"When you put the questions to the kids, A) They become more active participants, versus just passively trying to absorb the information. B) is, if you don't know the answer, it's actually cool. You can put the burden on them to ask the questions, then say, "Hey, you know what? I don't really know." Or, "Let's see." You don't even have to say that you don't know. It's like, “Let's see. Let's try it out; let's test it. We can find it out through this experiment.” -Vicky Wu-Davis
Meet Vicky Wu-Davis, videogame designer and entrepreneur. In this transcript of a live webinar chat with KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant, you'll hear about:
- The connection between critical thinking skills, entrepreneurship and STEM
- How Vicky's degree in accounting turned into a software company in 2000 that provides technology for social games and virtual worlds
- How these skills and experiences fueled her passion to co-found International Orphans Foundation and Youth CITIES
Francis Vigeant: Hi, and thank you for joining us for this session on the path to innovation. My name's Francis Vigeant. I'm CEO here at KnowAtom, and I'm glad to be able to bring a new voice to the table today with Vicky Wu-Davis.
Before we get into that, I wanted to let you know why we are interested in speaking with innovators in the first place. The answer to that really has to do with the role of STEM in K-12 education, especially as we think about the Next Generation Science Standards, and the movement towards performance-based teaching, learning, and assessment. The reason I mention this is that those critical thinking skills, the creative and analytical-thinking skills, are something that at least we here at KnowAtom believe are vital to any college or career choice, regardless of whether somebody becomes a scientist or engineer.
We also believe that by putting students in the role of scientist and engineer in the classroom, by giving them that experience, through the Next Generation Science Standards and these performance expectations, we have an opportunity to develop those thinking skills and actually give students an opportunity, or a taste, of what it's like to be a scientist, an engineer. That's really where these two come together. I think as part of this national conversation that is developing — that the idea that innovation is key to our future, and that innovation takes many forms.
Very few people have insight on what exactly is the 'stuff' or the properties of innovation. That brings us to these discussions, and so I'd like to introduce our special guest, Vicky Wu-Davis, executive director of YouthCITIES. Vicky, leaving the corporate world in her late 20s to become an entrepreneur, says she's never looked back. She started a software company in the video game industry and ran it for over ten years before deciding to teach innovation and entrepreneurship to middle school and high school kids through her non-profit YouthCITIES.
Vicky's also a mentor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT's Venture Mentor Services, and she's a member of an investment community called Beacon Angels. Vicky has been recognized numerous times in the area of entrepreneurship, such as Red Herring's cover story, "Young Moguls: Twenty Outstanding Entrepreneurs Under Thirty-Five," the Kauffman Foundation's "Entrepreneurs Giving It Back" recognition, and the 2004 Boston Business Journal's "Forty Under 40", and in 2015, she was Women Op's honoree as a local woman of influence.
So we're honored to have Vicky here with us to discuss her path to innovation. Vicky, thanks for joining us.
Vicky Wu-Davis: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
Francis Vigeant: Wonderful. We mentioned some of MIT Venture Mentoring, teen mentoring. It seems like much of your time right now is involved in giving back. I'm hoping that, through our conversation today, we'll be able to explore some of the connections between STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math — entrepreneurship, and innovation. I wanted to ask you, sort of to start things off from the get-go, really, when you think back into your experience as an innovator, as somebody who, I believe, started with an accounting degree, what was your "a-ha" moment that got you towards... An accounting degree- which is a STEM degree. What nudged you in that direction?
Vicky Wu-Davis: It's kind of interesting. My path to my professional life has not been a straightforward one. First off, I want to apologize if I end up coughing a little bit, and I'm a little bit lethargic. I'm actually getting over a very nasty cold. I have a five- and an eight-year-old that were both sick and have gotten me sick as well.
Francis Vigeant: No problem.
Vicky Wu-Davis: I don't think I have that one pivotal moment. I was raised in a family of computer scientists and engineers, so I kind of grew up immersed in STEM to begin with; it wasn't something that was very new to me. However, I was raised in a very fiscally conservative environment where risk was not something, at least financially, that was taken. I was also raised by a single mom as my parents got divorced when I was two.
My mom was a computer programmer, and my dad an electrical engineer, and neither of them ever uttered the word “entrepreneur” or “innovator.” In fact, I don't think I ever even knew what an entrepreneur was until I went to college, and even when I heard about it there, entrepreneurship was portrayed to me more as a small-business owner rather than the much more complex definition of what an entrepreneur — being an entrepreneur — means.
