Workplace

Shaka Senghor, fresh off a Nas track, wants to shake up diversity in tech

Shaka Senghor, head of DEI at TripActions, wants to make conversations around DEI "less volatile" and ensure folks with nontraditional paths can also find a place for themselves in tech.

Shaka Senghor wears a black baseball cap in a black and white photo.

Shaka Senghor joined TripActions as its head of diversity, equity and inclusion amid the 2020 racial justice uprising.

Ernest Sisson

Shaka Senghor, the head of diversity, equality and inclusion at corporate travel startup TripActions, was hyped to start his weekend. The latest Nas album had just come out, and he was excited to celebrate the fact that he'd been featured on the album. Still, Senghor took the time to chat with Protocol about his journey into the tech industry and how his life experiences have shaped the work he's doing at TripActions, a travel and expense platform for businesses.

Senghor's memoir, "Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison," put him on the map and became a New York Times bestseller in 2016. Senghor has gone on to serve as executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition and more. Last July, Senghor joined TripActions to lead its diversity efforts.

"Obviously I have a very unique life path that has played out over the years and continues to get more interesting as I grow older and grow grayer and all those things," Senghor told Protocol.

Senghor said his life experiences have made him more sensitive to "what's really happening in communities that are underserved and marginalized." For example, he said, he has a better understanding of "what happens when opportunities aren't presented or created for people who come from different backgrounds."

Making non-traditional paths traditional

Whenever the TV would lose reception in Senghor's childhood home, he would grab a coat hanger and wrap it in aluminum foil to build a makeshift antenna.

"That's iterating," Senghor said. "You're solving a problem and you're fixing it with the resources available. And when you come from that type of community and you get placed in a space where resources are abundant, and the only thing you have to do is actively engage your mind, it's just a game-changer. And I think my experience has really helped our staff see where innovation is taking place and recognize these other opportunities that typically wouldn't come up in these conversations."

What's most important for Senghor is to ensure TripActions has a culture that makes conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion "less volatile," he said. Senghor also sees his role as helping to challenge the thinking around talent pipelines and which pipelines have the best talent. There is plenty of talent, for example, among those who have been impacted by societal systems.

"It's not just people coming out of incarceration, it's also people coming out of foster care, it's people coming out of communities that oftentimes resources don't reach or people don't think of when they think of creativity, curiosity and all of the things that make a great employee," he said.

That's why Senghor has prioritized company field trips into a variety of communities. Last year, for example, Senghor took some employees to Old Skool Cafe in San Francisco's Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, which has the largest proportion of people of color and financially insecure households in Bayview. The cafe, founded by a former correctional officer, solely employs people who have been impacted by a societal system in some way, whether it's foster care, juvenile detention or prison.

"It's different from me just coming in with a pitch deck and saying, 'Hey, we should hire people who were formerly incarcerated,' because a lot of times that proximity removes fear and removes those barriers," he said. "And that's why those in-person connections are so important."

The workforce

In March 2020, prior to Senghor's arrival, TripActions laid off about 100 customer support and customer success team members over a Zoom call in March 2020. Despite the work-related travel industry and the travel industry as a whole suffering at the time, the layoffs still came as a shock to employees due to the amount of money, about $480 million, TripActions had raised at the time. In January 2021, TripActions raised another $155 million at a $5 billion valuation.

Senghor, who had consulted with TripActions for a few years, officially came on board in July 2020, four months after the layoffs and two months after the murder of George Floyd. Senghor's hiring came amid an uptick in companies seeking out employees for diversity, equity and inclusion roles. Between June 8 and July 15, 2020, for example, job postings for DEI roles rose by 55% after decreasing by 60% in March, according to Glassdoor.

TripActions' DEI department "is relatively new," Senghor said, despite having been founded in 2015. The company employs more than 1,200 people across the world, but the diversity of its employees is not clear because TripActions has yet to release a diversity report. Senghor, however, said it's something the company is working on.

TripActions is starting to track diversity data and is thinking about the best type of data to collect, he said. The company is also looking at retention and exploring how to better understand "the experience of people of color when they come into a predominantly white workspace," he said. "Are they able to show up as they, you know, who they truly are?"

As Senghor says in Nas' new track, "Composure:"

Keep your composure
And believe in the magic of who we are
Because what you believe is everything
And what someone believes about you is nothing
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins