Lynn Davison 00:45
There she is.
Tara May 00:46
Good morning. Morning. How are you good I'm delighted to be on with you. I love your purple glasses.
Lynn Davison 00:53
Oh, thank you very much. It's inspired by the poem, when I'm old, I will wear purple.
Tara May 01:02
Have you ever loved that poem? And I love the clubs too, like the people that get together, yeah,
Lynn Davison 01:08
oh, I don't know about that. May I got something to do.
Tara May 01:12
Oh my gosh, Google it. You should Google it. So I did a I used to be a journalist in a prior life, and it must have been 20 years ago, I did a story on these clubs that get together based on this poem. I think they, they, it might be the Red Hat society, you know, because it's, I wear purple and the Red Hat, but they're still around. I just saw some out together, and I smiled at them, and was like, I can't wait to be you, right? Like it's amazing.
Lynn Davison 01:44
Yes, that's where I am. Alright, wonderful, yeah, yeah, alright. So I'm so thrilled to be talking to you today because we are going to figure out how we can do more to support a spirit tech, because you guys help our people get good jobs. And that's my goal, is for our people to get some good jobs. And you know, it's not so easy. So I've got some questions here, and the first one is, what inspired you? I I'm assuming you're the founder of a spirit tech. And did I say it right?
Tara May 02:23
You are saying it right. It is a spirit tech, a for autism. Spirit and tech all flow well together. I am not the founder. You're not the founders were two amazing people in 2008 Brenda and Moshe weitzberg, who were searching for meaningful employment for their autistic adult son, and just weren't finding things that were commensurate with his intelligence and ability. And they actually based the company on an organization called specialisterna in Denmark that was teaching QA to autistic adults, yeah, they built it from their kitchen table to $6 million company with 100 employees. Whoa, three years ago, at their retirement, I was recruited to be CEO and lead the the company to its next trajectory, which I am working actively to do. And check out this Lynn full circle moment. We are actually helping specialist Sterna with their training in the US. So we've had this great partnership with a company we were based on 20 years later.
Lynn Davison 03:41
That's cool. And I have, I have a member of my group who is doing their training starting in
Tara May 03:46
September. Well, it's going to be taught by an aspirated instructor. He just
Lynn Davison 03:51
got word that he's in it, and he was so excited and thrilled. He has always wanted to work in tech. And, you know, he's he just can't find the on ramp that works for him.
Tara May 04:04
So our instructor, Doug Norton, is autistic himself. Yes, he has three autistic grown children now, and is an incredible tech leader, in addition to having this really unique perspective on career and learning as an autistic person, he is a rock star, that Academy will be beautiful. Oh,
Lynn Davison 04:27
wonderful, wonderful. Okay, so, how do you help? How do you accommodate neurodivergent people, you know, so that they can get what they want out of a job. So
Tara May 04:43
it starts right from the get go with the hiring process. So our hiring process is incredibly unique for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the hiring process is the biggest hurdle for autistic people to getting a job. Um, and in part, it's because the hiring process is built to evaluate your social skills in a lot of ways, right? And that doesn't always have anything to do with how good you're going to be at the actual work itself. So we try, first of all, to break down those barriers from jump, right? So we are offering our candidates opportunities to show how good they are at the work the Academy is a great example of that. We provide our questions because we do do a conversational interview as well. We provide the questions in advance. So if you need some processing time, you need to write down or rehearse your answers. You can do that right? We tell you exactly what everything is going to look like in the interview process from start to finish, so that you aren't dealing with last minute surprises or figuring out where to park or how to log into the call. So we sort of right from the beginning, try to completely transform the process to be neuro inclusive, and then that goes through our workplace to absolutely everything that we do. I'll give you just a couple examples. I will not talk about it all day, but I could. Here's a couple examples. We have a sensory room in our office. If you need an escape from the hubbub of the office, you can go into that very quiet, very well lit sensory room with weighted blankets, with fidget toys, with emotional regulation techniques plastered on the wall, and you can have some space. But let's take that a step further. We also allow people to work from home, where you can set up your sensory environment exactly how you need it. We also think about different communication styles in the workplace, when I give an all hands call, for example, first of all, we record it so that you can watch it at either sped up or slowed down processing speeds based on what you need, and then we also provide visuals and bullet points information, right? So I often think to myself, Why was I not thinking about this when I was leading several 1000 people at AOL? Because, of course, in those 7000 people, you have visual learners, you have auditory learners, etcetera. So a lot of what we do is being more conscientious about neurodiversity and all these kinds of brains in the workplace in ways that actually benefit all of us, neurotypical and neurodivergent alike. So like I said, I could talk about that all day, but those are some of the examples of things we do.
