Companies to Watch: Supporting Families Through the COVID-19 Pandemic
Innovation and adaptability define New York’s tech community. That culture inspired a rapid call to action from entrepreneurs, engineers, and creatives alike to respond to the myriad of changes New Yorkers are experiencing in their work and home lives. Whether through financial assistance, at-home healthcare, or education readiness, New York’s tech sector has been at the forefront of the city’s support for our most impacted communities.
Here, we’re profiling New York startups using their tools to support the work and home lives of all New Yorkers — and the entire country — over these difficult months. Check back here weekly for new conversations with the founders lending a hand.
OPUS
What does your company do?
Opus co-founder and CEO Rachael Nemeth: Opus upskills and reskills the frontline workforce with interactive training delivered over text message. We help businesses up and down the supply chain keep their teams engaged, productive, safe, and happy. Employees stack up skills and earn certifications, while managers track compliance and spot high potential team members.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
RN: NYC is one organ in the massive, living, breathing working world and is one of the most diverse cities on the planet. Who wouldn't want to found a company here?!
What brought you to New York?
RN: I initially came to NYC in pursuit of a masters in linguistics. Once I arrived, it only took some napkin math to calculate massive student debt before I decided to get to work and focus on paying rent. So I got back to working in restaurants (again!) and taught ESL on the side. The rest is (an intense but romantic) history.
Opus provides training to frontline teams in all kinds of industries and sectors, but of course, the frontline workers anyone is talking about this year are those responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. How is Opus supporting them — did you have to create new COVID training from scratch, or how did you adapt existing Opus tools to meet the moment?
RN: When COVID hit, there was no question that we could help companies keep their employees, customers, and communities safe by leveraging our existing product to deliver COVID training.
There are 50 million essential frontline employees who have been working this year without a full stop. In order to meet this need, we developed training that is compliant with CDC and WHO guidelines — all delivered via text message and WhatsApp and in multiple languages. With Opus, employees train for three minutes a day throughout the year in order to stay fresh in best practices. Managers can track their team via mobile and send them digital applause or even a nudge. Executives are insured in more ways than one — not only is their business compliant, their workforce is behaving safely at work which supports a healthy work environment, mentally and physically.
Why text message-based? What unique advantages does a mobile-centric training solution have over, say, something more traditionally web-based — or even in-person training?
RN: The Opus company mantra is no logins, no emails, no passwords — ever. I worked in service and manufacturing jobs for 15 years. On-site training is expensive and is a huge logistical challenge. Offices are no bigger than a broom closet. Computers and tablets cannot be easily shared. And when it comes to software, traditional learning platforms just aren't built for the majority workforce. Most training tech is built for desk workers and then repurposed for non-desk workers — so the outcomes are poor for the folks out on the field.
So you have to start with mobile training. It's simple to get to a 99% open rate with text message, but what's most important is your level of accessibility and efficacy. In order to achieve great learning outcomes, our solution is interactive from start to finish through lessons that build knowledge on a micro-topic over the course of a three-minute lesson. Opus is audio visual, available in multiple languages, and accommodates all learning levels. Employees stack up digital badges and certifications while managers can track and motivate their team. All over text!
Let’s talk about the multilingual component — given that frontline workers often disproportionately come from immigrant communities, that feels important. What are you seeing about businesses’ ESL needs right now?
RN: We've provided chat-based ESL (English training) since we launched in 2019. Now, we're seeing an incredible rise in demand for ESL. Communication and productivity are critical in order for businesses to grow — so it makes sense that they are prioritizing training, especially ESL. We work with businesses up and down the supply chain that consist of 20-80% limited English speakers.
ESL is a specialized training though. It's not the same as learning Italian for that vacation you've been hankering for. So we're helping businesses get everyone out on the field a daily dose of interactive language learning that they can use immediately in order to function better on the job and grow at work. That's exactly why Luke's Lobster came to us in fact.
Skills training, of course, helps the employees learning the new skills, but it also can provide a lot of valuable insights to employers providing the tool? What does an employer get out of providing a tool like Opus?
RN: Employers work with us because we can reach 100% of their team with quality training. At the same time, we can give them their ops budget back because employees don't have to step into a corporate office (or any office) to train. So at the most basic level, mobile-first training saves businesses money.
But what's equally as valuable is that Opus is a part of a company's culture and can position folks as employers of choice. We do that by providing insights to Ops and HR leaders to help them recognize high-potential talent quickly. For our customers their entire frontline workforce is training online for the first time ever after years of training inequity. That's special and something to celebrate.
One of your big projects in response to the pandemic is StopCOVID.co, a resource your team spun up in a lightning fast five days, right? What users did you have in mind when you built it, and how has it evolved over the past several months?
RN: The moment COVID hit the west coast, we knew we needed to work fast. We only had one user in mind. So yes! In five days we grew from a team of three to 15 product and design humans to deliver StopCOVID. It was a rapid response effort to support essential businesses with basic COVID training delivered over text message. Through the spring and summer, we served over 300 businesses and their frontline teams including delivery.com, David Chang's FUKU, and other major players.
That has evolved into recurrent COVID training that ensures workers have year-round access to new knowledge as regulations and best practices evolve. It is an enormous burden to track the changes that are happening from week to week, then translate that into training for your entire workforce, and then track who's understanding what. In fact, we just released COVID training that complies with all 39 state governors offices that require that employers train their teams in COVID safety. I couldn't have predicted that COVID training would be on the roadmap, but it marries so well with our product and our mission to bring the frontline workforce forward.
What else is on the horizon? Are there any projects Opus put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
RN: Our team has tripled since March and we closed our $2 million round in July. We're all in and nothing was put on hold. We're focused on building a product that helps people build work value throughout their lives. So, what's next is continuing to serve and grow our customer base and to expand our platform in order to continue making training accessible to everyone.
I don't believe it's a question of what happens when the pandemic ends. I believe it's a question of...How do we evolve into the future of work and ensure that everyone has a chance to succeed? I'm incredibly optimistic about that world and believe that Opus can be a leader in achieving it.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
RN: My friends and family reading this right now are laughing because I *really* love pizza. So my answer is every single restaurant on the Slice app.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
RN: La Bagel Delight, of course. 80% for the bagel. 20% for the name.
What’s your favorite New York landmark?
RN: The New York Public Library. That was our first "office" and it still holds a special place in my heart.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
RN: It's never the same. There are too many good spots to enjoy to commit to one. (But I really miss City Bakery. RIP.)
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
RN: It's easy to experience sensory deprivation while working from home. In order to mix things up, I burn incense or listen to new music while I work. Also, a 4pm coffee never hurts.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
RN: In an office environment you get the hums of background conversations and coffee chats. Early on, it was clear our team wanted spontaneous inspiration beyond reading books and listening to podcasts. So, we have a weekly speaker series where we invite investors, founders, customers, and other inspiring people to chat with the team. My team has had a chance to meet the dozens of people who have inspired me and that's really special to share with them. They'll help us solve a problem we're focused on or share their story. It's informal and lovely and we'll never stop doing it now.
NORBERT HEALTH
What does your company do?
Norbert Health co-founder and CEO Alexandre Winter: Norbert Health is building the first medical grade, contact-less vital signs scanner and health monitoring solution for the masses. We are building a sleek, plug-and-play, consumer grade device, that measures temperature, cardiac activity, breathing rate without contact, within ten feet, in less than two seconds, and with medical grade accuracy.
Our device and system works great in workplace environments. We currently sell return to work applications, where we automate the temperature scanning of employees and visitors. This is a well defined and clear opportunity today, that does not require FDA approval, so we can go to market immediately. In parallel, we are developing partnerships with hospitals, caregiving agencies, and other channel partners to build the home health monitoring of tomorrow — starting with elderly monitoring, chronic condition monitoring, remote patient monitoring use cases.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
AW: This is the best city on earth, and also my home since 2009. It is also one of the most active and rich startup ecosystems in the world. Last but not least, it is the only place where you can find decent pizza, decent French food, and decent French wine selections in the US.
In the past couple of decades — and even since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — we’ve learned just how much of our daily lives can be managed independently from home. Healthcare isn’t one of them. How is Norbert Health addressing that?
AW: You’re right, health is one of the last things we still can’t do from home. You can shop, consume media, meet people, even workout with a coach from home. But you still mostly have to go to “the store” for health. The pandemic has changed that. We all learned the meaning of “nosocomial infections” (look it up!). Elderly people, people with chronic conditions, or even healthy people, now know too well that you can get infections in the hospital or doctor’s office.
Health has to move to our homes and offices very quickly. It is happening with the explosion of telehealth, but traditional medicine and health care was designed to take place in the doctor’s office, with devices and people to monitor and screen you. We need to automate the process of measuring vital signs and triaging patients based on that. This is what we are building at Norbert.
You launched last year with the idea to build solutions for people to monitor vital signs and other health data directly. Of course, that now couldn’t be more timely, but surely something like a global public health pandemic wasn’t initially part of your business plan. How has your technology pivoted — or not — since COVID-19 came into the picture?
AW: We always had the vision of health moving to our homes and to build the infrastructure for that. We originally focused on building a first device to help the most frail and underserved part of our population: our aging adults. The original Norbert was supposed to sit on a table top or shelf in an aging adult’s apartment, and quietly keep track of their health. It would notify caregivers immediately if anything was wrong and provide health care providers with vital sign trends over time, to predict outcomes, and take action early if some alarming patterns were detected.
The pandemic upended the world, and all of a sudden, our devices were needed for the whole new populations — schools, offices, businesses, factories, hotels, movie studios, and even cruise ships now use Norbert devices for health screening or monitoring to get back to business. We are still providing our device to caregiving agencies for the benefit of our seniors.
You mention that you want Norbert Health’s tools to be preventative — to predict health problems before they occur. Is that what the healthcare industry should be focusing on? What do you hope the sector looks like post-pandemic? Or a decade from now?
AW: Right now our focus is to make health screening automated and ubiquitous — and to help the world deal with the new reality where our health is not our own personal issue anymore, but something that affects the world directly. We’re focused on COVID today, but tomorrow we’ll keep this in mind for the flu, colds, and other conditions.
Once vital signs are monitored more regularly in our homes, we’ll be able to train machine learning models to detect almost-invisible patterns that are early signs of the onset of a disease or health issue. We’ll then take immediate action and cure the disease before the first symptom becomes visible. The first examples of this will probably be available before 10 years. I would even say five and a half years.
Let’s talk about your own office environment. You’re working out of Newlab, where you’ve deployed some of your scanners. Have a lot of workers using the Newlab space begun regularly returning to the office? What sorts of insights have the scanners picked up so far?
AW: We are thrilled to have pioneered return to work systems with Girelle Guzman and Shaun Stewart at Newlab, along with other member companies like StrongArm Technologies. Newlab never closed, because we were building medical devices here. So we had to stay open, and in a safe manner. Today Newlab is at more than 50 percent occupancy, which is a record number compared to 12 percent average in NYC. At Norbert, we take a little bit of credit for that.
The main insights we have gathered is that we never detected anyone with a fever getting into the office in the morning, but we did detect people with a fever who were leaving the office. We are now exploring new ways of using our devices — for example, setting it up next to the first aid kit as a self-serve health checkup station. If you feel sick, you can go there and check your temperature, heart rate, breathing rate, HRV, and get data to help you decide if you should go home.
Are there any projects Norbert Health put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
AW: We had to put very exciting research projects exploring fall detection and through-wall radar imaging on hold, but we’ll resume as soon as it makes sense. We pack very futuristic sensors in our little device!
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
AW: F&F Pizzeria in Carroll Gardens.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
AW: Russ & Daughters in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
What’s your favorite New York landmark?
AW: The Red Hook Grain Terminal.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
AW: Cafe Gitane in Vinegar Hill for lunch — it's so quiet and the couscous is so good! For coffee, Lafayette in Noho — their madeleines and pastries are also so good!
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
AW: Taking guitar breaks twice a day!
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
AW: We talk about random stuff so much more on zoom. Zoom rooms post meetings is our new coffee machine. Our #random channel on Slack also has never been busier.
COGNITIVE TOYBOX
What does your company do?
Cognitive ToyBox co-founder and CEO Tammy Kwan: Cognitive ToyBox is an edtech company focused on early childhood education. We develop game-based solutions that support parents and educators in assessment and learning. Our mission is to help every child start school ready to succeed.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
TK: I founded the organization while in graduate school here in NYC, and I am so grateful to have done so! I am a big believer in the power of networks, and NYC has an incredible support system for entrepreneurs. I have greatly benefitted from New York-based networks, including the NYU Entrepreneurship community and the Robin Hood Foundation’s Blue Ridge Labs.
COVID-19 has posed all kinds of challenges, and perhaps one of the biggest is its impact on education, especially for a school district as large and diverse as NYC. We’re in the first week of blended learning for a first group of public schools students — what hurdles should we be anticipating? What markers should we be keeping our eye as we get underway?
TK: Student/family participation is a marker that I recommend focusing on. Especially for younger children, the remote aspect of blended learning requires a lot of supervision at home from parents and caregivers — we need to ensure that parents are supported at this time. Tech companies and schools can work together to make teaching tools easy to use, culturally relevant, and light-touch for families who are already juggling so much. This is especially true for early childhood grades like Pre-K, when children (and sometimes parents) are new to school, not familiar with technology, and have shorter attention spans.
Parents and teachers alike have been — understandably — frustrated with the process for moving instruction online, oftentimes with very little orientation or planning time. Is Cognitive ToyBox a tool school administrators or education departments could use to help?
TK: Yes. Back in March, when we realized school was no longer business as usual, Cognitive ToyBox increased our focus on research to better understand how our product could support parents and teachers in a post-COVID world. Based on their feedback, we adapted our early childhood technology platform to better inform schools on how families are engaging at home and also facilitate ongoing collaboration among teachers, families and young children.
When we’ve reached a post-pandemic point and schools fully reopen, do you think the city’s education system will return to its pre-pandemic normal? Or are there systems being used to learn at home that we should carry forward with us more permanently?
TK: Systems should engage in a process of continuous improvement. When schools return, they should absolutely reflect on what worked well and use those insights to permanently improve their processes.
In our work with Early Head Start, Head Start, Pre-K and K programs, Cognitive ToyBox has already seen some wins. For example, teachers are getting much more comfortable with technology and are more open to trying new solutions to support families and children in this “new normal.” Moreover, many programs have seen efficiency gains from using technology products that reduce their administrative and compliance burden and will likely continue to use these tools even after schools fully reopen. Our tool has built a bridge that enables more explicit collaboration between parents and teachers by giving them a common language to use when talking about school readiness.
Of course there’s lots of talk around remote and digital learning right now. What impact do you think the pandemic will have on the future of edtech? What’s next in that space
TK: The pandemic has brought to light the need for more innovation in the school system, especially for publicly funded programs. Selling to schools is notoriously difficult. This causes many new edtech companies to focus on the consumer market instead. I am hopeful that the pandemic will open the doors for more ventures to develop solutions specifically for PreK-12 school systems, and that school systems will also be more eager and willing to try new solutions.
Are there any projects Cognitive ToyBox put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
TK: Cognitive ToyBox was spun out of research from NYU, and we have several research collaborations and research programs ongoing to establish how our technology-based platform and tools can support school readiness. Some of this work has been put on hold as we focus our attention on supporting schools and family child care providers in the remote learning environment. I am looking forward to continuing to move forward on our “normal” research agenda once the pandemic ends.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
TK: Joe’s Pizza.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
TK: Ess-a-Bagel.
What’s your favorite New York landmark?
TK: Washington Square Park
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
TK: I love Ole & Steen in Union Square.
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
TK: Fast internet — I recently switched internet providers, and it has been a complete game-changer (no more dropped Zoom calls)!
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
TK: There’s nothing that can substitute for in-person interaction, but once a month, we do a virtual Zoom lunch. It’s a great way to catch up and chat casually about everything else going on in our lives!
Casebook pbc
What does your company do?
Casebook PBC president and CEO Tristan Louis: Initially incubated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Casebook is a proven SaaS human services platform. Our technology solutions are the response to frustration among human services professionals and leaders who have struggled with antiquated information systems. As a result, Casebook PBC developed a configurable, intuitive, and easy to use software in close partnership with human services practitioners. Our solutions evolve with policy and practice in child welfare and human services to provide the best-in-class experience.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
TL: I like to think of New York as the tech center with a heart. While Silicon Valley tends to focus on the supremacy of technology, New York tech companies are built around the idea of using technology to help people. This is a fundamentally different view of the world and the role of technology in the world that makes New York the only place where a company like Casebook could be built.
What brought you to New York?
TL: I’m an immigrant from France and New York, to me, is a city that serves not as American city but as the capital of the world. Even in the middle of this pandemic, there is still a pulse to the city that you can’t get anywhere else. Having lived through a few crises in the city now (9/11, the blackout, the hurricane, this pandemic), I’ve also learned that tragedy brings the best in New Yorkers. There’s a way in which neighbors and neighborhoods help each others that I haven’t found in other parts of the country.
I know I’m going to get heat for this but I think my feeling is best reflected by a John Updike quote: “the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
Casebook provides support to the human services sector. What does that mean exactly? How have their needs changed during COVID-19?