I think what did influence me, and what I feel being entrepreneurial is, is that even though my mom wasn't necessarily an entrepreneur by training, she was very entrepreneurial about life, and maybe by necessity. I feel like that's also the critical juncture where some people give up when there are roadblocks while others figure out how to make it work. While there's a single mom who was also a homeowner who spoke with an accent when we grew up, years and years ago in a very homogeneous neighborhood, trying to provide me with this middle-class lifestyle when we probably could have qualified for financial aid of various sorts.
We had very, very little resources, yet she was amazingly resourceful, and I never felt like I lacked anything. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized the obstacles that she had to overcome for her passion, which coincidentally was me, and to take care of me. Throughout life, I felt like I had no excuses for giving up when encountering obstacles, and the mentality is even to make something work — maybe not in the first way that you think of, and maybe not the most obvious, handed to you, already on this golden polished path, and maybe not equipped with everything you need, but, somehow, if there was a goal and you were passionate about making that goal, I watched, over and over again, my mom creatively make substitutions that probably ended up working out better than if she had gone the more ideal, run-of-the-mill route.
That was, sort of, what I feel mentally fostered my entrepreneurial mindset and my entrepreneurial behavior. If I look back, I feel that actually shaped me, more so, in kind of an odd way. I'm a little bit of an odd duck where I don't feel I have the traditional past, traditional professional trajectory.
Francis Vigeant: Sure. Well, that's a really powerful story because it sounds like through your mother's experience, and through being a part of that and observing the problem solving that was going on, that there was some element of inspiration there where, whether it was passive or active, something that you felt like you could solve problems as well. Was that anything that you were ever really conscious of at some point? Where it's like, you know... I think of entrepreneurs as having a problem-solving mindset.
Vicky Wu-Davis: Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think resiliency and problem solving... Because, you know, we didn't have a choice. If something went wrong with the house, or something didn't go right with something, we didn't have, necessarily, the ability to then invite someone and pay for the service or whatnot; or to buy a new version of it. If there was a problem, you can't run away from it. You have to, basically, address it, and if you didn't have all the tools or all the materials or the products that you need that you would first obviously point to as the path or the right solutions, we have to creatively come up with that.
Yeah, I think that problem-solving mentality, I probably didn't frame it in such a sound byte when I was growing up. But if you're confronted with a problem, you fix it; and if you can't fix it the way you think it's supposed to be fixed, then you can't walk away from it. There has to be a solution to it. So, how can we creatively figure out a solution, within the few resources that we have, and make it work? And make it work not in a temporary solution sort of way, because then it will fall apart again. That costs more time, more money, that we didn't have. You have to figure out, really, what was the root problem of whatever thing is going on and kind of MacGyver the whole situation. Whether it was a product or some other ... It wasn't always a product-based thing that was broken, that had to be fixed. It had to work, and it had to work in a long-term way, because there was no other option.
I feel that that definitely laid the groundwork and the framework for having that problem-solving mentality growing up later. It was very subconscious before but, in hindsight, it definitely placed a foundation for me.
Francis Vigeant: For teachers, I think too, that we're often thinking, especially in urban or rural settings where we're teaching students who are resource-constrained and who may come from similar backgrounds, that it's almost, as if, kind of a myth that perhaps that places students at a disadvantage. But in some, from a skill standpoint, that may be actually equipping students for some things that we don't even expect in the sense of these problem-solving skills.
I wanted to ask you about your first big venture. I know you decided to leave corporate life. I think you were taking your accounting degree and working for a large company and sort of strike out on your own in a start-up with Froghop. What was the impetus to make the change and the one-minute basics for the average person? What did Froghop do that was innovative?
Vicky Wu-Davis: Sure. If I could go back to your prior comment about the resource constraints, community or background or starting point, and the tie with entrepreneurship, I think that's an excellent point. In my mind, I feel that having this entrepreneurial mindset — in teaching entrepreneurship, which I love to do — is absolutely an economic leveler in certain ways to level the playing field. A lot of time, the mentality is, even for my eight-year-old, because I think that, "If I only had this, I could do that." Everybody's definition of "I don't have enough" or "I have enough" is all relative. I feel that being entrepreneurial means taking what you have, and all I have is all I need, and I don't need anything else beyond that — at least to start it off.
