Jennifer Bonine is the CEO and co-founder of the Pink Lion Company (PinkPowered Innovations Inc.), which includes Pink Lion AI and the Pink Lion Foundation. She was one of the first female CEOs of an AI testing tech company in the world. Based in Minneapolis, the company focuses on making AI accessible to those developing mobile apps and websites while also running a foundation committed to children’s health, diversity in technology, and social responsibility. She co-founded the company in July 2018 with Andrew Birkholz and Rick Felice.
Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Jennifer Bonine
Conversation Transcript
Richard: Tell me about your company and foundation.
Jennifer: We started a little different than a lot of startups. We initially started with an idea around bringing AI to the people who build and develop the world’s mobile apps and websites, making something that was complex and challenging into an easier-to-understand, soft landing for how to engage with AI. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning, all the buzzwords, but what does that really mean? How do I get involved? How does it apply to my job?
We wanted to start a startup from the beginning with the mindset of education, giving back, and social responsibility. My other two co-founders, Andrew Birkholz and Rick Felice, and I had known each other for about 10 years. We’d been through ups and downs together and seen what makes something work well and what the challenges are. In July of 2018 we started this AI-based company and a foundation at the same time, similar to the idea of the Walt Disney Company. That’s why we call it the Pink Lion Company.
One of the things we started doing right away was partnering with organizations like AI Girls to encourage more women in AI and technology. I was one of the first female CEOs of an AI testing tech company in the world, which is crazy because AI has been around for 20 years. There are very few females who are founders of highly technical companies. We wanted to bring to light the need for more diversity of thought in that space.
We also wanted to give back where we live. We are from Minneapolis, Minnesota, which makes us unique. We’re not on the west or east coast, which is unusual for an AI company. We wanted to shine a light on all the amazing talent that exists in the Midwest.
We partner with Chad Greenway, who has an organization called Lead the Way. They did studies on children recovering from serious illnesses or requiring extended hospital stays, and found that if you give them healthy distractions and technology, they recover faster with better experiences and better actual recovery rates. Lead the Way provides Chad’s Lockers with technology assets inside hospitals for children whose parents may not be able to afford an iPad or a PlayStation. We visit those hospitals and meet with the kids. We even had the opportunity to bring one young man in to help us. He got a cancer diagnosis in his senior year of college, so his internship and plans were all put on hold. We’re going to give him some healthy distraction and have him assist us in training some AI.
What we’d like to talk about is how other companies can do this too. If we all focus not just on making money but on bringing a better world to bear, creating social programs that engage more people, we’re actually leaving the world a better place. We think that’s really powerful.
The Business Case for Diversity
Richard: I’m struck by the women part of it. When I was Director of Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, I hired a lot of people. The IT industry didn’t have a lot of women at the time. The women I did hire introduced a unique and interesting viewpoint that was different from the men. Both have strengths and weaknesses, but it was good to have that balance. Same with minorities. I was very keen on what we didn’t call diverse at the time, but it was a pretty diverse workspace. I remember Google miscategorized pictures of gorillas as Black people. That would not have happened if they’d had Black people on the team.
Jennifer: There’s a business practicality to diverse teams. They’ve done studies. It’s not just a “be a good human” thing, though you want to do that too. Companies with more diversity in their teams correlate to higher innovation. With higher innovation comes higher revenue from more innovative products. They actually generate more revenue than less diverse companies. The studies support that if you want higher revenues and more innovative products that serve a broader population, you need that diversity.
Your point on Google wasn’t just Google. Every major tech company had similar flaws. The dryers that dispensed air when you put your hand under them originally weren’t tested with different skin tones. Voice recognition systems didn’t pick up female intonation or people with higher or lower pitched voices. When you have to go back and re-architect a product after it’s gone through its whole lifecycle, that’s incredibly expensive.
Richard: The public relations hit is not minor either. And it’s not just diversity. It’s a different kind of innovation. Men and women think differently. People from other cultures think differently. When you have a Muslim or Jewish or Christian person interacting on Scrum teams, you get a different variety of ideas. When everyone’s the same, you get the same kind of innovation, and that doesn’t always work. If you want to break into new markets, you better make sure your products work for those markets. You better make sure your translations into Japanese aren’t insults. You might want a Japanese person on the team.
Social Responsibility and Company Values
Richard: My sister owns two charter school nonprofits in California with 4,000 students. Many are disadvantaged or have challenges. Her own son is autistic. What you’re saying about programs for children is extremely important to her. I like companies that invest in humanity, not just profit. You can make profit and still contribute to your neighborhood and communities. You don’t have to scrape all the money you can without worrying about people. That tends to make your company not long-lived.
Jennifer: This generation of consumers wants to understand what type of personality a company has. They have options. People are more aware of what the company stands for. Mark Cuban said how companies treat their employees through COVID could be their reputation and brand for many years to come. They’re going to get branded not just by their products but by how they showed up during a challenging time. Building that social consciousness is going to be imperative.
The Digital Marketplace and Global Competition
Richard: Consumers have a choice now. Before, your choice was basically what you could drive to. Now your choice is anywhere in the world. I’ve ordered products direct from other countries. When I want to buy something I look on Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, and other sites until I find the right price and support. That’s a lot of competition.
Jennifer: It opens up opportunity for companies and people like yourself as writers. You’re not limited to your geography. But it increases responsibility too. Consumers have a lot of choice, and they’re looking at you on a global stage. Defining what characteristics make you stand out is really important.
Richard: Especially with the gig economy. I was a master of this at Trader Joe’s, hiring contractors for specific small tasks. People who are furloughed or laid off really have an opportunity on the gig market. If you’re good at needlepoint, get on Etsy and start selling.
Jennifer: I think we’ll see less and less employees who just earn salary and more unique independents who are contractors selling their services to lots of companies.
COVID as a Defining Moment
Richard: One thing I’ve been learning about is what’s called a 911 moment. Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, 9/11. Before that moment and after that moment, you’re looking at a totally different country. This is our 911 moment. COVID is going to cause massive change in society, businesses, and industry that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Industry is going to come back to the United States because companies are finding out how fragile supply chains can be.
Jennifer: Think about telemedicine. People who never thought they’d see a doctor online were forced to do it.
Richard: I did my first telemedicine a couple days after everything closed. I had a toothache, the dentist was closed, I called telemedicine. He prescribed an antibiotic in 10 minutes. I didn’t have to leave the house.
Jennifer: Things that the adoption was going to be farther down the road, 5, 10, 15 years, people are now finding creative ways because of where we are and the restrictions placed on us. Limiting beliefs in certain industries have been tested.
Remote Work and the Future of Schools
Richard: There’s a company local to me with about 100 employees. They were very adamant about working in the building. Now they’re all remote. If COVID lasts through early next year, those employees will probably stay remote for the most part.
Jennifer: So many staunch traditional companies said they can’t be effective remotely. They’ve been forced to adapt. Maybe you’ll shift to a smaller space where not everyone has pre-assigned desks, more of a common gathering location for critical meetings. Most people will be remote most of the time. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but a lot will be created out of this moment that we couldn’t have predicted even in 2019.
Richard: Schools were really against remote too, and now they’re all remote. One of my neighbors, her child went from a full day of school to an hour and a half at home, and she got higher grades. The only thing she’s missing is the social aspect. But she’s doing at least a grade level better.
Jennifer: Maybe it’s not one-size-fits-all anymore. Now kids can get up at a time that works for their body clock. Some might be better at math in the morning and wait until evening for science. They have more control over their schedule. I think you’ll see better grades, more productivity, and deeper learning.
