An Interview With Penny Bauder
You don’t have to have everything perfectly set up and scheduled in order to start. This belief prevents you from starting, always striving to reach some idea of “ready” or “perfect” that is either too time consuming or expensive to reach. We started without a logo but succeeded in doing what we intended to do, and I’m glad we didn’t wait for it. There are few exceptions to this, like if you truly have no money or materials, if you’re working with hardware or inventing things and need to get patents, but for the most part, all other things are procrastination disguised as inability.
As part of my series about young people who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Zino Haro.
Zino Haro is the 24 year old CEO and Co-Founder of fashion tech company Uni-ke, for which she was recognized as a 30 Under 30 Hispanic Executive in 2021. Industry experiences include cybersecurity (research presented in 4 countries), fashion design (collaborations with New York and Seoul fashion weeks since 2017), music distribution, and Web3 digital art. Haro is the child of immigrants and a first generation college graduate who completed a BS at Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MBA. Currently, Haro is working with the World Economic Forum Global Shapers community to run the OneRise startup program.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit how you grew up?
I’m still growing up. We don’t stop growing up. I think I still cringe at my past self from six months ago. That’s a sign of growing up, right?
In the traditional sense, I lived in many places, mostly with my mother. I spoke Spanish at home and never went on vacation. Is that important? I just realized that’s not really a thing you hear people talk about in interviews. Anyway, I went to high school in Texas, where I did very casual archery and attended engineering university courses in the summer for four years. They were free and interesting. I accidentally set a project on fire one time — bad wiring. I think that says a lot about me already.
After that, I went to Columbia University and worked at various places. There was a point where I had two internships and a work-study job at the same time as a full course load. I’ve been a barista, a web developer, a cybersecurity analyst, and a 3D gallery designer in everything from a 2 person startup to companies like Madison Square Garden and Jane Street. I think I just do what I want to do and try to do it as well as I can. That tends to work out pretty well.
You are currently leading an organization that aims to make a social impact. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change in our world today?
OneRise is… I want to call it a startup accelerator, because that’s what it feels like. We don’t have any funding right now, so we can’t provide startups with funding directly; but we work to improve networks, awareness, and directly connect startups with mentors and investors when possible. Our target founders are immigrants and children of immigrants who want to start a company in the US. Being an entrepreneur is already hard as it is, but immigrants face even more issues than the average founder. There are cultural communication differences, visa issues, and sometimes people are self-conscious about having an accent, which makes it harder to pitch to investors confidently. There’s also no existing network for them to fall back on in this country, so they’re lonelier than most when hard times come. We’re trying to make things a little easier.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I’m the co-founder of a startup. We have been in and out of idea and (multiple) development stages since 2017, and the years have shed light on many difficulties we didn’t expect or fully understand at the start. One of my co-founders is an immigrant, and my other co-founder and I are children of immigrants. We had to consider things that many founders don’t have to, like taking care of family members in other countries and — in one case — going through an extensive immigration process. Finding a network to fall back on wasn’t straightforward either — attending a prestigious university doesn’t really grant you the privileges and connections that come along with the stereotype, at least not for everyone. That’s the origin of my passion. We go through things as founders. We live them. It’s hard to ignore after that, and we start seeing these issues pop up everywhere we look in the founder community.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest it. They don’t get up and just do it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and do it? What was that final trigger?
It wasn’t up to me, really. The project was proposed by Secil, a senior associate at a venture capital fund, and I don’t think I would have helped build this exact organization in this exact format if she hadn’t proposed it. It’s her idea. We met at the New York hub of the World Economic Forum (WEF) community — which I joined in 2021 — where she was also a newly recruited member. New recruits have the chance to propose new projects and present them to the community for interest and approval, and the OneRise project was chosen as an initiative to move forward with. The core team got recruited in that way. Looking at the proposals and meeting with the people who came up with the ideas…
Things almost fell into place, like reality modified itself to fit what we needed, when we needed it. “Manifestation” at its purest form, I would say. That’s what people call it. Obviously a lot of hard work, too but… I think to fully answer this question I’d have to explain why and how I joined the WEF community to begin with, and that would take us too far out of the topic at hand. In the end, the final trigger was the overall method we had to make a team and get collaborations. It was very easy and accessible. I think it’s harder to start alone, but we started off with a team that was already interested in the mission and had a clear view of each other’s strengths. An interested community and a determined team. That’s what you need to find. Ideally, obviously. I don’t think everyone has the network to be in this ideal situation, so expanding your network and community could be a good start if you don’t.
