Andy Molinsky: [00:00:00] Today's guest is Georges Clement, who is a Co-Founder of JustFix.nyc, a nonprofit that supports tenants facing harassment and poor housing conditions with technology to build well-documented cases and connect with community and legal advocates. Georges also a Kennedy fellow studying the Intersection of Technology and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Andy Molinsky: [00:00:29] Previously, Georges was a fellow with Blue Ridge Labs at the Robin Hood Foundation, and a Product Manager at General Assembly, leading the expansion of General Assembly's business programs around the world. Georges is a New Yorker with a BA in Sociology and African Studies from the University of Wisconsin Madison and was recently selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Law and Policy, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and an American Express Emerging Innovator. I'm really happy to have Georges with us here today on the podcast.

Andy Molinsky: [00:01:16] So, thank you so much for joining us today.

Georges Clement: [00:01:19] Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Andy Molinsky: [00:01:21] Great. So, let's jump right in. And I'd love to hear a bit about what you do now. What's your job? How long you've been doing it? Do you like it? Give us a sense of what you're up to.

Georges Clement: [00:01:33] So, I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky. I absolutely love the work that I do. As you mentioned, I'm one of the Co-Founders of JustFix.nyc. We're a bit of a unique entity in that we look very much and operate very much like a tech startup, but we're actually a non-profit. And so, we're trying to apply the same kind of technology and data techniques that are very common in this for-profit and, sort of, Silicon Valley worlds to help address a really critical problem in New York City and in cities across the country.

Georges Clement: [00:02:16] And so, our team is a very interdisciplinary team made up of folks who are coming more from technology backgrounds, as well as people coming from community organizing, tenant organizing specifically. So, I'm splitting my time these days between Brooklyn, New York where JustFix.nyc is based and, also, in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a fellow here at Harvard Kennedy School as well.

Andy Molinsky: [00:02:45] So, tell us about the organization. What do you do? What would be a good example of where your organization would be super useful?

Georges Clement: [00:02:53] So, there are over a million New Yorkers across all five boroughs that live in what the city defines as deficient housing. So, that is an apartment, if you can imagine, that has three or more major violations present and unaddressed at any given time. So, these are things like lead paint, black mold, lack of heat or hot water, rats and cockroaches. Any of these issues would be really difficult and frustrating to deal with and dangerous to deal with just one. And so, you're talking about over a million people in New York City alone that are living in conditions that can be quite dangerous and unhealthy.

Georges Clement: [00:03:44] So, we are supporting those New Yorkers to take action to improve the conditions in their apartments. We hope those tenants with a simple, self-help, web-based tool to take action and take various steps. So, think of it as Turbo Tax for taking action against your landlord, wherein an individual tenant can build out their case. So, that means uploading photo evidence, completing a checklist of issues that they're dealing with, and any other kind of communications that they've had with their management company or super in their building. And then, we streamline their ability to report these issues to the city, or send notices to their landlord, or actually start a case in housing court. So, that is our primary tool for individual tenants.

Georges Clement: [00:04:44] And then, the other side of our work is really supporting the really rich ecosystem of advocates across the city. So, from community organizations, to policy makers, to legal aid providers, and helping them with data to be able to do very targeted work. So, focusing their work and outreach at the buildings and the neighborhoods that are most at risk and helping them to have the data to create really compelling, strong, organizing actions or legal cases.

Andy Molinsky: [00:05:18] Wow, really cool. So, let's rewind. It sounds super interesting, really worthwhile, and meaningful organization. Let's rewind. And you said that you went to, or I told, I said that you went to the University of Wisconsin. So, you were there. You were a student. Tell us what you majored in. Tell us about your college experience. And then, I'd love to fill in the gaps between that and what you're doing right now.

Georges Clement: [00:05:40] Yeah. So, ironically, when I started at University of Wisconsin, I was in the business school. I was planning on majoring in Management or Finance. And I took my first accounting class, and didn't do so well, and realized that it was not a topic that was very interesting to me. And the business courses that I took felt very general, and abstract, and they just didn't get me excited.