Lynn Davison 07:39
Okay, all right, because I do have a member who's applied and is on the waiting list, I guess so,
Tara May 07:47
and that's a point worth making, right a spirit Tech, I often say we're chipping away at an iceberg that is, you know, the autism, unemployment rate and the underemployment of brilliant, talented people, and it's what keeps me up at night. Lynn, right, I am constantly thinking not about our employees, because they're awesome. They're in this great space, living their best life, doing building a tech company, but about all the people we can employ yet. How do we grow? How do we scale? Because the need is greater than the demand that we can get. So we're always thinking about new ways for funding for our academy. We offer our academy completely for free to autistic adults. It grew from one cohort its first year to more than five cohorts this year, and we're still have a waiting list. We still have a long line to get into the academy. And then in terms of growing our revenue and our clients, the more revenue and clients we have, the more people we can employ, so that we we can start shortening up that waiting list, like you just mentioned, of people who want to come in the door here. So grow, grow, grow. Because for us, growth is
Lynn Davison 09:01
mission. Okay, okay, so how can we it sounds like which part of the world is has responded best to your services.
Tara May 09:15
So it's interesting. I wouldn't say it's a specific part of the world. I would say it's a group of people in all parts of the world that care about the mission. Okay, you, I'll give you a good example. You meet someone in tech that has an autistic son, yes, which we did. You know. Noah silvers and his wife have one neurotypical son, one autistic son. He works in tech. He wants to open doors for us. He wants to make introductions because he cares about this mission. His wife is helping us fundraise because she cares about this mission. So I would say it's less where have people responded in terms of a certain industry? It's all industries, and it's people who know. Know and care about what we do, and often that means an autistic loved one.
Lynn Davison 10:06
Yes. Well, if you know the current guest is around 3% my guess is around 5% of the population. And if you expand that to all divergence, you know it's just your basic bell shaped curve. You got 66 and two thirds in the middle, and you got a third on each end, right?
Tara May 10:23
So, totally, totally. So it touches so so many
Lynn Davison 10:27
of us. It touches all of us. Yes, no question. So it sounds like what we need to do is increase the awareness among the people who care about autistic people, about what a spirit tech does
Tara May 10:47
1,000% so I'll give you my mantra since the day I started here. My mantra is everyone who knows about a spirit tech wants to work with a spirit tech. Yes, our job is to make sure more people know about a spirit tech. Okay, we are working hard at that. One thing that helped, we were named one of Forbes top 100 accessibility companies in the world. Nice, great, right? It opened a lot of doors. All of a sudden, a lot of people wanted to interview us. People are reaching out, right? So it's talk about a spirit tech. If I could ask anything of the people who care about the autism community, it is talk about a spirit tech, because when you talk about it, inevitably you meet another person who cares, and they make an introduction, and they can make an introduction, and maybe it's to a workforce development board that can help us get workforce development funding for our academy. Maybe it's to a business that needs a data project done, and, gosh, our team is awesome at that, right? So it doesn't matter who it is you're opening a door for us. Maybe it's a parent with a adult son or daughter who's looking for a job and doesn't know where the next place to turn is, even if we can't be the employer, we've got lots of partners. I never, ever leave an email from an autistic person or, really, anyone I'm a little bit crazy about that unreplied to, right? I will do everything I can to help. If it's not hiring, I can open a door.
Lynn Davison 12:25
So what? What problems do you solve for companies? What are the best problems that you solve at a spirit tech that you have the people to solve.
Tara May 12:42
I'll give you three good problems that we solve all day, every day. One is if you need a product or a tool or anything quality assurance tested, if you need it to be perfect or as close to perfect as humanly possible before it goes to market. We've got the team for that. So that's one, okay. Two, you have any sort of data project that is just too big, too time consuming for your internal team to do, and you need to outsource it. We got your back. We do cloud migrations, we do data annotation, we do normalization, we do large language model building. You've got a data problem, we've got a solution three. You need something to be accessible to everyone based on federal law, your website, your software, your chat bot, whatever it might be that's out there to the public, is required by law to be accessible to everyone. A spirit tech can help you both with testing and remediation to make sure it's accessible to all.