Many young people don’t know the steps to take to start a new organization. But you did. What are some of the things or steps you took to get your project started?
We did a lot of background research on the issue and existing solutions to plan out the ideal outcome months in advance, with month by month milestones. For these kinds of projects, it’s important to know what you want in the end, otherwise you end up floating around “getting things done” but never really knowing where you’re going. We listed out plans for sessions, contacted people we wanted as speakers, locked down all the social media handles, and posted our call for founders on all channels available. I mean Slack channels, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Upstream, Discord, F6S, everything. This was the only part that seemed “inactive” from the outside. Don’t get me wrong, we were still active. We were definitely doing things, but it was the only quiet time we had at the start — and it was very fast, too. We started in October. By mid December, we had already completed founder interviews to select the first cohort. Planning was very important for this timing to work out. We had to be organized, and we met at least once a week with significant updates from each core member.
Because of our origin, we also had some technicalities to work out. One important thing is that we had to be recognized as a non-profit organization by WEF, but I don’t think that’s an issue most people have. Maybe it is if they start it within a corporate entity or a larger organization, but I don’t think this is a common concern for independent organization founders. Just make sure you’re registering properly.
For everyone, planning is ideal, but a clear multi-step goal is necessary to avoid losing sight of what you’re trying to accomplish.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
The project caught the attention of someone named Jai Relan. Somehow,we ended up talking about it on Twitter… I think in two different Slack groups, and through email. We even scheduled a call at some point. It struck me that what we were doing could capture people’s attention and reach individuals all over the world. Just taking a step into doing something connects you with incredible people who are doing their own incredible thing. I remember, we were on the call, and he made a comment about having to finish homework. He’s in high school. He is in high school, and he’s deeply involved in the startup and investment ecosystems on a global scale. I mentioned to him, “Hey, I’m doing this interview about social impact. Do you have anything to say about immigrant founders?” He sent me a quote, and I’m going to say it here, because he’s been in the space, and he had a lot to say about immigrant founders.
“Immigrant founders represent an enormously unexplored niche in the startup and venture ecosystem. Programs like OneRise, which help immigrant-led startups get funding, don’t only serve as a step in the right direction for the startup ecosystem but also for the development of underrepresented communities and, therefore, the larger society. The most important traits for a startup founder are local understanding and determination, and immigrant founders tend to have a unique perspective on this.”
I think these opportunities to connect are very interesting, and these connections don’t happen without action on your part as an individual.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or take away you learned from that?
I don’t have a particularly funny story for this. I think even as far as making mistakes goes, we didn’t make that many. Maybe it’s still too early for us to know what mistakes we’re making with this cohort. I guess something that’s sort of become a running joke internally is the development of our logo. Of all things, that is probably the one we planned the least. It turns out an organization can function without a logo, but it makes people ask us a lot of questions. We started off with the traditional World Economic Forum New York hub logo as default. Then, we went on Canva and just sort of…played around with colors because we needed to post something on Instagram. We were typing OneRise with a particular font consistently, so that became a logo substitute for a while, and it still is. I drew one on a black sheet of paper at some point. Of course, drawing on a black paper isn’t really a good idea, because it’s hard to see, so that didn’t work out immediately. What did we learn from this? Founders will ask you for logos to post on their social media pages when one isn’t readily available. You know, I completely understand that. I’m one of those founders. I’ve been asking my own team for a logo that doesn’t exist, but that’s part of the joke, you know? Execution is more important than aesthetics in some organizations, but maybe we should figure this out.