Georges Clement: [00:06:14] That same year, I took a couple of courses in the sociology departments and met a couple of professors that were really fantastic, and got really interested in Sociology as a discipline and studying inequality in various areas of of life in the US and globally. So, I ended up switching to majoring in Sociology and not looking back from there.

Andy Molinsky: [00:06:46] Wow, interesting. So then, what was your first job experience after college?

Georges Clement: [00:06:54] So, I was only very interested in politics. So, my first job out of college was actually working on a congressional campaign of someone who was running against Charlie Rangel to represent in Congress, basically, Upper Manhattan. So, Harlem and the South Bronx. That campaign did not go so well. We didn't get much more than, I think, 11% or 12% of the vote. Charlie Rangel was a 20-term incumbent and something like that. He had been in office literally for decades. And so, it was a very big hurdle with that election. It is really fascinating to get to work on the campaign to be very involved in the day to day.

Georges Clement: [00:07:40] After that campaign, with a Sociology degree, you're, sort of, interested in a lot of things. I'm prepared for, virtually, no particular jobs except going into academia. And so, I was open to lots of different types of job opportunities. A friend who had started working in technology encouraged me to look at small companies, some of these startups that were emerging in New York. And one of the lists of companies that I looked at was from Y Combinator, which is, sort of, the most famous tech accelerator in the US based out in the Bay Area.

Georges Clement: [00:08:23] And there was an education startup that had just graduated from Y Combinator, and the founders were moving back to New York. It was very small. They were a founding team of three with a couple of employees. And I was lucky enough to join that team soon after the congressional campaign ended, basically, as a generalist. They sort of needed somebody young, and eager, and willing to not make very much money because they had raised a very small seed round that could do a little bit of everything.

Georges Clement: [00:09:00] So, for that first year, I was working at this company. It was called Tutorspree. It was, basically, an online tutoring marketplace. And I was doing everything from customer service, to sales, to marketing, and operations, working very closely with two of the founders, the CEO and the CFO, and, basically, got to build out, over the course of that year, a team of folks who were doing sales, and customer service, and marketing, and got to really touch lots of different aspects of the company and really see what it took to bring a company from one customer, to a hundred customers, to a thousand, to 10,000.

Georges Clement: [00:09:49] And after that year, the company, sort of, fizzled out a little bit, and the founders chose to leave. And I was, sort of, sitting there thinking about why I did so many different things in that role in the course of a year. What was it that I was most intrigued by, most interested in focusing on in my next role? And I was lucky enough to get introduced to folks at General Assembly, a slightly later-stage startup in the education space in New York, and absolutely fell in love with what General Assembly was doing and joined the General Assembly basically a year and a half after I had graduated.

Andy Molinsky: [00:10:32] Really interesting story. It's funny. There are points about it that popped out to me, like you started with your eyes open. This is looking for opportunities early on. You tapped your network. You said that a friend of yours who started working in technology hooked up with this Y Combinator startup. So, that's building. That's tapping your network. A lot of young people right out of college don't think of their friends as a network, but they're a network, right?

Georges Clement: [00:11:03] Absolutely.

Andy Molinsky: [00:11:03] So, it's kind of interesting. It's interesting how you did this. And you were young, you were eager, you're willing to be poor, but you wanted to learn a lot. It's almost like you traded tons of learning for money, which a pretty good trade early on.

Georges Clement: [00:11:17] Yeah, absolutely. I, also, had the fortune of my parents were living in New York. I could live with them for a period of time. New York City is an extremely expensive place to live. And so, that is not something that everybody can do and have access to. So, there's certainly an element of risk taking that is available because my parents, sort of, had a spare bedroom in their two-bedroom apartments in New York.

Andy Molinsky: [00:11:53] Right, yeah.

Georges Clement: [00:11:53] I would say in terms of network building, that has absolutely been the single largest driver of getting from step to step in my career thus far. I didn't go through these, sort of, large traditional interview processes like out of Wisconsin interviewing at consulting firms or for finance jobs, that kind of thing. I always had, sort of, slightly nontraditional internships during college. And so, I wasn't interested in working in these big corporations where it would have been a more clearly defined path.

