A WORKPLACE DIVERSITY DILEMMA
The first article this week is from The Atlantic. It’s called “A Workplace Diversity Dilemma” by Bourree Lam. What it talks about is a professor, David Heckman, at the University of Colorado and the School of Business there. Some research that he has been doing along with the University of Singapore and the University of Texas was basically looking at office dynamics, specifically the idea of how executives were judged based on a set of criteria that could lend itself to a commitment to diversity. They basically came up with a framework, this idea of understand and respecting different culture, working with a diverse group, etc. And they looked at the peer reports for executives, about 350 executives across 26 industries. They started to look for how this type of behavior in the peer reports and how it was perceived. And what they found was that white women and non-white executives who valued diversity (so basically showed examples of this behavior) were actually judged to be less competent and basically got a lower performance score. But white executives who promoted diversity got better ratings. They showed some level of this behavior. Whether or not they showed a commitment to diversity, they were considered competent. So they did a couple of studies in a couple of different ways to see what the outcome would be and it was genuinely concerning. Basically what it said was that the only group that was really able to promote diversity without then facing a backlash on their performance reviews were white males. What Heckman believed, what the conclusion was, is that white men have a normal, legitimate sort of status. So whatever they do is considered normal and legitimate, whereas non-white men managers and women don't have that social status. It's a really interesting article and a bit depressing. The article talks about how maybe the answer then is to put a white man in charge of the company's diversity efforts. But it's an interesting article and an interesting dilemma and that women should be helping women, and what this study and the couple of studies show is that doing that seemed to hinder or impact their judgment by their peers, even though a white male doing the same thing was thought to still be competent and was not impacted in any negative way. It’s an interesting dilemma and something that corporations need to wrestle with and figure out.
INTERVIEW WITH RAUL GUTIERREZ, CEO OF TINYBOP
Kabir: As promised everyone, it wouldn’t just be my voice on the podcast this week. We have a very special guest, Raul Gutierrez who is here. He is the founder and CEO of Tinybop. If you don’t know Tinybop, you must be living under a rock, but Tinybop creates beautiful digital apps for kids. Their latest is Tinybop’s Weather which was selected as an editor’s choice from the Apple App Store. So Raul, thank you very much for being with me today.
Raul: Thank you very much!
Kabir: Your road to Tinybop from what I’ve read has been a roundabout path. You started out in Hollywood, took a step back from that for a little while, but you stayed close to the industry. You ran your own movie analytics firm for a little while. And then you moved to the East Coast and got started with an art start-up during the early days of flash sales. Is that correct?
Raul: That’s roughly correct.
Kabir: And then your inspiration for Tinybop came from your son. How did that happen? Tell me that story.
Raul: I had always been interested in children’s books and kids’ media. The one thing that my parents really spoiled us with were books. And so we didn’t have a ton of toys, we had a lot of books. I grew up between Mexico and Texas. With children’s media, especially in Mexico, it was always a little bit weird. We had all this Japanese stuff. It was dubbed in Spanish. My favorite children’s show is this show that everybody in Mexico that’s of my age knows. It’s called Cometo San which in Mexico they call Senorita Cometo which is sort of like a Japanese Bewitched with these little animated characters. It was dubbed in Spanish, it was kind of weird. And I always loved the weirdness of children’s books. And when I had my own kids, it was like they were my laboratory. First of all, I have more kids’ books than is sort of reasonable. And I couldn’t wait to expose them to all of these cool books. So for me, books were really the starting point. And then once we started to have iPhones and iPads in the house, my kids were really the first generation to see those or to play with those as kids. My oldest son was born in 2004, just when he was getting cognizant of the world is when the first iPads and iPhones came out. Instantly they became his favorite toy. He called them the everything machine, which is actually now the name of one of our products. And it’s because for him, they were. There were tools, they were toys, they were passive entertainment, active entertainment, and they did all these things.