It takes something that might have been a negative starting point for, say, me or someone else and says, "You know what? This is actually a creative challenge for me to figure out, because I can make it work." For those who maybe have never had the opportunity hear somebody say, "Well, we can't get that for you," can pose that. It becomes a design constraint. I feel that road blocks in life and challenges are not meant to be things that knock us down and is a quitting point, but rather it's a design constraint that we need creatively overcome no matter what it is. I wasn't 100% happy, professionally, working in the corporate world; and I don't think I actually put my finger on it for a long time. Thankfully, I was kind of driven to remain satisfied, because I know some friends who have basically stayed with what they knew and were not passionate about. After a while, you sort of get locked into that cycle of the incremental pay raise and more and more financial obligations, and it's really hard to leave it sometimes.
I didn't feel fully satisfied in my work, and so I started fidgeting around and trying to figure out what it was that I did like. At that point in time, I didn't know I was an entrepreneur. When I started reading and exposing myself to different networks, I found that I loved the whole uncertainty and chaos of things that were not working right, and trying to figure out a better way to do things. Or taking a set of constraints — here is the context, and this problem exists. And how do we fix that within the certain context, within these certain people. You can't all of a sudden wipe out the whole entire staff and say, "Let's hire from brand new." You can't say, "Oh, let's change x, y, z, with those removable parts."
To me, it was like a puzzle. My favorite cousin is a mechanical engineer, and I used to watch him take apart stuff and rebuild, and then modify one part to be able to test what would happen, and then do something else to make another goal happen. When I saw problems or inefficiencies within a company, or within just something else, that I felt could become better, I always ended up in my mind equating myself to him, except in a non-mechanical way. So I always felt I was the equivalent from the ... Except instead of... I guess I am not being so eloquent, but instead of with different components like mechanical components, it was different puzzle pieces of life and problems and issues. How do you solve that? I think that was what really intrigued me.
Francis Vigeant: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Vicky Wu-Davis: I ended up starting something on the side, which I did briefly, was to help out other companies that were started by people who were brilliant in what they did, whether it was in sciences, or in languages, or as a tech person, and then when they got to a point where they started to plateau around the three- to five-year mark, I helped them streamline their processes, and looked to improve their business. I really enjoyed that because, again, it was taking different pieces and trying to put it together in a puzzle that made sense.
I worked for Nextel and when they wanted to relocate, I decided that I would take a plunge. I've always been a passionate video gamer, so I decided, "Hey, you know, I'd love to be in the video game industry."
Francis Vigeant: I was just going to ask one quick question. Before you took the plunge... I wanted to ask you about the idea of career paths, because you were talking about this iterative increase in pay and climbing the ladder.
Vicky Wu-Davis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Francis Vigeant: I think that one of the big things that K-12 educators, workforce development and a number of other individuals are asking is, "Do career paths exist anymore?" I'm not really talking about within a company, so if you join x-y-z company, Fortune 500, that once you're in the door, you can work internally your way up the ladder. But the idea that a career path really exists if you want to be more of a... Someone says, "Well, I want to design cars." Or, "I want to design technology for video games." I don't mean to get the cart ahead of the horse if this isn't where you were headed. I wanted to ask that because when you brought up that idea of being in a corporate culture where there were iterative improvements, and yet you have all these skills and this interest in putting the puzzle pieces together, you have this entrepreneurial spirit. It seems like most companies would say, "That's exactly what we want." That's how you get to be designing cars, that's how you get to do these sort of fantastic things. What's your perspective on that? Is there a career path?
Vicky Wu-Davis: I think yes and no. I don't think it's a very black-and-white answer. If you want to aspire to be a dancer, or if you want to aspire to be a medical doctor or a lawyer, there are those kinds of things that you can study for and aspire to be. At the same time, there's no guarantees in life that you'll actually like it once you get there. At one point in time when I was younger, for the longest time I wanted be a criminal lawyer, and I wanted to fight crime, and I wanted to move to New York City where there were all these things. I didn't know what I was talking about; these were things that I had envisioned in my mind. I feel that, yes, there can be a career path and some people might be — I don't know if the word is lucky, but it just happens to be that whatever they had set their sights on, it actually was the love of their life, and they stay with it. At the same time, I feel that it's absolutely okay and absolutely doable to not really know for sure what you want to do.
