“The main difficulty for Tech for Good organizations is to scale”
Interview of Paul Duan, founder of the NGO Bayes Impact, pioneer of the Tech for Good Movement
Each month, find out the interview of the people who believe that Impact & Growth coexist to change the world for the better.
- Paul, can you tell us more about Bayes Impact?
Bayes Impact is a tech non-profit whose mission is to use technology to address social issues on a large scale, by creating a new generation of citizen-led public services. We started by building a few of these ourselves, like Bob, an AI employment counselor that coached more than 300,000 people, or Briser la Chaîne, an open-source and tracking-free contact tracing system that helped notify more than 6 million people in France. We also built the police violence reporting system used by 800 police agencies in California.
All of these projects are open-source and mostly philanthropy-funded; once they show proof of impact, we then partner with governments to deploy them on a larger scale.
- Many companies today are calling themselves “Tech for Good”. So, real impact or bullshit?
Depends (laughs)! Tech for good is interesting precisely because of its unique potential to make an impact on a large scale, but many companies are guilty of tech for good washing.
It’s still difficult to talk about a mature movement for the moment. The great work done by the Impact France Movement is making progress on impact measurement and setting standards, so it’s going in the right direction.
The problem is that we still see too many companies that add an “impact” label to be more fashionable. But it’s easy for any company, even those that clearly don’t have social impact at heart, create a tech for good narrative: if your business is to sell people’s data to sell advertisement, you can always create marketing campaigns to explain how you are empowering local businesses. You also have delivery companies that brand themselves as tech for good companies that create economic opportunities for people when they’ve been caught profiting from illegal workers…
Still, tech has a lot of potential to do a lot of good. But to keep companies honest you have to be able to measure the extent to which their actions and their business models are really aligned with their impact incentives. And often, the real test is when the company is facing a difficult decision.
It’s easy to be aligned when everything goes well (many talk of a “double bottom line”, where you both make money and create impact), but at some point you will always have to make a trade-off. And this is where you see where your true incentives reside: are you willing to lose -20% margin by doing the right thing? And this is also where having mission-aligned investors like Ring Mission is very important, because you want investors that support you in making these difficult decisions.
- Any idea who the next unicorn for Good might be?
It’s hard to say — Ava, a startup founded by my friend Thibaut Duchemin to help deaf and hard of hearing people comes to mind — but there are many other areas of impact that need to be unlocked outside of the commercial landscape! I am particularly interested in how we can improve public service.
Today, the startup world tends to dismiss the role of government, but the reality is that few organizations respond to societal needs on such a large scale as public services. And while there are initiatives to make governments more innovative, there is still a long way to go. I helped create two such programs myself, the Entrepreneurs d’Intérêt Général program where you invite people outside government to help innovate from within, and the Accélérateur d’Initiatives Citoyennes recently launched by France to help create partnerships with tech for good organizations.
Overall, government and tech for good organizations often don’t speak the same language or operate on the same timescales, which is why it’s so important to have organizations that can bring them together.
- The field that Tech can change for good?
Public service! There is a huge potential pool of impact to be developed, that don’t always (or sometimes shouldn’t) have commercial applications. For example, systems to help address violence against women. Here, you don’t need venture capital, you need to cultivate trusted communities that can tackle this challenge in the long run and on a national scale.
This is where the tech + citizen synergy is very promising. For these sensitive topics, we must start from the bottom because you need communities that have legitimacy in dealing with them.
Diversity is already a challenge for regular startups, but it is 10x more critical when you talk about tech for good, because you want more entrepreneurs and innovators that know these societal challenges first-hand.
- You talk a lot about the concept of Citizen-Led Public Service. Can you tell us more?
The main difficulty for tech for good organizations is to scale. Today, we have more and more innovation programs or hackathons that help citizens come up with ideas. This is great, but we need to be a lot more ambitious, and we need to create the infrastructure for tech for good organizations to go beyond proof-of-concepts, and scale to the size of a national public service, the same way we want startups to reach unicorn size.
In many ways, the tech for good sector is where the classical startup world was twenty years ago. And we have a few ideas to remedy that.
- What are the next steps for you?
To address the issues mentioned above, we are planning to drastically scale our NGO to create the Y Combinator for citizen-led public services. Our own products are now doing quite well, with Bob being in replication phase in many countries or Briser la Chaîne being officially integrated with the French Assurance Maladie contact tracing system, so we are shifting our priorities to leverage our experience to create an accelerator for tech for good organizations that want to scale to public service size all across the world. We are starting with helping the French government with their accelerator, but we plan on replicating this approach in as many countries as possible, starting with Europe. Stay tuned!
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