At the point when I was starting Tinybop, I was actually searching for an idea, like many people who lead these kind of nonlinear lives. I’ve done many things in my life. I’ve started a whole bunch of things. I knew I wanted to create a startup in mobile. I didn’t know exactly where. I had a whole bunch of ideas that had nothing to do with kids’ stuff. My kid who was about to have his kindergarten birthday, came to me and asked if he could trade his party for an iPhone. To me that just floored me. If you know anything about that age, the kindergarten party is like the centerpiece of the year. It’s the way—if they’re angry at a friend, they’ll say, “You’re not coming to my birthday party.” So the fact that he was willing to sell out all his friends which he really cared about! He really loved his friends! So the fact that he was willing to sell out his friends for this device, I just knew it had a lot of power of him and I wanted to understand it. I, as a parent, especially as my wife and I call ourselves “people of the book,” not in a religious sense but we’re worried that our house is going to collapse because of all the books we have. I was kind of threatened by the screen, especially in the context of kids. I realized it was important and I really wanted to understand it. Not so much as a business thing or anything, I just wanted to understand what my kid was doing and why it was so powerful for him. What was the thing that gave it this draw for him? And what I found ultimately was that it was the form, it’s this incredible form. Because you’re actually touching something. Something’s happening back. It’s incredibly responsive. And many of the things that he was attracted to were tools. He liked taking pictures and making movies and so on. Many were games that were game games that were not designed for kids but for adults, like casual games. Back in 2009/2010, the game space for kids I found was really, really thin. There were a lot of apps that were designed around earlier numeracy and early literacy, which was fine and are great, but there were very few apps around the subjects that I was really interested in and that my kids were really interested in which were more sciencey subjects about the world. And the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about my own childhood—like I grew up in a small east Texas town that’s not known for anything good… I mean it’s a town split by train tracks into black and white. My dad was from Mexico, my mom was from New York. I was called a wetback Yankee. That was my— teachers called me that in school. We were one of the last federally desegregated school districts in the country. It was a racially-polarized, kind of backwards place. It changed a lot. Things have changed and gotten much better, but then it was really isolated. And it was sort of like this island. And I always thought of it as this island; instead of being surrounded by water, it was surrounded by trees. It was isolated in that we had one channel on the television, and on most mornings, it was just farm & ranch news with a guy with a big cowboy hat. The radio was just country music, there was no cable television, and it was isolated. There were no bookstores. You didn’t have access to the outside world. And so for me, my escape was the library. And I would go to the library and I would go to the children’s section, and they had sets of children’s encyclopedias that essentially gave you context for the world. And the Chlidcraft Library–they had one book on space and one book on mammals and one book on dinosaurs. Reading my way through that library, serendipitously I sort of discovered what I was interested in. I discovered that there was a whole other world that was outside of where I was living. It gave me some understanding of that world. In Mexico, I spent a lot of time too in Mexico with my grandparents and it was another kind of island in that my grandparents lived in Monterrey which is a big city, but we often would in the summer go out to the ranch which was in the middle of nowhere. And then you’re just cut off from everything.
And what I realized with iPhone and iPad is that Apple and Google have created these amazing distribution systems that can reach everywhere. There was this way in which you could create content that could reach out into all those islands. Those kids that are sort of out there everywhere. And the internet largely performs the same function. The internet connects people to all these things, but the internet is a horrible interface for a 6 year old. The thing about the internet is that you kind of have to know what you’re looking for. You have to sort of be motivated for subject. The thing about a series of apps that is very affordable and that we try to make even more affordable to schools is that a parent buys the whole series and they have this set of apps that explains the world It’s that same serendipitous—It’s not exactly an encyclopedia, but it’s a way to understand these various subjects. And so from the beginning, my goal was—I wanted to build apps to cover these subjects that my kids were interested in. I wanted to make them as beautiful as these children’s books that I had always loved. And it’s weird. Childhood is weird. And the way that children see the world is a little strange. There is so much children’s media that is just extremely straightforward and it’s the bright colors and the cute character and that’s not necessarily how kids see the world. I wanted each app to have this touch of strangeness to it. Little by little we came up with this idea for our company. From the beginning, the big ideas were that we wanted to be inclusive because we wanted to reach these islands of people and you can be in an island in a big city if you come with a bad economic situation in which maybe you don’t have a house full of books. That said, I found some iPads are fairly universal. By 2018, it’s predicted that virtually every adult on earth is going to have a smartphone in their pocket. Our question is how do we at a very low price provide a lot of great quality media. And then our next challenge, of course, is to get people to actually download and to schools and so on and so on.