Richard: If children are remote half the time and come to school for social and group activities the other half, you don’t need as much real estate. That frees up money for education that’s being spent on buildings and maintenance. Children don’t need fancy buildings. And you could pay teachers more.
Jennifer: It would be interesting to see what a school spends just on its physical space. From maintenance to upgrades to school buses and everything required to keep it running. You could shift the spend to where it actually impacts learning and children’s ability to be successful. Maybe even adopt the higher ed model with specialists teaching courses they have deep knowledge of. You can iterate curriculum without printing textbooks year after year.
Richard: Here’s an interesting technology coming to the forefront: 3D printing. You could have children with 3D printers at home, which are getting much cheaper. Say they want to look at what a saber-toothed tiger’s claw looks like. You could print it right in their house and they could actually feel it. That’s an opportunity waiting for somebody.
Jennifer: This whole space can get reinvented. If we filled even a little bit of the space we used to spend on social activities brainstorming what the opportunities are, I think that’s a really good use of the time. Some of the best, most successful companies were bred out of the financial crisis in 2008. Innovation comes from scarcity.
Pivoting in a Crisis
Jennifer: You see companies like Hertz, where people aren’t renting cars. I’ve seen them driving by my house dropping off Amazon packages because they’ve got drivers and vehicles they can repurpose for deliveries. Hotels pivoting to house homeless people or displaced healthcare workers who don’t want to infect their families while they’re on the frontlines. Different pivots for industries where you weren’t getting revenue from where you typically did.
Richard: Companies that were already digitally transformed are doing relatively well. Those that weren’t are struggling because they’re still manual.
Jennifer: You’re going to see huge winners and companies that just can’t pivot fast enough. Even restaurants. Some had embraced delivery models and services like DoorDash and Grubhub. Those were positioned way better than ones that hadn’t started thinking about it.
Richard: We have local restaurants that deliver and they have a line wrapped around the building every day to pick up. There’s another one nearby that doesn’t have a web presence and it’s probably out of business permanently because it doesn’t deliver and nobody has a way to order.
Jennifer: I give Target credit. They had drive-up capability early on. Not a lot of people were using it. Being from Minnesota where Target is headquartered, we were in the original beta program. Now you can order online, drive up, have it put in your car, no touch. Target saw a huge uptick. They also picked up the Shipt service for grocery delivery. If you didn’t do these things before and you’re struggling now, this is a huge wake-up call.
Richard: Our local supermarket Publix was already digitally transformed pretty well. You can get curbside delivery, which wasn’t very popular before but now it’s really popular. They have delivery through Shipt. They have to stagger people outside because of distancing. The drive-up and deliveries really help the older people. Clearwater is more of a retirement community, and the older people want contactless delivery because they don’t want to get exposed.
Children and the Future of AI
Jennifer: We believe children are the future for AI and tech. We don’t want to leave them behind. We’re working on programs around children and encouraging them to learn more about AI and machine learning.
A lot of folks at Pink Lion bring their children into the office or run ideas past them. Children have a different perspective. When we do demos of our tech for youth, I love their questions. They sometimes ask more thoughtful questions than senior executives at Fortune 100 companies. It teaches us a lot.
Staying Human in a Digital World
Jennifer: After 9/11 I remember when you could walk your person to the gate at the airport without a ticket. We said, “This is only temporary.” I wonder what things we won’t do anymore after this. One thing I hope: I hope we don’t lose the ability to be good humans. All of this no-touch, low-touch, remote, self-checkout technology is great. But I hope we don’t stop helping other people, being kind, engaging with strangers. Especially for the older population. If they don’t have to go to the grocery store or out for most things, how do they get their social interaction?
Richard: We used to have what I’d call micro-engagements. Standing in the checkout line talking to someone. Those have sharply reduced because it’s harder to talk six feet away through a mask. I predict handshakes are gone forever.
