PepUp Tech is a Trailblazer

If I were to walk into the Louvre and it was the same picture over and over and over again, nobody would want to go there and see those paintings, because this is the same damn picture.

Diversification gives you a higher yield on your return. You already know that. So why wouldn't you do the same within your organization?

We don't consider ourselves a charity. What we're doing is we're helping to uncover the opportunity that is there.

Hubbup Tech goes out and finds all the different shades of color of people, and it brings them into the world of technology, and we give them access, and we introduce them to the people that we know.

The students that are in our programs are told no a lot in their life. So to come into our program and for us to accept them for who they are, it helps beyond what we can even imagine.

I grew up in, like, really, like, extreme poverty, a lot of crime, a lot of violence in that area.

I felt judged. I felt looked down upon.

A lot of people told me that I would amount to nothing.

For people who live in poverty, life and death is a balance every day.

When I grew up, I met so many smart, incredible individuals. But, you know, they were limited by resources. So, like, for me, it always goes back to wanting more for people, right? I said, okay, how can I find other people that are as motivated as me to build a nonprofit? And that year, I went to Dreamforce. Dreamforce is a very special conference, right? Everyone there, they're thinking about innovation and growth and how to change the world. So not surprising that I met them at Dreamforce and established this friendship and then grew this organization under that friendship.

Being part of a consultancy was never something I would have considered before I.

Started working with Abel. So I sent Abel to go meet Patrick.

We don't hire someone based on how they were born. We hire somebody based on how they think. We build innovative applications on the Salesforce platform. Pep Up Tech trains these students, and so this is why it's a great relationship, because they can come here using these tools that they just learned using Trailhead is a great way to start writing your own code and create really innovative products.

When you invest in people of color, you're opening your eyes to a whole different lens. You're widening your data set. Now you're getting, like, some sort of different cadence.

In the tech industry, we're trying to solve big problems. We need diversity of thought. We can't just have one type of person in the room making decisions for the entire population.

We need to hire people that push us to think differently. And you can't get pushed to think differently if you hire all the same type of people.

A diamond is just a stone until that stone is unearthed. So what we try and do is we try and dig those diamonds out and polish them so people will take notice.

Anytime that you share the knowledge and your experiences, you're blazing a trail for others to follow.

You trailblazers do that. Like, sometimes we'll look at the path and be like, mmm, I'm gonna cut through the grass. I'm gonna make my own path.

My students will say to me, you changed my life.

You changed my life.

I mean, it makes me wake up.

And go, I wanna do it again.

They helped me put myself out there and obtain a job within the ecosyste system. Yeah. To me, I think Pepper Tech doesn't.

Just give you opportunities, it changes your life. And that's what it did for me. Pepper Tech and Salesforce opened a whole new world for me.

Salesforce had this million people employed moonshot, and we were like, we are going to meet that moonshot, and this is how we're going to do it.