TL: Human services is the term used to describe what most people know as social services. This includes homeless services, child welfare, and adult services (including domestic abuse and substance abuse). We provide software that helps agencies, in both the public and private sector, turn what has traditionally been paper files into digital ones.
The COVID-19 crisis has substantially increased the need for human services but the combination of lockdowns and of the virus has made it more difficult for case workers to remain safe while helping the most vulnerable members of our communities. The Casebook software allows them to collaborate through our SaaS platform, lowering the amount of time they take organizing information and giving them more free time to spend dealing with people.
Casebook recently expanded its platform to include more program areas in its social services portfolio. Did the pandemic fast-track that expansion? Have the priorities of human service organizations shifted due to coronavirus?
TL: This pandemic has substantially altered the landscape for human services organizations. While it is a sector of our economy that has traditionally been reluctant to use cloud-based and mobile software, this crisis has demonstrated the value of solutions like ours. At the same time, we’ve seen agencies struggling to adapt, making it more difficult for the populations they serve. So it did force us to accelerate efforts to include more programs in our offerings.
Are there unique challenges the human services sector is grappling with right now?
TL: Our typical customer’s work is difficult in normal times but this crisis has stepped it up even further. There are a number of specific areas where social distancing stands in the way of social work. For example, in child welfare, one of the ways in which child abuse cases are reported is through mandated reporters, people like teachers in a classroom who notice some issue with a child they deal with on a regular basis. But as classrooms have moved online, those high-touch points have all but evaporated, making it more difficult to ensure that children are safe.
Yet, the number of people who need access to social services has increased and human services agencies are grappling with the difficult balance of having to provide more services while being faced with budget uncertainty. In the public sector, for example, we’re hearing of states cutting budgets by 15, 20, 25 percent, which is crazy for agencies that were already receiving too little financial support prior to the crisis.
Last, but not least, is the fact that government systems have often been fairly antiquated and therefore not adapted for flexibility in features and volume. For example, when the CARES Act passed in the spring, many changes were made to how to report on the poverty line, who was eligible for jobless benefits, for food stamps, etc, and many systems had issues adapting to all those changes while dealing with requests that were anywhere from 100 to 1000 times higher than what they usually deal with.
Let’s talk about your own workforce. A lot of companies are turning attention to their return-to-office plans, but Casebook decided to close the headquarters and go fully remote. What informed that choice? What will be the most dramatic change you anticipate for Casebook employees’ professional lives in being indefinitely remote?
TL: The safety of our employees is one of the most important things we have to deal with these days. We were early in closing our offices in New York (about two weeks before New York State was put on “PAUSE”) because, as a company exposed to a lot of the people on the frontline of that crisis and in February, we were worried about the oncoming impact of the virus.
Historically, we’ve always been a hybrid company, with about two-thirds of our employees in New York and the rest spread around the country. So, for us, the transition from remote-friendly to full remote went smoothly. We had a return-to-office plan, but it was increasingly clear that the office was not going to be as much of a place for innovation and teamwork as it was before. So in early July, we presented what return-to-office life would look like to the New York team and then we polled them on willingness to return to the office. And a substantial majority said that they would prefer taking advantage of our remote work policy than return to the office.
The biggest change for employees is that we have now removed uncertainty as to the future. People make decisions about where they live or what kind of set up they want based on what they know. Lifting that uncertainty makes their lives easier and removes one source of stress in a year when we’ve all had to deal with relentless new stressors.
Are there any projects Casebook put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
TL: The most difficult part of this outbreak has been in dealing with a lot of ancillary projects we’ve had as a group. As a public benefit corporation, we put a lot of effort in helping our community, doing things like volunteering as a group and organizing donations to shelters. These types of efforts require physical presence and going full-remote may have an impact on that.
From a business standpoint, we’ve also been a little more conservative in managing our growth. Technology efforts that are on our roadmap are getting stretched out over a longer period of time as we keep an eye on the changing landscape. Some projects also get displaced by other things that need greater attention now: for example, we didn’t use to track health in our system, because we figured that health and medical record systems could handle that part, but we’ve found that some of the small and mid-sized organizations we were working with didn’t have the dollars to expand on having a solution like ours.
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
TL: I’m a thin-slice guy so for me, Vezzo is the place to go (the owners have a few other places with the similar formula around town). But sometimes you feel like a thicker slice so Rosario’s on the LES is the way to go then.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
TL: Pick-a-Bagel on 23rd is where my favorite tends to be, but usually I’m lazy and go for Bagel and Schmear on 28th because it’s closer to where I live.
