Hopelab has named In Tandem Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dave Hersh an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR). This is part of a 12-month program in which Hopelab provides ongoing consultation related to behavioral science, human-centered design, and youth co-creation. Hopelab will also provide ongoing consultation around scalable business and funding models and strategic partnerships, with attention to ways young people can benefit from In Tandem’s work.
For his part, Dave and the In Tandem team will support a new cohort of young people as they learn about behavioral science, inclusive design, and ways to provide feedback about the products that impact them. He and the team will also explore ways to expand strategic partnerships and funding to scale In Tandem and the integration of youth voice in products that impact young people.
Before In Tandem, Dave was CEO of Character Lab, leading the organization in its mission to advance scientific insights that help young people thrive. Previously, he spent nearly five years leading a project designed to build education agencies’ capacity to improve systemically and served as the Chief of Finance and Analytics at the Camden (New Jersey) City School District, among other roles focused on enhancing the lives of young people.
Hopelab recently spoke with Dave about his journey, the work of In Tandem, and what he hopes to achieve in the EIR program. The interview has been edited for clarity.
You’ve had quite a career journey that’s led you to Hopelab’s Entrepreneur in Residence program. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think your experience will influence your program?
I think of my career as a series of experiments. In each role or degree program, I’ve been testing a new hypothesis about how I can make the most impactful contribution to the world. My biggest takeaway from more than two decades of experiments is that intellectual humility drives impactful problem-solving. I came to this partially because I had so little humility early in my career, and it routinely put a ceiling on my impact regardless of whatever skills or talent I was trying to deploy. In Tandem’s theory of change is rooted in intellectual humility. It drives both what we do and how we do it.
Understanding people’s experience of the world is critical to designing impactful solutions. Because it’s not possible to be an expert in another person’s experience, we see making it easy to directly engage young people as a necessary condition for the success of any effort to improve youth outcomes. Our moonshot goal is a world where youth are engaged in everything that affects them. To that end, our service removes all the frictions it’s wise to remove from the process of engaging young people for anyone who authentically wants to improve youth outcomes.
Intellectual humility also pervades how we execute our vision. Perhaps uniquely amongst nonprofits, our approach to scaling impact involves a go-to-market strategy rooted in humility. To succeed, we must solve problems for organizations seeking to improve youth outcomes. We grow not by convincing others of our virtue but by deeply understanding their needs and designing our service to address them. Relatedly, we strive to be an organization that learns incredibly rapidly, making an experimental mindset a core value for us. We treat everything as a hypothesis and pursue all projects as experiments.
One of our shared beliefs is that young people must be involved in shaping their future. What is your vision for creating a space that facilitates this?
Our role in creating a world where young people are involved in everything that affects them is to understand and systematically remove the barriers to their involvement. At one level, this means creating an efficient platform through which organizations that need youth voices to design and implement impactful solutions for young people can easily and cost-effectively engage young people. But the day-to-day is all about addressing one source of friction at a time. So we coordinate the logistics of all engagements, handle parental consent and youth assent, provide Youth Partners (young people) a scholarship, support them with training to be agentic voices of their own experience and more. As Dorothy Day reportedly said, “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” We’re doing the dishes.
At In Tandem, you offer a Youth Voice Fellowship program for high school students. What do you hope the fellowship program will accomplish?
The Youth Voice Fellowship is the heart of In Tandem. Right now, it includes over 180 Young People who have signed up because we’ve promised to source and create opportunities for them to participate in shaping the world they experience. We provide training in behavioral science and design thinking so they can be critical participants with high standards for how they should be engaged. We connect them to one another so they can build networks that will support them throughout their lives. We provide a scholarship because it’s part of ensuring they have the freedom needed to fully exercise what we hope is a newfound sense of agency over their future. But this is far less valuable if they don’t have access to opportunities to participate in the designs and decisions that impact them. As such, the most critical role the Fellowship plays is in enabling us to source more and more impactful opportunities. Youth Partners are an on-demand cohort of young people that can help organizations answer the questions they need to realize their impact. Our hypothesis is that this will create impact both for Youth Partners through their participation and for young people in general by creating better solutions for all young people.
What are you looking forward to exploring during your Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR)? How do you envision the Hopelab team contributing to your learning?
So many things. The Hopelab team has already contributed so much, not just to my learning but also to the existence of In Tandem. The Hopelab team were incredible thought partners and supporters as I navigated the decision to launch In Tandem. It’s not hyperbolic to say it might not exist without Hopelab’s support.
Hopelab is such an exciting host for an EIR because it offers expertise in so many areas that are critical to figuring out how to maximize In Tandem’s impact. It’s an organization with a unique culture and high integrity that helps drive performance. It has a novel combination of philanthropy and mission-driven venture investing. It produces and publishes incredibly well-designed and well-informed content. It’s tied into many of the networks, such as funders and innovative, mission-aligned organizations, of which In Tandem will benefit from becoming a part. With all that said, I might value the thought partnership the most. It’s hard to overstate how valuable I find critical feedback and collaborators willing to push on my ideas. I find both in spades at Hopelab.
As an entrepreneur and business leader, how do you take care of your mental health?
I can’t say I think of myself the same way I think of the archetypical entrepreneur or business leader. I don’t feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. Part of my approach to leadership is being candid about the fact that I don’t know everything and can’t predict the future any better than anyone else. I rely on an incredible team to whom I hope I’ve given the autonomy, clarity, and resources to help drive us where we are trying to go. So, while I feel a responsibility to the team and the young people and organizations we serve, I don’t feel the burden of being the sole owner of our success or failure. At the same time, an experimental mindset fundamentally changes the definition of success for all of us in a way that I think makes it easier to manage the emotional and cognitive load of our ambition. When every idea is a hypothesis, success is not about being right but about whether you learned enough to accept or reject the hypothesis. Setting a goal of learning is far less burdensome than setting a goal of being right.
That isn’t to say that I have never experienced the kinds of things that challenge peoples’ mental health, just probably not at the unique level of the standard-definition business leader. When I sense myself struggling, I have a few go-tos. First, I exercise—a lot. I was a competitive athlete for years, and in addition to its physiological benefits, a good workout gives me a sense of self-efficacy that helps mitigate the frustration I have with things I can’t control. Second, I’m a big believer in the power of gratitude. My wife, our kids, and I have a daily routine of saying something we are grateful for during meals. The behavioral science says this should work. Character Lab made a whole playbook on it, and my experience backs that up. It really helps. In the end, I’m as fortunate as they come, and reminding myself of that goes a long way to keeping everything in perspective.