Or maybe we can keep the joke going. That might become the brand in and of itself, just keep one thing consistent and add a different color or mascot year by year.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
Secil, who had the original idea for this, obviously. I can’t stop mentioning her because she’s such an important foundational character in this organization. She came up with the premise and is the reason the team turned out as well as it did. We’re all important, but there is no way I could have built the team we have now, I think.
I personally get into strange mental states quite frequently, almost like I’m removed from reality and can see all details at once. From the outside, I think it looks like I’m quieter than usual, or maybe uninterested, but I’m really piecing together all the things I’ve missed before. I’ve had teammates in the past who take this negatively, but she takes this as an opportunity to hear what I’ve just thought about. That’s probably the sign of a good leader.
As an organization, we have needed the support of the New York hub throughout our journey, not only on technicalities, but also to make connections with volunteer mentors for the startups. For that, we have every member to thank, and every volunteer who joined, also.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
You know how I said I was one of the founders asking about the logo? I actually had my co-founders go through the entire application process without me. I didn’t help them. I avoided reviewing my company’s application. We ended up getting in the program as a startup, but I’m not really involved as a founder because of my central role in this organization.
What I have observed from my team is… I think even the reassurance of being accepted into a program like OneRise is very good for morale. When you’re part of an early stage startup, there’s a slump in between the early idea excitement stage and the point at which you actually start making money and delivering your vision. My team is feeling better, and that translates into how we perform and deliver in the other programs we have joined since getting into OneRise.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
The issue is addressed differently in different regions, so I’ll have to focus on the United States specifically, and even then I can’t promise that I fully understand things yet — especially when it comes to law technicalities.The root of the problem is hard to pin down on this one. Low access to investment networks, immigration concerns, and different biases are some of the few issues that contribute to the problem.
One thing I can say is that the idea of a “friends and family” round is overvalued, and this is something that has to be addressed by the early stage investment community. A comment I have come across as a founder, whether it be through panel discussions or investors themselves, is that if a startup doesn’t get an investment from friends and family, then it must not be a good thing to bet on.
Before I explain why this is a problem, I need to explain the SEC rules that affect early stage investing, and these are heavily paraphrased.
- Ideally, all of your investors should be accredited. In order to be accredited, they have to fulfill the following criteria, and I am taking this from the SEC Regulation D definition:
“The SEC defines an accredited investor as either: - an individual with gross income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse or partner exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year.
- a person whose individual net worth, or joint net worth with that person’s spouse or partner, exceeds $1,000,000, excluding the person’s primary residence.
- Any trust, with total assets in excess of $5,000,000“
Basically, friends and family can’t invest in you if they don’t earn a lot of money or if they have a low net worth. In contrast to these expectations, over two-thirds of immigrants earn less than $50k a year, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. Mexican immigrants — which my company relates the most to — earn even less, with over 80% falling under the $50k mark. Even for non-immigrants, only about 4% of the American salaried population can meet these SEC standards independently.
- If even one of your investors is not accredited, things get really complicated.
- You can have up to 35 unaccredited investors, but you must be able to prove that they are capable of evaluating the risks and merits of the investment.
- Until recently, the limit on how much money you were allowed to raise in a 12 month range was smaller than many seed rounds.
Accepting money from a person that doesn’t meet SEC standards makes things harder for founders. It limits how many people can invest and how much a startup can raise. So treating friends and family as investors doesn’t really work for the vast majority of Americans, much less children of immigrants and immigrants themselves, who lack a local network.
I need to clarify that I don’t think the SEC is completely wrong. These rules protect people from losing their money to bad investments they might choose to do out of love, misjudgement, or misinformation. The problem starts to show itself when early stage investors question, and even place a heavy value on, whether a startup has raised a friends and family round or not. Great companies founded by the bottom 96% of families don’t have access to this. Bad companies in the top 4% might, but this pre-round funding round gives a sense of credibility where there otherwise might not be. That’s one thing that needs to be addressed, definitely. It closes doors that have no reason to be closed.