Georges Clement: [00:12:36] And so, when you're creating your own path, it very much comes from meeting people and getting introductions. And I must have had 20 different interviews or informal interviews that were getting coffee or getting a drink with somebody who maybe knew someone useful or was maybe hiring.

Andy Molinsky: [00:12:58] Let me just pause you.

Georges Clement: [00:12:59] It's probably a big failure right there.

Andy Molinsky: [00:13:00] Yeah. Let me just pause you for a second because I think that's super important. And I just want to kind of put a point on this for anyone listening. Is there anything that you would recommend people do? So, you're having all these coffee meetings. I've done this to a previous point in my career, having a lot of coffee meetings, meeting a lot of people, being introduced to a lot of people. How do you make the best of that? I'm just making this up. Do you create a spreadsheet on Excel where you kind of keep track of who you've talked to, what you talked about, and when to contact them again? Do you hook up with them on LinkedIn? Is it something else? Do you have any process or any tips about how to, kind of, not only do it but leverage it?

Georges Clement: [00:13:41] Yeah. I would say going into each of those conversations maybe with a particular goal in mind but, also, being open minded, communicating that you are willing to be -- in my case, that I was willing to be scrappy and just wanted to learn about a lot of different areas given I didn't have a very particular sort of subject area of interest.

Georges Clement: [00:14:10] Education was an area that, sort of, came naturally and emerged after a handful of conversations. Both of my parents are public school teachers in New York City. And so, that was, sort of, a topic of dinner table conversation throughout my childhood. And so, talking about education came naturally to me. And that ended up being where this has started. And so, letting things, sort of, start to happen organically but communicating that you simply want your foot in the door, and you want to work with really good people.

Georges Clement: [00:14:45] In terms of process, I didn't have a super structured process with a spreadsheet, or a template, or anything like that. I would say I looked back at some of my old emails, and I cringe at how silly they sound now, both because of being overly formal in some ways, and also just sort of the structure, signing off on emails with sincerely, and that kind of thing, things that I would absolutely never do now. But there is a level of formality, sort of, shows that you're serious and professional when you are really young. So, being really humble when you're getting started and not expecting that you're going to get some, sort of, dream job or some perfect role that you've had in your mind.

Andy Molinsky: [00:15:43] Yeah, really interesting. Let's move to some pointed questions. And the first one is about misconceptions. Can you think of any sort of misconceptions young professionals, people graduating college jumping into the professional world that they have about entering that world?

Georges Clement: [00:16:04] Yeah. I would say the outside perception of millennials is certainly that people expect promotions, and lots of responsibility, and recognition right away. That won't come in the vast majority of workplaces. And so, I think, a lot of are people still going thinking that they do deserve that kind of rapid ascension. And so, this perception of millennials in that way is fairly accurate as far as I've seen actually. And so, again, learning to be humble is really important to counter that.

Georges Clement: [00:16:47] I would also say a little bit more tactically is that most people aren't necessarily getting an undergrad education that is going to prepare them with the kind of hard skills that most people need in the workplace. This is exactly the gap that General Assembly was looking to fill when they started this movement of coding boot camps, and then expanded it to other subjects like product management, user experience, design, data analytics, that kind of thing.

Georges Clement: [00:17:19] I'm still always shocked at seeing that you can graduate with a four-year degree in marketing and not know how to run a Facebook ad. And when you look at companies, marketing spend, Facebook, and Instagram, and Google ads are the vast majority of their marketing spend at this point. And it's just really fascinating to see this, sort of, real skills gap between what people learn in their undergraduate degrees, where if you're graduating with a Marketing degree, you most definitely feel like, "I should be prepared to do a marketing job." And there's still this big gap in actually knowing how to execute in that role when you get into that job. So, still acknowledging that there's going to be a lot of ongoing learning that you're going to need to do even when you step foot into your first role.