Lynn Davison 13:56
Wow, I can now. I can think that now I think that everyone that's a member, that's a tech kind of a person, should at least go to that Academy, right? That they should at least consider doing that. One of my members said that they were going to do that, but they were told that they were kind of overqualified for that, so they're the ones that are in your waiting list of
Tara May 14:23
Absolutely. And you know, one of the things we're thinking about is, how do we expand our offerings? Yes. So when, when we started the academy, it was QA, because QA is our jam, right? So if you're already trained in QA, or even advanced development, you might not learn something new at our academy, and so we wanted to have more one of the things that we are launching in September is our cybersecurity Academy, so that will lead to a CompTIA Security Plus certification, as well as hands on testing of the Department of Defense cybersecurity model. So. That was a great way for us to expand and offer more. And then the third thing I would say is that our academy simulates a workplace, and we do that on purpose, right? We are having you interact on Slack, on video conferencing calls, on email with people doing check in, like managers, and that is a really valuable skill for everyone you know, autistic or not, I remember being 22 sitting my first day in an office job, going, what do I even do? Who do I even talk to? Where do I get started? And so if you're autistic and you struggle with those sort of things, that can be even more exacerbated, and that practice in the friendliest, supportive, most neuro inclusive environment in that I know of is a great way to get ready for that first job. We also treat it like an internship. So at the end of it, you are getting references, you're getting your resume built up, and that, in and of itself, can be incredibly valuable.
Lynn Davison 16:00
Oh, makes your resume so much more magnetic. Yes, yes, that's what we want. Okay, alright, so I think the September Academy is is filled, right? I
Tara May 16:13
know, I know that's the thing keeping me up at night, right? Is if we have eight spots five times a year, that's 40 people. If 500 to 1000 people apply every year and they do, we're still just putting a dent in it.
Lynn Davison 16:28
Yes, that must be incredibly frustrating.
16:33
It just motivates me to work even harder.
Lynn Davison 16:36
Yeah, so if you could speak to CEOs at other companies, what would you ask them to do differently?
Tara May 16:46
Well, first, I would let them know, and I do this often, that you already have a neurodivergent team, right? And Lynn, what you were citing earlier, you know, 5% autistic, but really, when you expand that into ADHD, OCD and many other forms of neurodivergency, you're talking about, generally, one in five people have some sort of neurodivergent brain. And when you're talking about neurodiversity, you're talking about 100% of us. We all have brains that experience the world differently and cause us to walk through the world differently. So really want CEOs to understand that by embracing neurodiversity, they're thinking about their already existing team and how to help them be their best selves in the workplace, and that has an incredibly important return on investment for the Business Growth and Innovation, which you need in 2025 at the pace of AI, are driven by happy, successful, psychologically safe people, and that means really embracing and understanding all kinds of brains. Yeah,
Lynn Davison 17:57
the statistics about engagement are not encouraging engagement in the workplace. You know, it's less than half are
Tara May 18:03
engaged. Absolutely. Think about the loss of productivity, right? I mean, that is measured in the billions of dollars. Think about unsatisfied customers, because unsatisfied customers come from unsatisfied employees, right? So if you can keep your team happy and engaged that will drive your business forward?
Lynn Davison 18:23
Okay, yeah, that definitely makes sense. So how what's the best way for somebody to get involved with a spare tech?