The second thing is a government problem. The United States doesn’t really have an entrepreneur-focused visa. The two more common alternatives are the E-2 visa and the O-1 visa. The first one is technically an investor visa with a list of acceptable countries. The second one needs a large track record with multiple media publications and demonstrations of “extraordinary ability.” Some others include H1-B (which needs them to be classified as an employee), L1 (where the company needs to already be established in another country, and this only allows for temporary relocation), and OPT (technically part of the F-1 student visa, which generally only lasts a year). We need an entrepreneurship visa that rivals that of New Zealand, the Netherlands, or the UK.
I didn’t mention three things, I know. I don’t know three clearly defined things, but I came up with those two concerns that seem very obvious to me, and I hope they’re as obvious to everyone who sees this interview and the details I shared.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- Founders have very different backgrounds, and this is evident without interviewing them, but you don’t realize how different their experiences are until you talk to them. Especially when you do the very first interview after screening out applications, you get a very wide variety of perspectives, from people who have found it very easy to raise money without understanding how they did it to people who seem disillusioned by the process and just want something to go right for once.
- Once you realize you can help one person, you get the need to help everyone, but it isn’t possible. In our case, we had companies we wanted to take, but they had one thing or another that wasn’t quite right. If we had accepted them into the program, I’m not sure how much we would have been able to help. For example, we had applications from companies that were in very specific industries for which we could not possibly find a mentor within our current network.
- Team cohesion and drive towards a singular mission is more important than individual merits. You can have very specialized, smart people who disagree with each other all the time and get nothing done. On the other hand, you can get people who are not experts in the role they are taking on but care so much about what they are doing that they will adapt in any way they can to make things work. Disagreements themselves aren’t bad, but the inability to listen to differences or change a personal approach leads to bad results.
- You don’t have to have everything perfectly set up and scheduled in order to start. This belief prevents you from starting, always striving to reach some idea of “ready” or “perfect” that is either too time consuming or expensive to reach. We started without a logo but succeeded in doing what we intended to do, and I’m glad we didn’t wait for it. There are few exceptions to this, like if you truly have no money or materials, if you’re working with hardware or inventing things and need to get patents, but for the most part, all other things are procrastination disguised as inability.
- Some people won’t take you seriously because of your age or perceived lack of experience. I haven’t had this happen too often, but it has happened enough to affect some collaborations and publications. Obviously, I’m not going to name them, and the team is actually unaware of some of these exchanges. I don’t have much to say about this, just to be aware of it.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
If you already have causes you care about, I don’t need to talk to you. You just need to act.
For the rest, I’m not going to push my values on anybody, and I’m not going to try to convince people to care about things fundamentally. What I am going to say is that regardless of your personal values, having a positive impact on society generally works out in your favor. And so nobody gets confused, positive impact means you help people make their lives a little easier. If people end up feeling powerless and in personal distress because of your actions, then it’s not really a positive impact for society — even if it might seem positive from your perspective.
Back to the question, how do things work out in your favor?
There are people who are more self-focused and care mainly about money, prestige, or knowledge, among other things. Very little events in life have the capacity to change that, and a single paragraph by me certainly isn’t going to. The important thing is to realize that there is a distinction between personal gains that come at the expense of others and those that don’t. In reality, this has nothing to do with what you value, rather with how you pursue it.
Causing problems for others, or even preventing an improvement for others, will eventually slow your personal progress along with that of society. Helping others can lead to future collaborations and wealth that grows over the years. People will like working with you and for you, morale will be higher, and a lot of cool, unexpected things will happen in your life. Can you reach the same level of wealth and prestige without making a positive impact? Sure, but don’t be surprised if deals become harder to close, the press paints you in a negative light, or true friendships with valuable people become strained.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Maybe Marco Marandiz @allthingsmarco.eth on Twitter, we had an exchange before talking about growing organizations and companies to the point of acquiring others. I lost that exchange at some point, but that would be nice.
How can our readers follow you online?
On instagram and twitter @zinoharo
OneRise is @oneriseorg everywhere
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Young Social Impact Heroes: Why and How Zino Haro of Uni-ke Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.