What’s your favorite New York building?
TL: I can see both the Empire State and the Chrysler from my bedroom, so hard to choose between those two.
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
TL: Back when one could eat inside, I’d say the café at the Morgan Library was a favorite. Kayzer Bakery (rest in peace) was a favorite of mine but now it’s gone. Walking around Madison Square with a coffee cup is a great way to have a relatively socially distant coffee these days.
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
TL: CTRL-D on Google hangout (or mapping CTRL-D on zoom) so that you keep yourself on mute unless you’re talking. Multiple desktop (using mission control) on the Mac so I have a video meeting open full screen but can easily slide to documents with three fingers on my touchpad.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
TL: Remote social hour with drinks or games every Thursday. And #thanks, #pets, #travel, #food on Slack which are all super active channels. We had our first facemask-to-facemask social hour in McCarren Park last night, which all attendees enjoyed.
Upsolve
What does your company do?
Upsolve co-founder and CEO Rohan Pavuluri: Upsolve helps low-income families file bankruptcy for free, using an online web app. We’ve been funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, Y Combinator, Eric Schmidt, Vinod Khosla, Chris Sacca, Jim Breyer, and Harvard University. To date, we’ve relieved over $250 million in debt.
Why did you found your company in NYC?
RP: NYC is home to Blue Ridge Labs, the only physical incubator for tech nonprofits in the US. I started Upsolve after my sophomore year at Harvard when Hannah Calhoon, the Managing Director for Blue Ridge Labs at the Robin Hood Foundation, offered me a free desk for the summer.
We’ve all seen the headlines about how the pandemic has ravaged the economy, with layoffs and unemployment levels at record levels. A lot of people are in tough financial situations. Does that mean a wave of bankruptcies are coming?
RP: Yes, we think that’s likely, especially given what happened following the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010. Bankruptcy is an important tool to re-enter the economy for many low-income and working class people. People most often file bankruptcy after unexpected shocks, particularly job loss and medical illness.
Are you seeing people cite coronavirus as the reason they’re filing for bankruptcy?
RP: Yes. The number of Upsolve users without a job has doubled since before COVID-19, and many people say that COVID-19 was the reason for their unemployment.
Most people think of declaring bankruptcy as a stigmatizing process that happens in a court with lawyers, but you’re providing it via a web app. How is technology making it a more effective experience for those going through the process?
RP: Most importantly, we use technology to make bankruptcy free at scale. Millions of Americans are sadly too broke to afford a bankruptcy lawyer, and technology has allowed us to create a more equitable, just legal system. It’s one of the greatest civil rights injustices of our day that countless Americans can’t access their rights when they can’t afford lawyers.
In addition to bankruptcy, what other tools are being underutilized? How could we be doing more to provide legal and financial services to those most impacted by the pandemic?
RP: Countless areas of poverty law require someone to have a lawyer to access their rights — that makes no sense because if they could afford a lawyer, they wouldn’t have the legal problem in the first place. One way to tackle this problem is more high quality free legal content on the internet. We do this through web-based resources on Chapter 7 bankruptcy and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but there’s so much opportunity for other fields like housing, domestic violence, debt collection lawsuits, and social security.
Are there any projects Upsolve put on hold when the outbreak began? What are you most looking forward to devoting more time to when the pandemic ends?
RP: We continue to be hyper-focused on our mission to make bankruptcy more accessible to families who hit hard times. I’m most looking forward to working with my team in person, which I love. It’s been hard without their energy!
Where do you get your favorite pizza slice?
RP: Slice at 44th and 3rd.
Where do you get your favorite bagel?
RP: Court Street Bagels, across from Blue Ridge Labs in Cobble Hill.
What’s your favorite New York building?
RP: I do really love the Strand Bookstore building. It also houses the Robin Hood Foundation, our first institutional funder!
What’s the best place in New York for a coffee or lunch meeting (remember in-person meetings)?
RP: Definitely Bryant Park (many places for coffee, but a special shout out to the Maison Kayser nearby!)
What’s your favorite remote work office hack?
RP: Meditation before your workday! And remembering all the time you save from no commuting if you ever feel like you haven’t done enough.
What’s one new thing your team is doing to stay connected while everyone works from afar?
RP: We’ve had some intense Pictionary.
All illustrations by Elly Rodgers
NEW YORK CITY, September 6 by itoodmuk