Andy Molinsky: [00:18:12] Interesting. And then, actually, it's sort of interesting twist on what you just mentioned. Are their skills -- So, another question. Are there skills or knowledge from college that, I guess, for you, ended up being useful? I mean, I fully agree with you about this gap, and it's an interesting point you make. How about the reverse? What, if anything, was helpful or useful? And was anything helpful or useful, I don't know, in an unexpected way?

Georges Clement: [00:18:39] Yeah. I would say in terms of, sort of, soft skills, simply time management and being well-organized is something that's critical in college. If you're an active person with a full course load, you have a lot to balance at once. And work-life is no different than that. You may have multiple projects that you're working on at work, in addition to a social life, and other kinds of professional development, and that kind of thing outside of work. So, that kind of time management is really critical. And it might be something that you start getting really good at in high school, also, potentially.

Georges Clement: [00:19:17] The biggest thing to me is, I think, I started being more proactive and motivated in, sort of, an intellectual way towards the end of college. And that kind of intellectual curiosity in college led me to do research and independent study with a particular Sociology professor of mine that was really fantastic. And that's something that has been incredibly important is, sort of, being opportunistic but seeking out those opportunities.

Georges Clement: [00:19:54] When you find a subject area or a person that you feel like you are really interested in learning more about, and you feel yourself naturally gravitating towards, that interest will make it that much easier to learn more on that topic and succeed in that area because that comes across when you talk about your work if you are genuinely interested in it, instead of, I have friends who certainly go to work. They're there from 9:00 to 6:00 or 7:00, and they go home, and they have to compartmentalize these parts of their life. And when you ask them about their work, they're not terribly excited. So, being proactive and following those threads when you see yourself gravitating towards something is really important. And that's certainly something that started in, sort of, the more academic context later on in college for me.

Andy Molinsky: [00:20:59] Wow, very cool. And speaking of academic context, let's hear our student question of the day. This question comes from Amanda. I'm going to play it for you, and then you'll have a chance to respond. So, let's listen to Amanda.

Amanda: [00:21:12] Hi. My name is Amanda. And I'm a college student majoring in Biology and Neuroscience. And I'm from Quincy, Massachusetts. So, I'm graduating college soon, and I just want to ask, what did you do within the year you graduated college? And looking back now, would you have done anything differently?

Andy Molinsky: [00:21:30] All right. So, she's asking, it looks like, about immediately after college. And you, kind of, answered that one, but any more thoughts about it?

Andy Molinsky: [00:21:40] Yeah. I mean, I would say given the, sort of, career path I've gone down, I really benefited from getting this, sort of, broad spectrum of skills and insight across an organization at Tutorspree. I also have come full circle a little bit in terms of being here at the Kennedy School after working on a congressional campaign as, sort of, the very first internship I got when I graduated from college. That has still been a thread. And at JustFix.nyc, we do a lot of work with elected officials. So, even though that wasn't something that I continued immediately, it is something I've been able to pick back up.

Georges Clement: [00:22:31] And I think that's an important thing as well. While there may seem to be these, sort of, deviations in your path, there can be intersections later on in your career. And I've gotten to continue working on some in an intersection with politics and policy at this point. And it's just really exciting to see the ability to, sort of, go back to some of these previous interests.

Georges Clement: [00:23:08] And I would say, if there are things that people are excited about, and they feel like the first job that they get isn't directly about that topic, don't panic. Careers are extremely long. You talk about people having three, four, or five different careers over the span of their life but, also, intersection of various careers and various topics of interest is always possible.

Andy Molinsky: [00:23:35] Yeah, I like that. So, take the long view. So, we're nearing the end. And this has been super interesting. I have a couple of, sort of, quick fire questions for you. The first one is, what gets you motivated at work?

Georges Clement: [00:23:50] So, absolutely, the impact that we make when we hear from tenants that they were worried that they were going to lose their home, that they were going to be evicted, or they were living in conditions that were extremely dangerous for them or their families. When those issues get resolved, that is incredibly humbling and motivating to continue doing that work.