Kabir: You looked back in 2010 what kids apps looked like, and your design is designed for quit as opposed to designing with gamification or badges. Was that as a result of research? Obviously you had your children as your first lab rats, but was that—
Raul: Part of it was that idea—I started asking myself, “Why does screen time really bother me so much as a parent?” And it’s because I would see that with many things that were so called “kids apps” that they were designed to essentially overstimulate kids. They were using what are essentially gambling algorithms or gaming loops that encourage… “You have to hit the button!” It’s this Pavlovian loop that leads kids really jangled. Kids especially at that age, every parent knows that they can be overstimulated. And when a kid is overstimulated, they’re often foul tempered, bad mood. The minute you take the iPad away, suddenly they’re just awful. And so I wanted to the opposite. I wanted to do what a good book does and what a good science experiment does. We use the term (it’s not our term), we wanted to create explorable explanations. Each app is essentially a working model of the thing. We have two series. Each app has an explorer’s library. It’s essentially a working model of the thing that we’re trying to show. So the human body, it’s a little model of the body. You feed it, food goes in one end, poop goes out the other end. You tap the eye and we use the camera to show how it works and it blinks. But it’s accurate. It’s not dumbed down for kids. If you turn on the labels in our kids’ app, there are medical schools that are using the app as a way to have people learn various parts of the body. So we don’t dumb things down. They’re accurate. Our simple machines app, all those little interactions with the six simple machines, the physics are right.
Kabir: I do it with my son, the bicycle one. He loves that one.
Raul: So we spend a lot of time to make sure that the physics were the correct physics. The hope is that in creating this quiet experience, one that doesn’t have a soundtrack that’s going to be running behind, that doesn’t have this gamification loop that you will slow kids down enough so that they want to explore. And that’s where this slight touch of weirdness comes in. We have to give kids a reason to explore these things. We have a weather app with a lot of weather stuff; it’s a sunny day, it’s a cloudy day. How do you show that in an interesting way? We have these strange people that populate this land that have antlers for no particular reason other than it just creates this mood that’s mysterious and draws kids in. And I think that when we do our job, what happens is that the output of the apps is not that the kid knows everything about the subject. It is that your child will ask you questions. We design our explorer’s library series so that children will ask questions. We hope that some of the answers are embedded in the interactions. Our human body app, what’s the most important thing about the skeletal system, it holds the body up. If you remove the spine, it falls down. Hopefully that idea is imbedded in them. But the real goal of that whole series is to start conversations between parents and teachers and kids. When we’ve done our job, the kids are full of questions! One of my favorite negative comments that we got on the App Store, somebody gave us a one-star review. This woman said, “When I leave my kid at home with the iPad, when I come home she’s just full of questions!” I’m like, “Lady! This is the point is! This is the point! I want you to talk to your kids!” With that series, that’s the goal. We have this whole other series, Digital Toy Series. Each of those apps in that series are a construction kit. The idea there was the anti-Legos.
Kabir: You’ve gotten a little flack for this.
Raul: Yeah—
Kabir: I know you didn’t mean to take a shot directly at Legos.
Raul: No, I did! Modern Legos… first of all, I love Lego. I love a lot of things about Lego But a lot of the way that modern Legos are sold is as a disassembled toy that kids follow instructions and they get to a single endpoint, put it on their shelf, and sort of gradually falls apart, and then all the pieces go into a bin, and they’ve lost the instructions and it’s done. And then you buy the next one. Legos when I was a kid were blocks. I think this is why my preface is successful. If you have any sort of blocks that can be interchanged and build into anything, all you need is a little bit of a context. Here in the office, we have square Lego blocks and kids are like, “Uh, I don’t know what to do with them” because the modern kids that only know that you have to follow the instructions. And I’ll say to build a zoo. And a lot of times there’s this slight confusion and then there’s quiet and then you come back and there’s this beautiful little zoo and they feel really proud of it. Well that’s basically what Digital Toys is. Every app in that series is a construction kit build around a context. The first one is a robot factory; you have a whole bunch of robot parts. They all are autonomous. You have spider legs and humanoid legs and all sorts of slithery legs or whatever. And you put them on bodies. But we’re not telling you how to do it; the kid’s creating their own narrative. And if we’ve done our job, at the end of that app, the kid is going to have a story and a name that’s something that we didn’t imagine. Something that’s completely out of our experience.
We were just in a class deep in Brooklyn in Bensonhurst the other day. And the teacher is using [it in] her kindergarten as part of their storytelling and poem workshop. Each kid in the class created a robot and then she asked them to tell a story. The range of stories that the kids came out with was amazing. Some of the kids had avatars for themselves and some were the parents and some they were something super or other they hoped they could be. We see the same thing in the office. We have a great video where we just invited kids from Brooklyn and we asked them what the robots were and one kid said, “Mine’s a robot butler. He brings me food.” There was this other little girl that was like, “My robot likes fancy hotels. She likes cheese sandwiches.” To me, those apps are successful when it’s not something that’s been created from our imagination. It’s something that the kids—we’ve just given them the push and the context. It’s like the set of blocks and you say to build a zoo. And they’re building their own zoo.
Kabir: A couple of questions. You said this a couple of times, “We know we’ve done our job right.” How do you measure [this]?
Raul: With each app, we go into schools. We test in schools. We have a range of local schools we work with. We bring kids in here. Ads on Craiglist and school listservs or whatever. We do play testing in the office. I do informal testing because there are some things that happen in the office—if a kid’s sitting in there playing the app, they’re different when you’re at a birthday party and there’s like 16 kids. I have a couple of magic iPads that have every popular everything on there, Minecraft and everything else. And then I put our apps on those pages. I see how long they’re going to play our app, how quickly they’re going to switch to something else. Whether they keep coming back. There are many kids, especially kids that have been used to only these vast games, the first time that they come to our apps, they’re a little disoriented. I don’t know what to do. We’re not telling them what to do.
Kabir: The way I’ve seen it when a kid has touched your app is usually, “So now what do I do?” And I think it’s almost like you like that. You expected that.
Raul: Absolutely. You have to give them a reason to come back, but hopefully, usually it’s the artwork or some small that even if they’ll start and quit the app because they don’t know what to do, they’ll think about it then they’ll come back. Once they come back, then you start to see these long explorations… If you look at our engagement time over months, I think for a standard education app it’s a 30-day-retention rate, which means how often they come back over 30 days and it’s lower than 10%. We’re much, much better than that. We have a 1-year retention rate that’s above 10%.
Kabir: You talked about the Explorer Series and the Digital Toys. Going back to the Explorer Series, you sort of started with Human Body, and that was an actual choice, yes? You wanted the kid to start with themselves?
Raul: Yes, start with themselves. We had the game plan for three series planned out before we touched a line of code. We had so far every title that we’ve worked on mapped out. For that series (it’s not infinite) we have 25 apps. It’s not rocket science. We’re going to do a space app. Each thing is a subject that is important to kids everywhere. And they’re big subjects. I think by the time we’re finished, the Explorer’s Library series will cover every major science and some social studies subjects that are covered K-6. We think it will be an incredible resource for parents and for schools. Our Digital Toys series is a little more infinite, but only so far as the ideas are worthy of the series. We wouldn’t build something just to build something. And then we have a third series planned which is still secret.
Kabir: Are we going to make some news here?
Raul: Yeah, it’s going to be great too.
Kabir: When you talk about Tinybop overall, from what I’ve read, you guys are 70% women, there’s a ton of languages spoken in the office. Diversity is a big focus for you. It’s something you’ve talked about on panels. You’ve contributed to articles written about. Why is it something that it is important to you?
Raul: I think first and foremost, it’s good business. I think that’s something—it’s crazy to me that not everyone’s focused on diversity because why would you give away giants portions of your margin/market? We think that the subjects that we’re covering are universal. Every kid needs to learn about their body. Every kid needs to learn about weather. Every kid needs to learn about the earth and so on and so on. Why would we block out whole categories of kids? First and foremost it’s that. But also politically, we have a diverse office. I myself, if you’re sitting here looking at me you might think, “Well, this is the whitest Mexican I’ve ever seen.” But I grew up in this very mixed family, so my Mexican family comes in all shapes and size and colors, and there are people lighter than me and that are incredibly dark. I grew up in a town that was very racially split. Real economic differences between the two sides of town. Part of it is wanting to bridge those gaps. I know that Latinos as a group and Mexicans in particular consume more media on their smartphones per capita than white kids. And so why shouldn’t that be great? And why shouldn’t we appeal to those groups? At the start of appealing to a wide group of people is having voices at the table. If we were a standard tech company that was 90% guys, there would be a lot of things that wouldn’t happen. Because we’re more than half women, a lot of our apps appeal to girls and women in ways that might not have if those voices hadn’t been at the table. When we designed Robot App, the stereotype is that robots are something that only boys are interested in.
We tested our apps and we changed the artwork until girls who are playing with the app call their robot “she”. It was really important to us. We also made sure that if there was an African American or Latino kid or there was a kid from Russia or wherever that they would build robots and they would think that it was them. Part of it is by giving the kids choices and allowing them to color the robots in different ways and put their own voices into it. So it’s a core value. We don’t always succeed. In our Human Body app, partially because of the design of the app, we have four body outlines. With those four body outlines, we wanted to cover a range of the kids. We wanted to cover African American kids and Latino kids and white kids. Obviously, that’s impossible with four outlines. But I think we did a pretty good job. Like African American kids see themselves in that app and they think that one of the avatars is somebody that they’re familiar with. We found that across the board, but there are still edge cases. We got a message from a woman the other day that was very angry at us because she said that my son is a gender non-normative kid. He has long hair. He dresses as a female, but he’s male. And we have in the Human Body app one part of the app that is not included that you can purchase separately is the genital system. We have the boy’s parts matched to the boy’s body. For that kid, she was upset with us. These are hard problems. There’s always limitations in terms of what you can do. But we’ve gotten better at allowing kids to customize things. So now instead of maybe presenting kids with avatars, we’ll let them choose their own a little more. There’s an app coming out in two weeks called the infinite arcade. It’s a new app that asks kids to build their own video games. We have this pretty elaborate avatar creation. A kid can really create something. They can switch colors and hairstyles.
Kabir: It sounds like you’re never going to get it perfect. There’s going to be feedback. But it sounds like you guys take that feedback and rather than getting defensive about it, you sort of, “How do we make this better?” Or “How do we do it better?”
Raul: We want to appeal to as many people as possible. Our office is also sort of not a perfect mirror of society either. We’re more than half women which I think is great. And we’re really diverse and many of us come from or were born in different places or speak different languages at home. But we could be more diverse. There’s socio-economic diversity. We definitely, again, many people here. Parents here were immigrants. We are striving kids. A lot of Ivy League kids in the office. There are other perspectives that ultimately, like my sort of platonic ideal of a company, involves people that come from a wider range of backgrounds. Because I think the more voices you have at the table, the more that you can take those considerations into account. That said, we try. We go to a wide, wide range of schools. We go to some of the best, crazy, private prep schools where it’s hedge fund kids. We go to really tough Title I schools where the vast majority of the kids in the school are on school lunch and the truth is that they see things differently. Because of the range of experiences that they have, because of the little islands they’re in, they see the information presented differently. Even something like the concept of a volcano or a desert might be foreign to a kid who has very limited experiences, who lives in the city or who lives in Arizona. It’s an impossible task really to cover everything. But we want to be accurate. We want to be engaging, and we want to draw kids in as much as we can to cover as much of the world as we can.