Jennifer: This is the first time the entire world, no matter where you are, is collectively experiencing this. It’s not one country. Everyone’s children’s schools are closed, they’re not able to go to their job, they’ve seen the economy change. There’s a power in that. How do we harness it to come out collectively and work together better, like the doctors sharing information on cures and vaccines? Instead of saying it’s not my problem, it’s someone else’s problem.
Richard: Where I live there’s a complex with 320 units. It’s pretty diverse. Now that we’re in COVID, people are bored and walking around maintaining distance. We’re all talking more than we used to.
Jennifer: I have a lot of friends in California and New York saying exactly the same thing. “I’ve seen more people in my building than I’ve seen in 10 years.” People are engaging in a different way, meeting neighbors they never would have met. In high-density populations, everyone just went about their own thing. Now they’re pulling their heads up because they need to.
Scams, Crime, and Staying Vigilant
Richard: There are a lot of scams going around. “Take my special vitamin C for $25 a pill and it will solve your COVID problem.” Show me the double-blind study and I’ll believe you.
Jennifer: There’s a lot of good opportunity that comes out of a crisis, and there’s a lot of taking advantage. We’ve seen more hackers trying to get into our systems. They’re desperate for money. The other thing is car break-ins. Vehicles sitting outside are getting broken into more often. It’s shifting the types of crimes that are occurring.
Richard: We’ve noticed a little uptick in crime in our community too. Mostly younger people who are bored. I’ve also noticed an uptick in the Nigerian-style scams. I found out why those scam letters are written with grammar errors. It’s intentional. They’re trying to catch people who aren’t so sharp. I’ve actually had scammers hit me three times. They didn’t succeed, but they got far enough that my second wall of defense had to catch them. I had a scammer come in saying he wanted a book ghostwritten. We got almost all the way through until it came time to pay and he wanted to pay more and have me refund part of it to his consultant friend. That’s a typical scam, like the apartment scam where you overpay and ask for a refund.
Richard: The romance scam is a big one. There’s a woman who lost $200,000 to someone she never met. Never saw a picture of him. All text. And even after he was caught, she still wanted to give him more money. They had to stop her.
Jennifer: That’s why through all of this, we still have to figure out how to create humanization and connectedness. One of our taglines at Pink Lion is “humanizing AI.” I love tech more than anyone. But we need to humanize it and show up as good humans. That scam you just talked about, people need and crave human interaction, even in negative places. How do we give them that in a positive way so they’re not tied to people like that? That’s a fundamental lack of connection and support in their life.
The Pink Lions
Richard: You mentioned these little stuffed animals. Tell me about those.
Jennifer: We wanted them to symbolize more than just artificial intelligence. They’re about six inches tall, pink, very fuzzy and fluffy. We started giving them out to children at events. Ironically, a lot of adults wanted them for their children too. We’d get photos back from parents who attended tech conferences of these pink lions with their kids. They’d say, “This represents women in technology. This represents the idea that my daughter can grow up and be a CEO of a tech company.” Everyone made it their own. We realized our brand, what we stand for, is as important as the tech we build.
I’ll tell this story. At a conference in Europe, a single dad who had lost his wife to a disease brought his six-year-old daughter to a two-day tech conference. She was the only child among 700 people. I walked over and gave her one of these pink lions and her little face lit up. He could speak English and translated for her.
They got there at 7:30 in the morning and left about 7 pm. On the train home, both fell asleep. He picked her up when they got off and left the lion. He cried all night and sent a message: “Can anyone help a dad that has failed his little daughter?” She had made it her most important asset. He asked where to buy one, but no one else makes them. We’re the only ones in the world who produce them. We got her another one.
We’re now starting a children’s book series where when you get the first book, our goal is you’ll get one of these stuffed pink lions. We want to see photos of kids with these lions doing whatever is their passion, living their dream. We want those lions to represent being the best version of yourself for anyone, children or adults. A symbol of hope and being your best self.
Learn more about Jennifer Bonine at jennbonine.com.
Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.