Interestingly enough, when I look at people to hire or to work with, I actually prefer not to bring on somebody that has the cookie-cutter resume of they did this step, and they were the junior role here, and then after a few years they got promoted and were the senior role here, and then a few years later on they gained some incremental skills and were the next logical path. I actually like seeing people who have more of a little bit of an eclectic background. Then to me, personally, I feel like it signifies that they can take things that are unexpected, or something things that they may not be an initial expert in; but they have something that they're good at, so they can then quickly assess the situation, apply their skills for it, and then benefit a new situation.
Life is never the way you plan it. If the only way that you can do better and grow is to do this in a very linear fashion, I wonder, especially, not only in the start-up world but even in a large company or anywhere that there are changes that you have to react to quickly, that you might be affected in ...
I would rather see somebody that had a more eclectic background rather than a more linear one, where my assumption would be they know how to do it because they did it before. My question to them in the back in my mind is, "I wonder, if you hadn't experienced it before, would you know how to do it?"
Francis Vigeant: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Interesting. That I guess bring us back to Froghop in terms of, what was the issue that Froghop was setting out to solve that hadn't been solved, that nobody had experienced? What was the divergent thought that was Froghop, and could you tell us a little about that?
Vicky Wu-Davis: Sure.
Froghop didn't take a very linear path either. That's the thing, is that sometimes you might have this great idea in your mind, and you have this picture that you built. It could be just an idea; it could be a technical scientific innovation. Then you have to figure out how it actually fits into real life in its applicability. Who are you solving the problems for, and who would use it, and how would you get it to these people, and can you create the right relationships to make it all happen?
What Froghop ended up being was — we were essentially, if you think back, not even too long ago, our accessibility to information and data was mainly from the computer. We were a little bit tethered. Even with a laptop you have some mobility, but it was still relatively tethered. If you think about nowadays, if had to wait until you returned to the office to be able to read an email and to respond to it, you'd be like, "No way; absolutely unacceptable." Right? You have access to real time email from your phone, and you reply to it in real time, right away, and there's no time lost.
There's a type of video game that was played on your gaming rig, on a very specific computer that your game was loaded on. It was a subscription-based game where there were a lot of hardcore gamers. They spend a lot of their extra time... Maybe not so much extra time, but made it a priority to play these games. When they were at work or out of the house, they had no access to this information, to the game, the virtual world. You might be thinking, "Well, what's the big deal about that?"
Unlike some games where when you play it and you're done, you shut it off and it saves the status of where you were, in the virtual world, we're pretty much like the real world, in the fact that if you miss a day of work or miss a day of school, life goes on. Fires may happen that you're not there to put out, and then you have to deal with the repercussions when you do return to work. Sometimes when you leave for a week's vacation, you come back, you feel like you need another vacation just to catch up from all of that. In this virtual world, if you spend all of your resources and your time, your virtual resources and your actual time building up an empire, if you're not there constantly to guard it, your enemies... I know — depending upon on if you've played games — some of this may sound really silly, but the empire that you spent all this time building could be destroyed when you're not logged in.
The thing about this is that even though it's something of entertainment value, to certain people it becomes a necessity. To the video game industry business, there are also [...] as well that affect business. From the player's side, they needed to be able to have access to what was going on. For example, maybe being alerted if your empire was being destroyed. Or being able to access a tool that you really need in the auctions within these games. If you think about Bay, but for the virtual world, and then being able to do that functionality on your mobile phone, which a lot of us probably do now... Those types of things on your mobile. These were things that these particular gamers who spent a higher percentage of their discretionary income on these types of game-related activities — it was something pretty important to them.
From the video game makers, they had to deal with business issues such as attracting new players, because you pay money for that, and retaining them, because that's a consistent business model, so there's a consistent revenue stream that they depend on. If a player does not continue to play your game, you end up losing money. If the game is too time-consuming and you can't stay and play on it for a long period of time, and you keep getting your stuff destroyed time and time again, there's only so many times where you're like, "I'm gonna rebuild this fort again; let me do this again."
Francis Vigeant: Right.
Vicky Wu-Davis: You might just end up quitting, right? These fun aspects of it become real-life points that affect the survival of the game from a revenue standpoint, and we were addressing that. That wasn't how it had started off to be. It took a lot of adaptations to get to there.
