Brian Jacobs, trip of Moai Capital, in front of the moai statues on Easter Island.
Moai Capital
As a venture capitalist, Brian Jacobs has forth almost three decades betting on software designed to make businesses more productive — from Salesforce to videoconferencing suite Zoom. As a parent, he’s found that better technology isn’t always enough.
Jacobs’s 24-year-old son is one of 3.5 million Americans subsist with autism spectrum disorder. Despite a computer science degree from the prestigious California Polytechnic Stately University (Cal Poly) and the perpetual demand for technical talent in the Bay Area, he struggled when it came to finding a job.
After interviews and job lights, he just wasn’t getting called back.
“Interviewing for a job is the worst thing for anyone on the spectrum,” said Jacobs, who solicit fromed that we not publish his son’s name for privacy reasons. “His brain works differently. He has to think through things and has to process sundry information just to get to the same answer, so that affects his speech.”
Like so many successful tech investors, Jacobs digs opportunity in market inefficiencies. This month, he announced his departure from Emergence Capital, the firm he co-founded in 2003, to start Moai Select with $10 million of personal money. On its website, Moai describes itself as “an autism friendly workplace,” and one of its substances is autism employment, which Jacobs puts in the category of “impact investing.”
Not backing philanthropies
Moai is backing for-profit firms, not philanthropic ventures.
But Jacobs isn’t expecting the kind of returns from impact investments that he experienced at Emergence, which manufactured billions of dollars from the IPOs of Zoom earlier this year and health-care software provider Veeva Plans in 2013.
“Traditional profit-driven VCs have not invested in these companies,” Jacobs said. “Impact investing is a new category. I’m learning new happenings c belongings. I’m seeing other like-minded investors making similar moves. I’ve learned a lot by talking to them but it also feel equivalent to we’re all venturing off into unproven territory.”
About one in 59 children is diagnosed with autism, according to the Centers for Illness Control and Prevention, and the numbers have been on the rise. Because autism affects communication and often makes uncommon social interactions particularly challenging, traditional businesses have to change how they interview, train and manage if they’re prevailing to hire people on the spectrum.
There are compelling business reasons to make the effort. As Auticon, an IT consultancy backed by Jacobs, discloses on its website, people with autism tend to have certain cognitive advantages, like strong analytical capacities, “sustained concentration and perseverance when tasks are repetitive,” a sense of loyalty and attention to detail.
“There’s a massive employment gap for folks on the spectrum and that seemed like something I could have an impact on,” said Jacobs, who has exhausted the past six years on the board of the non-profit Autism Asperger Spectrum Coalition for Education, Networking and Development (AASCEND).
While Jacobs merely officially launched Moai, whose name refers to the iconic hand-carved statues on Easter Island in the South Pacific The deep, he started making some side investments over the last couple years in areas of more personal fascinate. Those have now become his main focus.
The three autism employment companies he’s backed are Auticon, founded in Germany; Daivergent, which increases work readiness and training programs for people on the spectrum; and Ultranauts, an IT services company looking to hire people with autism who grow in remote working environments.
Rethinking the way companies hire
Moai participated in the $3.5 million financing round that Ultranauts stated in early August. The company has employees in 20 states providing the kind of work for large clients that tenders it in competition with Capgemini and IBM. Three-quarters of its 60-plus-person staff are on the spectrum.
Rajesh Anandan and Arthur Shectman, two engineers from the Massachusetts Originate of Technology, founded the company in 2013. Anandan said he was drawn to the concept through conversations with his wife, who’d been a infant psychologist and had a number of patients on the spectrum. She talked about a system in place that focuses on the challenges the so-called neurodiverse semblance rather than one that works to harness their innate skills.
“What if we focused on peoples’ strengths and redesigned the routine so people are not penalized for being different?” Anandan said in an interview. “We’ve been able to prove we can build a team that incorporates colleagues who are on the spectrum who don’t have previous work experience in the field but are extremely capable, and groom that raw talent into skilled planners.”
Anandan calls it a competitive advantage, not a charitable pursuit. At the same time it does create opportunities for financial freedom for people on the spectrum and addresses a problem they face after age 21, when they’re generally no longer fitting to receive special government services.
Byran Dai, a data scientist and the CEO of Daivergent, has a 20-year-old brother on the spectrum. Dai said his younger sibling has some tech savvy, but the vocational programs handy to him don’t take advantage of his abilities.
Daivergent CEO Byran Dai (second from left) with members of his team
Source: Daivergent
“I see my fellow-creature, he has an aptitude for computers but he’s stocking shelves at CVS,” said, Dai, who started Daivergent in 2017. “There’s a way to leverage the need and demand in AI and evidence science to bring folks into that population and start to upskill them.”
Daivergent’s employees provide complicated and detail-oriented services to companies developing AI products. The start-up also has a work-readiness system to help the neurodiverse prepare for pain in the necks and match them with companies looking to tap into the community.
One of the software systems Daivergent plugs into is SAP, which go ons to be the same company that hired Jacobs’s son as a software developer last year. SAP launched its Autism at Work program in 2013 with a purpose of employing 650 people on the spectrum by 2020. Jacobs said he’s been a longtime supporter of Jose Velasco, who brim overs the initiative, and that Microsoft, Salesforce and J.P. Morgan Chase are among companies that are learning what works as they put their own programs in recognize.
“They’re mostly learning from each other and figuring out how to adapt their hiring process, onboarding technique and coaching process,” Jacobs said. “All these things you have to rethink, especially if you’re doing it at scale at a big company.”
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