Tara May 18:34
So think about your talent and your passion and your needs, and we will find a way to partner with you, right? Maybe you are awesome at navigating the government. Well, we work with source America on government contracts for disabled workers. It's a great way for us to move the organization forward. Maybe you're an awesome person on social media, you just have a million friends and followers. Talk about us, right? It's inevitably you're going to reach someone that wants to help, right? So I always say, take your talent that you offer the world and figure out how you can apply it to a really amazing mission. And if you're not sure, shoot me an email. Visit our website. We will help you find a way to collaborate with what I believed to be one of the most important missions out there today,
Lynn Davison 19:24
absolutely, it's just so important that we, and especially in light of the recent changes in qualifications for things like Medicaid, you know, people want to, it's it's not that our my kids. All my members all want to work. My kids in my house want to work. It's just there are some barriers that that they have to navigate around and to understand what those are and put the accommodations in place at the workplace and just be aware of them. You know, I was reading. Just yesterday, in a book that we can only people, we can only take in a few bits of information in our brain, and there's like billions of them to take in. But what we also do is take in this subconscious takes in so much more than the conscious. So our intention, when we're interviewing our intention comes across when we're managing someone, and if it's our intention to help make them feel safe so they can make a bigger contribution. Whether it's spoken or not, it's it's going to be they're going to know there, it's going to
Tara May 20:40
be felt. I think you're right. Intention is so important. You know, our team members often cite kindness as the most important accommodation. They just want people to accept them for who they are, and sometimes maybe be patient if they have a need. And I also want to just highlight something else you said, Lynn, because I think it's so important people want to work. And when you think, when I think about work, I think about how it's the way that we shelter ourselves, put food on our table, take care of ourselves and our loved ones, but it's also identity, absolutely what we offer the world and how we take our value and share it with someone else, and that's an incredibly important piece of living our best
Lynn Davison 21:29
lives. Absolutely and I was just talking to my one of my kids this morning, and he said, I do so much better when I have the structure of the job in all aspects of my life. When I'm adrift, I don't I don't do as well. When I'm structured, I do better.
Tara May 21:51
So we all, I mean, it's sometimes why we are so excited to come home after a vacation. As wonderful as the vacation is, as great as that new destination might have been we, we all sometimes feel that sense of, oh, right, I'm home again. And such an important piece of that is routine and living our life with some structure to it. It's important to every single one
Lynn Davison 22:14
of us. Yes, it's so is so is so. Just to tie up our little talk here. What, what have you learned personally in this role? How long have you been in this role? And what have you learned yourself that has really, you know,
Tara May 22:32
I'm three years in to the role, and I feel like it was just yesterday. I feel like,
Lynn Davison 22:36
yeah, okay, for six years, and it feels like I'm just starting. So
Tara May 22:42
I will tell you two things I've learned. One is that the most important thing we do at a spirit tech is build confidence and self esteem. Autistic people often have spent most of their lives hearing about their deficits, yeah, whether that's from well meaning loved ones, their work in therapy, their school experience, and I often say to the team, our biggest work is rebuilding our perspective from a strengths based context, what is your strength and what do you have to contribute in a workplace and to the world? So that is something really important that I've learned. And then the second thing I would say, I hope that's what I give to the team. What I've gotten from the team is a reminder to also give myself grace, because this team is so willing to give me grace, right? Um, and it's a reminder that we all are humans, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we don't leave that behind from nine to five, Monday through Friday, and when we're willing to embrace that human experience and give both each other and ourselves grace, all of a sudden, the world becomes a lot kinder and better place.
Lynn Davison 24:16
I love that kindness theme. I was just talking to one of my members, and they had just seen, then, the most recent Superman movie,
Tara May 24:27
and heard a lot about that. I haven't seen it yet.
Lynn Davison 24:31
He's fantastic. And this is a movie critic, so for him to be impressed is a good thing. And in the middle of it, it was like, kindness is the new I can't remember what he said, but this kindness is the new way. That's the new way. And it was in the middle of that movie, and he picked right up on it, and it, I think it's, I think it's the way we've got to be with each other
Tara May 24:53
Absolutely. And the world doesn't always feel that way, right? Sometimes it feels way too mean, way too quiet. Old. I could cite some, you know, pretty significant examples of that over the past six months. And so if we can create more kindness for everyone, including ourselves, which is sometimes the hardest,
Lynn Davison 25:13
yeah, to do, we can make that world work better for more people. And that's what we want. We want to make it work for everybody. So, you know, we can, we can have the lives we love, and we can take care of our world, and, you know, leave it better off than we found it. The ROI of kindness
Tara May 25:34
is incredible. And I say that often it's infinite.
Lynn Davison 25:41
It's infinite. Yeah. Oh, thanks so much, Tara. I really have enjoyed talking to you. I have an idea of where I want to take us next, so let me do the steps there and then bring you in if I need to, because I just here's my here's my thinking is that so many autism local autism organizations get their funding from corporations. Those people need to know about a spirit tech. The funders, they need to know about it. So that's where I'm thinking of heading next. Whatever
Tara May 26:13
you've got cooking, I'm in great to talk to you today.
Lynn Davison 26:17
Thanks, Tara, thanks for being there. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do my best to spread the word in all the ways that I can and see
Tara May 26:26
what I can do to take action. Awesome. Thanks. Lynn,
Lynn Davison 26:29
thank you, Tara, bye for now. You.