Francis Vigeant: I can see the value though, because it's interesting. Thinking back to my childhood, I think of a game like Monopoly that we would play. It was a board game. We always had the constraint that we could never stay up late enough to build hotels. Because you had to go through the game, build up enough money, buy enough houses. It just took a lot of time. Our bedtime was eight o'clock. Eight o'clock came; we had to put everything away. We never got to build hotels. Essentially, after a while, that becomes discouraging. You go through that same process, get to the same point, and you have to shut down, and you kind of lose everything you've done. After a while, the game has less appeal.
With the virtual world, and computer games, the ability to save that and then, of course, make it mobile made that game which could go on for an awfully long time much more interesting. I could see how that would be much more valuable because, again, instead of putting the Monopoly board away and losing interest in Monopoly because you can't stay up later, you can somehow keep it going and it goes on down the road. How did that move forward from that point, then, to... You said that there were some additional changes that took place in its evolution.
Vicky Wu-Davis: Yeah, I should have went backwards. That's where it ended up.
Francis Vigeant: Okay.
Vicky Wu-Davis: The front of it was completely different. What ended up happening was that I had a passion for video games. I was 26 when I wanted to start this company. Raised some initial funding to build the game. Since I was fortunate enough to have had experience managing software development, I wanted to create a platform that would allow me to churn out a bunch of games down the road instead of creating it all from scratch. That ended up being my saving grace, without spending too much time and wasting the time detailing all that out, having that infrastructure on that back end allowed me to adapt when the market conditions... This was when — I don't know how many people remember the days where mobile technology was first introduced, and it was marketed as Internet in your back pocket.
Which, of course, nowadays it is. Back then, 15, 20 years ago, it was far from that. There were a lot of issues, and technology issues that didn't quite catch up or live to the expectations. So, the idea of playing video games on your mobile phone wasn't that popular. But because I had invested my money in creating an infrastructure and not just on a game, when the first idea didn't pan out, I didn't have to hold. I ended up trying to figure; I said, "Okay, well, here I am, I have this technology that I raised money and spent money on; gosh, what can I do with it now?"
I have been involved in STEM related stuff, but I personally don't code. Well, I can code. Not anymore. Back then, I could code a little bit; you wouldn't want me to code. It was a puzzle piece of trying to figure out, “Who could use this? What could I turn it into?” [...]
A lot of the things that affected the change and the evolution of the business were not necessarily technologically related. It was how the ecosystem was in respect to a lot of other factors — external. You had this technological innovation, but there are other forces at play that made me have to react differently and evolve the use of the technology to different circumstances. It's kind of like a lot of times you have STEM innovation, or even if you like a fictitious one like Flubber — I don't know if you guys know that movie. You have Flubber and it's like, "Oh, cool, this is this really cool scientific discovery." But it really doesn't mean anything to anybody. Maybe aside from the person who invented Flubber and a few other scientists. Unless you find out how that Flubber is going to actually be integrated into a useful way for the mainstream population, or at least where... Even if it's a niche population, how would that actually be utilized? There's no application for it.
Flubber is just something exciting for the person who invented it. That was sort of the challenge in the evolution.
I ran Froghop for a little over 10 years, then handed it to my right-hand guy to run it, because somewhere around the tail end of that my older son, who is now eight — he's a second grader — was born. When I became a mom, that whole first-time-mom contemplation of providing, to raise my kid. Anything from sleep things to nutrition to education all crossed my mind. Education was something that kept coming back and back and back. Because even though I loved my upbringing... Despite the whole single-mom thing, didn't feel like I was missing a beat. One of the things that I did feel that I would do differently is influencing the career choices that I would make. Of course, my mom did the best that she could; it was a lot of based off her own experiences. One of the things — couple of things — was that I think I mentioned earlier, both from cultural and monetary standpoint, our family was very fiscally conservative.
When I was a college senior and recruiters were interviewing me, apparently I was the only college senior they have ever met who had asked about 401K plans, and how long the probation was before I could start saving up a 401K, and how much income could I deduct from my paycheck to put into my 401K? They just looked at me, and they're like, "We've never had a college senior ask these questions." That was how I was brought up. When I was 16, I had an internship at Lockheed as a graphics illustrator, my mom opened an IRA account for me. That's where my money went. My mom, I had wanted her to spend some time with me, so she stopped being a computer programmer for a while, and took time to raise me; and then had work-reentry issues. This was before the days of LinkedIn and other things.
Francis Vigeant: Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Vicky Wu-Davis:
