EP 040 Connecting rural communities with tech communities

In today’s conversation, we discuss how Knight Moves is bringing tech opportunities to Native American, rural, and urban underserved communities.

A conversation with linc groeger from knight moves:

Mike:
Welcome everybody. I am so excited to have our guest on the show today, it’s Linc Kroeger. He is the president of Knight Moves. It’s a limiting profit company and what they’re doing is creating the next generation of elite technology professionals through training and different technology disciplines and they’ve got a focus on Native Americans, rural, and urban underserved communities. Linc, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really excited to have you on.

Linc:
Thanks for having me on, Mike. It’s going to be fun.

Mike:
So I got a ton of questions for you and you know, I feel like I live in a rural area. I haven’t always lived in a rural area. So I feel like Knight moves is this thing that you’re doing that I really want to learn more about. So I live in Northeast Ohio, and in Ohio and which is the Midwest of America, for anybody living, not in the U.S., we’ve got what we’ve called a rust belt up here. And the rust belt is communities who had once seen their heyday through steel and that type of stuff, but all that has moved out. And so we’ve got lots of communities that are trying to reimagine themselves, I guess. Some of the big companies that were kind of the mainstays for a lot of communities aren’t there anymore.
And so there’s a lot of blight in many of these communities and people thinking that the best days were in the past as opposed to the best days are in the future. And that’s not a place where I like to think about. I always like to think about the best days in the future. It’s just a matter of what can we do to make that happen. So can you just tell me about Knight Moves and what you guys are up to and what it looks like for you?

Linc:
Yeah. Neat. Quick question. Where are you at in Northeast, Ohio?

Mike:
I’m right on the east side, right by Pennsylvania.

Linc:
Oh, excellent. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time visiting rural communities in Ohio and Ohio is a big state, right? So there’s Ohio, rural communities, spoken at a couple rural conferences there too. So I lived in Cincinnati and Columbus in the tech scene for over 20 years.

Mike:
Oh, wow. Fantastic.

Linc:
Live in Iowa now. I was the CEO of a technology services company in Columbus. And when we decided to open up one of our innovation and delivery centers for software development for clients as a consulting organization, moved to Iowa to do that. And then when I was in living in Ohio, actually I was studying the nationally failing rural technology job hubs. And if you didn’t know this, traditionally rural communities that put in an education system and try to create these local tech jobs in software development have about a 95% failure rate. So I got to travel around to Zanesville and these different areas, both in Ohio and outside of Ohio and talk to these leaders and said, hey, why didn’t this work? So I just spent … And I was curious about it, right? And I was like, I’m in the tech scene, this is what I do.
Our primary competitor was offshoring. So I was like, if you can offshore, we should be able to do this in rural. And I grew up in a small Northeast, rural Iowa town, about 6000 people myself. There’s just a lot of people in this field who grew up in rural, went to college, got a computer science degree and you don’t move back. And then maybe in your thirties, you move back because it’s time to raise kids and you want them to have that same experience. Or the other big reason is if you have an aging parent that you want to be around, and I’d say now with COVID, it’s people are just choosing to live where they want to live with the quality of living. And it’s like, geez, it’s cheaper, the peace, I mean there’s all kinds of data showing your stress levels in living in rural are lower than urban. All the anxiety and so there’s a lot of reasons, I’m kind of doing a run on answer for you here, Mike but.

Mike:
No, that’s fine. No, I’m loving it.

Linc:
Yeah. After doing the research, I came back and said, there’s these keys seven areas that if you don’t do, let’s say you’re a rural community, and your goal is to be a rural tech hub of jobs. And if you don’t do any of those seven, you’re going to fail. And I’ve actually toured the U.S. department of agriculture on a rural prosperity summit going to rural communities, because there’s a lot of snake oil out there in this where companies will come in and say for a half million dollars, we’ll create a co-working space for you. And all of a sudden your people are going to be creating the next Facebook. And so they open up this half million dollar, three quarter million dollar, high tech, co-working incubator, and what you have is the rosary club quilting in it because they’re missing the rest of the components.
You know, the big domino that had to fall first though is you’ve got to have enterprise class, internet, at least to main street. Which most of rural America has that. Especially if their community has a school or a hospital. They’re going to at least have it to main street. The final mile may not be there, Ohio is pretty strong. Iowa is really strong with more the final mile. But you go to states like West Virginia, Washington, where it’s mountainous, it’s just very difficult to run the cable for fiber. So that first domino is, do you at least have enterprise class business fiber to the main street.

Mike:
So, okay. There’s a lot in there. I want to kind of dive into a little bit, dig into. So you mentioned that failure rate, 95% failure rate and that’s big. What does the success look like and what does a failure look like? So how do you say, hey, this has been successful. Is it tech jobs per capita in a specific region increase? Is that the success rate?

Linc:
Yeah. We have two metrics we use for rural. One is, are we creating a recurring number of jobs that stick in that community every year? I mean, so our target is going to be for a typical community, like one in Ohio I’ve worked with pretty extensively, we haven’t implemented yet as Van Work, which is a little bit more toward Fort Wayne on the Ohio side, a larger community, 10000 people, larger rural community. When I say large, 10000, a lot of people snicker. We work in communities with 1400 people. That target might be more of, hey, creating five jobs a year. When I say jobs, it’s through the full training program and placed with companies. So we bring the company to our graduates. And those companies line up, this is the first check you got to have.
Your program has to be in the spectrum of a four year computer science degree. And our program actually rivals that where companies raid our graduates as the same as a four year computer science graduate after they have six months experience on the job. Because most of these real communities that have tried this, it’s usually economic development are a local educator saying, hey, let’s do this, but they don’t know anything about the technology industry. So they’ll start creating all this junior talent and junior talent can’t join a fortune 500 company without a support network. So all those different aspects of the education has to be at the right level. I’m not knocking code camps or you know those, but this is a three year program. It’s not a four month code camp. You know, we can talk more later about why it’s three years and you know what composes in it. Can be as small as two years, depending on the person and where they’re at in life.
Our primary focus is on the high school group. Getting people that are freshmen, sophomore, and juniors, into a local community college program, that’s dual enrollment. And in most states I’m not just going to pick on Ohio, just since you’re there. Most states like even Iowa, Ohio, while you’re in high school, you can take dual enrollment college courses at no cost of the student. So we don’t want to duplicate what’s already being done well in the education system. We want to compliment it. The whole nation is kind of marching toward this academy approach where your junior year in high school you start getting more centered in what you could do for a living. So we’re leveraging that whole momentum in the country and just coming in and what we’ll do is we’ll present to students who have no idea what current technology is.
And if we turn this around, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to get people in when they’re younger. Because if you’re not in software development, by the time you’re 18 statistically, there’s 1.4 million jobs a year not getting filled or shouldn’t say not getting filled, but open positions in the United States that so many ship offshore, because we can’t create that talent. We can’t fill the demand. But if we really want to fill that demand, we’ve got to get people interested, younger. That’s our jelly in our donut. Where we go in, we help these kids understand, wow, I didn’t no idea. I didn’t even know what current tech looks like. So we can go in, help them understand, and then our whole goal isn’t to get them to make a career decision. It’s just, hey, sign up next semester in your local community college, take this course.
And if you like it, keep going, here’s the next six you got to complete. Which are free to you. And if you don’t like it and you become a doctor or an architect or whatever you become, great, you’ll have at a software development class and you’ll know how it works. So you’ll have a leg up on all your competition. And so the whole messaging with students totally resonates on our approach of in 30 minutes we can go in and get 30 to 40% of every high school student we talk to say, wow, I had no idea. I would be interested in this, sign me up. For that next course, next semester and native American communities, the last one we talked to, we had 58% of all the eighth through 11th graders we talked to say, if I had that opportunity, I’d sign up for that course, which is, 58% is astounding. Of a response.

Mike:
That’s fantastic. So I am interested in how then it’s implemented. So it sounds like you’re doing it through the community college. So are you guys teaming up with community colleges then, and then are you providing the instructors? How does that work? I’m just curious how the nuts and bolts of that work?

Linc:
So this is actually the most challenging part of the whole program is when we started this five years ago. And I started it under my last company and spun it off as Knight moves about two years ago. Is the initial plan was what I just described, get students in, get the community colleges to instruct, but COVID happened. And with COVID, the good side was, big part of this program is getting companies to agree for work from anywhere. That was a harder discussion. Now it’s not a hard discussion. I mean, still, I don’t have one company I work with that’s saying for software developers, they can’t work remote. I mean, I’m sure there’s companies out there, but I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But the thing that happened is, when you have over a million jobs that need to get filled and all of a sudden work from anywhere is a new standard because nobody’s going to the office.
All these recruiters, this army of recruiters said who can write code that I can go recruit. And they just went after these community college and high school instructors to code. In the past you were in small town Indiana or wherever, and you could only get a job if there was a local software developing employer. And so you worked at the community college right. Now I can get a job for 30, 40000 a year more and work remote. Why wouldn’t I take it? So I call it the eat your seed kind of phenomenon. Where we’re at right now is the middle of winter, and you’re hungry because it’s been a hard winter. And by that, I mean, the metaphors with were such a drought of computer science workers. And you sit here and you go, okay, I’ve got my bag of seed I’m going to plant for my next harvest. Do I eat it or do I save it for the spring so I can plant it?
And the seeds are all these teachers and instructors who are going to teach our next generation of talent. But we ate it. So we went out and hired all these people up to work. And now there’s this drought of people able to teach. So I would just roughly estimate if every community we work with, only one in 15 can actually get a computer science instructor. So that’s our big problem that we’re solving. And we have two solutions to that. One is expensive and one is not so expensive. So the expensive one is we actually provide the adjunct instructor at no cost of them. And the second is which for intellectual property reasons, I can’t describe yet, but I will hopefully soon.
And if you’re interested, we’ll do a follow up, is we have a very innovative approach at how to solve this because we’ve looked at the problem. So the problem in rural and Native American, which is different than urban, and I know we’re talking a lot about rural and Native American were equally urban, underserved focused, is okay, so schools can’t hire either their high school or community college, they can’t hire these computer science instructors. So now they’re going all video or online. And the challenge with that is like in Iowa, the average age of someone going into a code camps, 36 years old. So at 36, you run into something it’s hard, you get stuck, you work through it. It’s just a different time in your life. High school kids, our program, we see when the school only offers online only or video, about a 75% dropout.
They’re going along. As soon as they miss something or they’re paying attention and throwing something at their neighbor or whatever. They get behind and then they go, it’s too hard, I’m stuck. And it’s just easier to quit. That’s the short version of what we’re seeing. And obviously you can look at the data too from COVID the last couple years and see just how challenging overall it’s been for high school aged kids to grow and learn in an online world, not so easy.
Plus we’re just not … This isn’t the intellectual property piece but we believe in short segmental training. More like the TikTok generation. So we have a solution we’re getting ready to test only in communities that can’t provide that computer science instructor and to experiment. And we have our first community and we’re getting ready to pilot this fall, that this approach. So hopefully I’ll come back and give you some good results on, but once we figure it out, we’ll share that solution because we’re a social benefiting company, not here to make money. That’s not our mission.

Mike:
Right. That’s so cool. That sounds really exciting. Yeah. I think there are definitely huge challenges with just complete online learning. It’s funny because I have done a lot of online training myself, multi month type of instructor led training. And it’s pretty tough, even when you are in your thirties or forties, to kind of like stay in there and work through that. But I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a young person to work through those difficulties. Can you tell me more about what a limiting profit company is? You kind of just touched on it there for a second, but I’m curious what that means and is that a special U.S. designation for a type of company?

Linc:
Well, the actual designation would be a social benefiting company depending on the state you’re in. And limiting profit social benefiting are the same because a social benefiting company is limiting, but there’s a legal moniker and not all states have a legal classification of social benefiting. So if you’re limiting profit, that’s the same as a social benefiting. You get the social benefiting if your state supports it and you apply for it, you still have to go through it. But what that does is basically a social benefiting company or limiting profit is you have a social benefit, just like a nonprofit. You’re like a nonprofit in the sense of you have this societal benefiting goal, this primary. So what that does is, it lets foundations and organizations invest in you or give you loans as long as it aligns with their mission.
So it’s really an alternative to a nonprofit because I actually started Knight Moves as a nonprofit two years ago and never ran a nonprofit before and ran into a couple of problems. And one of them was, my attorneys were always saying, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. IRS very tightly regulates what you do. And I finally just said, well, if I can’t do these things, it’s not going to work. I’m not going to do it. So I said, well great, go start a limiting profit company. So I come from an innovative tech background, always working with companies, how do you apply innovation? So it’s kind of hard to put our group of people into a box and just say what you can’t do right when you go, hey, well this is what it’s going to take to work.
I didn’t realize the way the nonprofit world works is, nonprofits get funded by donors and they get funded by foundations. Especially if you’re doing something big and I’d say also grants, right? Like federal state grants. But you know, shortly I’ll get back on track here with your question is, the challenge if you’re doing something innovative in the nonprofit space is when you’re working with a hundred million dollar asset or 200 million dollar asset foundation, let’s say you’re working in Northeast Ohio or wherever and you’re going to implement and one of the first questions they ask you after they go, wow, this is amazing, this is incredible, how long have you been doing this? And you go, well, I’ve been doing it for seven years, but as a nonprofit less than a year and they go, wow, you don’t qualify.
You’ve got to be doing this four years. As I ask him the question, because you hear it time … I mean, I’ve met with so many massive foundations that go, this is amazing, come back in four years. And you go, okay, so explain something to me, do you see society advancing, whether it’s urban underserved, rural, Native American, do these people groups and do we really think we’re moving the needle with society fast enough? Well, no. Okay. So if there’s no way to fund any innovative approach that works because you have to be in existence four years, we’ve created a system that there’s no way for innovation to happen in the nonprofit space. And they’re like, yeah, that’s the system, right? You got to realize length that this is oversimplifying, but rich people give money to foundations so that when people come to them and say, I want your money. They say, talk to the foundation. And then that foundation has to pick ultra low risk options. Because if they make a bad decision, then they’re rich people stop donating to them.
So the system is really designed to not … If there was a cure for cancer to come through the non-profit space, it would probably just sit there and never happen. So that’s a little sidebar, but I found it real interesting since I never worked in nonprofit world. And the other side of the problem is a nonprofit, is you go for a federal grant. So let’s say in your rural community there, we were applying for a grant to put this in. Well, they go, how many jobs are you going to create year one, year two and maybe year three? So this is a three year program, right?
To get people to come through it where you really start creating jobs year four. So there’s no way to meet the federal grant requirements because they want to see how many jobs you create year one, year two, maybe year three. So for transformative kind of rural projects for communities, there’s no funding source from the federal government. They want quick hit wins, they want to see jobs year one, year two.
So you sit here in the quandary of, okay, federal grants are no good, foundations are no good because they don’t support innovation. All right. I’m just going to go start a limiting profit company, which means to answer your question, the social benefiting mission is first, but then we can do whatever business we want. But from the profits, from that, we fund our public benefiting mission. And for me it was worth taking the time because working in this industry with the people that listen to your podcast, there are so many people that want to make a difference in the world. And hopefully that will give them an idea of, hey, maybe I just go start a social benefiting company and I can still make a profit. I can still do these things and make a good living and not take a vow of poverty going and doing a nonprofit and save them all that mess of what I just went through for the last year and a half.

Mike:
Wow. That’s really neat. Yeah. I love this idea of considering rural assets as a resource for as a competitor to offshoring. Is that kind of what you’re talking about? Because companies are, if I understand, right, companies are they’re offshoring for, I guess my immediate thought is they’re offshoring for a lower price. Is that right? They’re looking for people who can do a similar job at a lower price or are they just looking, they just need the talent and they’re just looking somewhere else because the talent is not available in their location?

Linc:
There’s multiple categories, right? Some is people just want the cheap labor. And they’re going to go offshore and you’re not going to change them. And then you have the companies that they don’t want to go offshore, but there just isn’t the talent. In our country if you compare us to India and China, India and China are nationally organized. I mean they nationally say, what are the emerging talent jobs, especially in tech and science, and they create a structure. That creates a lot of talent. I’d give our country somewhere between a D and an F because it’s going to happen or it’s not going to happen. We don’t really get that organized. That’s my personal opinion. In business, here’s the other gap, is when you talk about talent entry level, like out of college, and you talk about diversity, they really count on the education system to supply that.
So when the education system isn’t supplying enough talent in an industry or diversity, it just doesn’t get solved. I mean the closest thing businesses have to remediate the situation with education not being able to recruit diversity is apprenticeship programs. Which are really expensive. They’re hard to scale and they’re very risky, companies don’t like them but they’re the best thing they have that isn’t there. And that’s why Knight Moves was formed is what are the things that business doesn’t do? What is the things education doesn’t do? What are the things the government doesn’t do? Let’s do those things and be that missing piece that advances the amount of talent we need in bringing diversity inclusion into the picture, in solving those. We didn’t create this to create another organization to duplicate what other people are not doing right. It’s hey, focus on what they’re doing right, and then let’s add to that. And be a catalyst to fill a gap.

Mike:
Gotcha. Okay. I see. And so generally speaking then, are the people in rural communities able to work for a wage that’s different then from people who might be working out of San Francisco?

Linc:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, wherever you’re at geographically and companies are getting much tighter on where you make it, but let’s put it this way. Let’s say, in fact, I presented to a community not far from you in Northeast Ohio, that went in and they had a group of high school seniors and were all leaving their community after graduating. Because they wanted to get their feedback, hey, if they had this opportunity, would they have taken it earlier? So what really surprised the community leaders was, we’ve got 10 minutes to present this to them, after hearing it, all of them in the group, and it was less than 10 high school graduating seniors, they were about to graduate. All 10, everyone in the room said, yeah, we would’ve done this if we had the opportunity. But what really surprised the leaders is we would’ve actually stayed in our home community after we graduate because they have the choice of do they stay or do they leave? We don’t put any handcuffs on them if.

Mike:
Okay right.

Linc:
You want to leave, you can leave but.

Mike:
I was curious.

Linc:
That’s up to you. That’s your choice because we want that freedom. But everyone said we would actually stay, we’d love to stay in our community. They’re just no opportunity for us here. And what we want to do for a living. So, okay. So imagine 20 years old, no debt, because by the time they actually start their end job, they have no debt from the program that’s built into it, which I can explain if you’re interested. So you’re 20 years old … So you’re grad, you’re starting your career two to three or sooner than if you went and got a four year degree and you’re starting at around 60000 a year, maybe a little more. I’ve seen 60, I’ve seen 80000, but that’s where they got lucky and they worked for some East Coast company that wasn’t adjusting for salary for the Midwest and rural.
But you know, typically you’re going to start. So let me ask you this, would you rather have around 60 to a hundred thousand in debt at 22 or 23, start your job, or start two years early making 60000 a year with no debt, so you’ve got two to three years of experience and to make raises with your competition. So yeah, because when you come out of college as a computer science degree, you’ve got to get trained. I mean that’s the reality is you don’t know how to create commercial software. And that’s why companies will look at our program and say they save 25 to 35000 dollars hiring our graduates over a four year computer science graduate because they can literally say, okay, what’s your source code system? What’s this, point me here. Okay. I’m on the team. Let’s start building code. Scalable, secure, continuous delivery, continuous integration, all the modern software, craftsmanship, solid code.
So it’s a very different preparation to get into those jobs. So I mean just people can ask themselves, would you rather avoid four years of total end to end, and start the job at around 60000 a year where you could stay in your community or move if you wanted with no debt? That’s a heck of a beginning of your career. And think you’re getting for two years how much money you’re going to make when you would’ve just building debt instead. We all know in this career, I’ve been in this industry 35 years, the computer science degree, experience is way more important than credentials. If you can show … People don’t want to hire you based on your paper, tiger certificate or degree, show me what you’ve done and what you’ve created. Show me your experience. That’s always more important than in my work career in the field of software development. Experience and your capabilities more important than your paper tiger.
I just think of interviews I’ve had with people where they pulled their Velcro and they show you all their certificates, but okay, what have you actually built? Oh no. I just, how about the certificates, right?

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. So what’s it take for a kid to get into this program? I’m curious, is it competitive to get in for these students?

Linc:
Well, you know, and one is we’re very community centric. And if you go to our website, Knightmoves.org and it’s night like the chess piece, not like the Bob seeker song, right? If you go to our website, it’ll show the ideal communities because we want to be community transforming and it’s not an online program that anybody can just sign up for. So first we want to get a relationship with a rural and Native American or urban underserved community. How do we get our prerequisite? So we have seven courses that they need to take typically starting their sophomore or junior year in high school. And one short note is, we also focus on mid-career workers, but our primary focus, 85, 90% is on the youth to keep them there and get more people into tech that wouldn’t have.
And you know, once you complete your prerequisites, then our training program is six months long. And what you do in that, and this is great for your audience, because this is going to be my sales pitch to them, if you’re in the software development space, is there’s two things that our employees do. We’re either doing services in the consulting space for clients, but we’re taking profit from that and investing it into our philanthropic piece. We also pay no sales commission. We have no sales targets. So my history in the consulting industry is, sales guys will sell anything that can move. Even if it’s such a bad environment for their workers, we’re not going to do that. If it’s not the right contract, if it’s not the right client, not the right project, we walk away from it because we’re not going after the money.
We look for companies that want to partner on the social benefiting aspect of it. And the other thing we do is our training program is really unique, right? You’ve already had seven courses in software development, so you’ve had a beginner like Java and advanced. So you have O O or C sharp, right? So you have to have two languages, beginner, advance. You have to have database HTML, right? So of course seven courses you’d get as if you went to a four year college. But our program, once you get into our core training, you are on a product team of seven to 12 people and you’re only creating real world solutions, right? When you go to college and you turn in your program, they grade it and throw it away. Not a lot of heart in this.
It’s just to get a good grade. But you’re working with real users. And our whole focus in the training program is creating technology platform, social innovations that are public benefiting. So how do you address homeless, sex trafficking, hunger, you name it, as long as it’s a 501C kind of mission, we could build a solution for a nonprofit and we’re building technology the same way that Google builds technology. In fact, they actually reviewed our program and said, hey, your graduates are at the same level as a four year computer science graduate. They don’t have to go through our apprentice program. We could just hire them directly. Because you’re working as a high fortune 500 high performing team, and you only graduate our program when you demonstrate you can do the job. There’s no grades, there’s no classroom.
You join a team, you build real world product, and you have seasoned experienced technologists who lead you in mentoring you through that. So that’s the two kind of jobs that two roles you’d have as a software developer. You’re either doing work for our clients. So every day you’re coming in and doing something meaningful because the money isn’t going to buy owners bigger yachts. It’s going back into how do we help these communities and advance and you solve these problems with society. Or you’re going to lead a student group to create these world solutions to support public benefiting causes. Does that make sense?

Mike:
Yeah, no, that does. That is just fantastic. That’s really cool. I absolutely love the mission here helping out rural communities. And I just think it’s fantastic and Linc, thank you so much. Is there anything you want add as we close this up?

Linc:
You know, I love your mission here of getting … I don’t see a lot of where you’re pollinating ideas with the software development group, but just things that they could do with their lives. That’s a fantastic mission of just giving them ideas and how they could innovate and do something unique. So thank you for serving that cause there.

Mike:
Absolutely. I appreciate it. Linc, thanks so much for being on the show.