but the slog wears them down. I expected to have to compromise on at least one of these dimensions. So I was thrilled to find that at Pavilion, I didn’t have to, because:

1. The mission is a true north star: As cofounders, we’re in this because it is the best way we’ve found to achieve our social impact goals. Our mission is to improve lives at scale using government procurement as a lever. As an industry, it is 10% of US GDP and almost entirely ignored by tech. Procurement is what translates $2T/yr of taxpayer dollars into software, buses, etc. Purchasers make these critical decisions using tech from the ‘90s, and slow, suboptimal outcomes disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. We can improve the quality of purchased goods and services and lower the barrier to entry for small and diverse suppliers.
2. We’re solving a pure technology problem: We’re applying tech to improve a process that is legal and widely practiced but inefficient.
3. We’ve solved the funding issues: Monetizing on the supplier side means we can offer the tool to governments for free and skip the procurement cycle, which is what powers our rapid, viral growth. We’re working towards the broader $2T market, starting from a $200B+ niche sector with no tech-enabled competitors.
4. Pavilion is a great place to work: I might be biased, but I think we’ve put together an amazing team. We’re hiring so come find out for yourself!

I’m having my cake and eating it too, and I encourage you all to do the same. It just might mean searching on until you’ve found an opportunity that meets all of your criteria, or creating such an opportunity yourself.