Female Founders Conference - Mountain View
Right now that you all know each other, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. Okay, I would like to welcome our first speaker, Phaedra Ellis Lumpkins, who's the founder and CEO of Promise. Now, Promise went through the winter 2018 batch of YC and is working on a solution to reduce the jail population. Prior to founding Promise, Phaedra ran revenue and operations at Honor, a company that offers in-home care to senior citizens. Before Honor, Phaedra worked with the musician Prince. She's a labor and community organizer by trade who is committed to making measurable change in the world.
So welcome, Phaedra!
Hello! Can you hear me in the back? Okay, great! First, how exciting is it to be in a room full of phenomenal women who have started companies or are starting companies? I just feel like I want to walk around and just like rub everyone and say, "Oh, it's so exciting!" Just the energy in the air. My name is Phaedra Ellis Lumpkins, and I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Promise, and just incredibly thrilled to be here today.
So I thought I would start out and talk a little bit about myself and why we ended up starting a company. So this is my mom, Gail Lumpkins. My mom, when I was growing up, was a waitress, and so we grew up pretty poor. My mom worked at Dave's Restaurant in San Francisco; if you've ever had a great burger, you've probably been there. Growing up, as the mom, you have a mom who's a waitress, you really rely on tips. And so there was a very kind of physical feeling like, you know you're broke when you're a kid. As you get older, I knew things like when I went shopping with my mom on food stamps, people treated us differently. I knew that we ate, I remember the first time I saw people eating meat and sandwiches, and I was like, "Wait, you don't eat cheese and pickle sandwiches?" It wasn't until I was older that I realized, "Oh, that's because we didn't have meat money," as we called it.
So I spent a lot of time just really understanding kind of what happens, I think, when you're just broke. And then something changed, which is when I was 12 years old, my mom went back to school, and she got her degree, and she got a job with the county. And I just, you know, you have moments that you remember as a child, and I remember the moment she got the call, and it was like $10 an hour. I remember my mom saying, "What are we gonna do with all that money?" I just knew our life had shifted.
The thing that became very clear to me is that when you have a little bit more money, as I think about, I went from free lunch to reduced lunch at school, which meant I was in a different line. You just feel differently; people treated us differently. My mom carried herself differently. So what I knew was that there was this feeling in what was transformative for me.
As I grew older, I just said, "I want that for all kids. I want all kids to feel like no shame when they go to the grocery store, not different because they have free lunch or they get free peanut butter." But really, how do we create a feeling for all kids where they get to feel equal and they get to feel proud? So that was really what I set out to do.
I spent the first kind of 15 years of my professional life working in the labor movement, working with janitors on behalf of janitors, Teamsters, teachers, and really trying to understand how did we create opportunity for working families, and how did we create dignity in work? Then I started to run a Labor Federation in Silicon Valley, and all of a sudden, the way that people went to work changed. It used to be that people had one employer; they stayed at a company for a long time, but increasingly, work began to be contracted out.
What was most striking to me is that some of those jobs got worse, not better. So we would see these covers of, like, these people who are like a receptionist at Google, and all of a sudden, they had a Ferrari on the cover of Newsweek. But in my world, I represented janitors who were working two jobs, living in Stockton, driving in, and kind of cleaning the waste back at some of these folks. So, in fact, technology had no...