Kabir: Not to put you on the spot, but can you think of—because you have diverse voices at the table and you focus on building a company that is diverse how that made a particular product better or created a certain detail that if we didn’t have a certain voice in the room, you wouldn’t see that.
Raul: We actually have the opposite problem sometimes. We have this new app, the Infinite Arcade app. And many of the primary designers on this app are women. When they have the avatar selection, it was a girl with a ponytail and they had shirts with hearts on them. I was the voice that was like, “You gotta get some boy stuff in here too!” That’s sort of a simple, silly example, but—
Kabir: Think of the Homes app.
Raul: With the Homes app, we currently have four homes in there. We actually have artwork for another four around the world. We chose a home in Yemen which is not necessarily the most politically popular destination these days for Americans. Many homes are amazing though. Like I’ve been obsessed with them since I was a kid. I think I saw them in some kids’ book. My goal with choosing Yemen in particular was that I’ve traveled a lot, seen what those homes look like, and the important thing about that app was to show kids where other kids sleep, how they eat, where they go to the bathroom, how do they live their daily lives. We don’t show people in that app. We’re just showing the homes. The kids, when they play with that app, especially kids of a certain age, image themselves in their home doing those things. Is a 5 or 6 year old going to put together that it’s in Yemen? They’re not going to understand all that but maybe, just maybe, they might understand that there are people who live in a very different way from them, but they’re still kids who are eating, who are playing, who are waking up every day, who are people. And I think the most important thing that we can do just as humans is to understand that there is no “other.” There are people with other cultures, but they’re just people trying to get through the day. Our world might be as foreign as theirs is. There is a little bit of quiet social engineering.
Kabir: The long-term vision of Tinybop. You guys don’t really and hesitate to call yourselves “apps.” You call yourselves “digital toys.” Do you see yourself moving away from the screen and into the physical world?
Raul: It’s absolutely part of the bigger game plan. We don’t call ourselves games because we’re not games in any traditional sense. They are little simulations. They are digital toys. The truth is many of the best toys are things that [aren’t] doing anything. It’s a set of blocks. The kid has to be active in order for the thing to be something wonderful, sort of transport that kid to another world. I think that’s true for our apps. Or at least I hope it’s true.
We’ve always looked at the apps as the seed of everything else that we’ve wanted to do. In this next year, we’ve mapped out a plan that includes us making some physical toys. I’ve always wanted to do books. A book is sort of my ultimate aspiration. We’ve actually designed them. We’re just looking for the right partners. I love to do video. I came out of the film industry. Making movies is a lot like starting a company. It’s essentially a little start-up. Each movie is like a little start-up. You start with an idea, get a bunch of people together, you make it, you put it out. I’d love to do video at some point. I think that we have just started with schools. So over 150,000 of our apps have been sold to educational institutions. We estimate that we are in at least 70,000 schools around the world. More than half of our sales are abroad. The US is actually less than 50% of our sales. Europe is 30%. Asia is growing pretty fast. I think that if you look at schools as a group, they are looking for solutions to problems. Our apps work particularly well with teachers because we’re not looking to replace curriculum. A 1st grade teacher teaching simple machines and a 6th grade teacher teaching simple machines can use the apps as models, and they work equally well with a different set of curriculum. I do think we could be a little better at helping teachers share curriculum that they’ve made against the app. Packing stuff for schools. We’re just now in the planning stages of sort of a major push to package our apps in a way that makes more sense for schools or that is easier for them—our apps are being brought into schools by individual teachers. We’re not really selling them on the district level and things like. Partially it’s because of how they are packaged. That’s a goal of ours.
Kabir: That’s great. This has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Raul: Thank you.