Georges Clement: [00:24:23] And I would say, also, hearing from folks a change in, sort of, their belief and their attitude towards their situation. So, feeling empowered to take this action themselves, and stand up for their rights is really exciting, and very much motivates myself and everybody on my team.

Georges Clement: [00:24:49] And I would say the other thing is one of my favorite aspects of my role now is getting to hire the people that I work with. And that, basically, means every time I go into the office, I see people that I really, really respect that bring an incredible attitude and passion to the work. And that is so fun. It is really rare and really lucky to be able to, sort of, choose the people that you work with.

Andy Molinsky: [00:25:21] Interesting. And how about in terms of, I guess, the people that you work with, can you say a bit about mentoring? So, based on your experience of being a mentor, perhaps, to some of these people you just mentioned, maybe it's having had mentors of your own, and you talked a little bit about that earlier with maybe some professors, what do you think makes for a good mentor for young professionals? And how should someone find one?

Georges Clement: [00:25:50] Yeah. So, I do think it's a misconception that the folks think people that are experienced at a later stage in their career don't have enough time or aren't interested in talking to them, when, in fact, they think many great leaders really love the opportunity to talk to folks that are early in their career and give them advice on what direction to take, that kind of thing. So, certainly, I encourage people to be very proactive and don't be afraid that someone might not have time to pencil you into their schedule for a few weeks. That's totally fine. Take advantage of those opportunities.

Georges Clement: [00:26:34] I would say the other thing is mentors understanding that the learning is two ways. So, I think, every great mentor that I've had and, certainly, relationships that I've had with everybody on the teams that I've worked on is that everybody is learning, whether you are the more senior or the more junior person. It's not a one-directional transfer of information. Every leader should understand that they have just as much to learn from the folks that they are working with. And that might be a lower in the totem pole in their organization.

Georges Clement: [00:27:15] When you look at lots of these larger traditional corporations now, they're worried about disruption, and digital transformation, and that kind of thing. Well, if they just looked within their own company, they could learn a lot of what they need to adapt and evolve just through the younger, potentially, more junior team members.

Andy Molinsky: [00:27:39] Interesting. This has been great. I want to ask you one last question. Now, you talked about your experience in Wisconsin, which sounds like a really interesting college experience. You're older now, more experienced, done a lot of cool stuff. If you could sort of transport yourself back in time for a moment and speak to your 20-year-old college version of yourself, is there a piece of advice you might give that version of yourself back then? And if so, what might that be?

Georges Clement: [00:28:07] Wow. There's a lot of advice, some that I'll share here, and some that I would share privately. I would say everything is going to be okay. And, again, if it might feel like a very winding path, that's fine. It is an exploration. It can feel worrisome at points that there doesn't seem to necessarily be a North Star, or if there is, that that shifts a little bit, that's totally natural and not to worry.

Georges Clement: [00:28:42] And some of the opportunities that end up being the greatest opportunities for growth and learning don't feel like option number one at any given moment. So, sort of, rolling with the punches and using every single opportunity and hurdle that comes at you as a learning experience, and an experience to grow learn more about yourself is really, really critical. And, again, careers are very long, and they're not going to be simple steps one through five. So, just view everything as an opportunity to grow, for sure.

Andy Molinsky: [00:29:24] And how do you think the 20-year-old version of yourself would respond to that advice?

Georges Clement: [00:29:28] Probably, "Yeah, yeah, sure. Thanks. That was great. Sounds like a nice motivational speech."

Andy Molinsky: [00:29:34] All right. We're at the end of our chat. Thanks so much for for joining us today. Can you tell listeners how they can find out more about you and the work that you're doing?

Georges Clement: [00:29:47] Absolutely. So, you can go to our website for JustFix.nyc at justfix.nyc. So, .nyc instead of .org or .com. On Twitter, @justfixnyc. And you can find us on on Facebook as well.

Andy Molinsky: [00:30:08] All right, great. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Georges Clement: [00:30:14] Thank you so much for having me.