(light music)
- [Werner Vogels] From the moment humanity was able to conceive
of a better place, we've been on the move,
constantly flowing, searching for the promise
of sturdy shelter, good work, and safe harbor.
In recent years, Germany has been one of the main recipients
of that humanity,
taking in over 1.6 million refugees since 2014,
more than all the other EU countries combined
and Berlin is at the center of that migration.
Based in Berlin, ReDi School offers technology classes
for refugees ranging from basic web design
to advanced coding, and gets them into the workplace.
ReDi School invited me as a guest lecturer
and I decided to arrive early to learn more
about how Dave, along with tech companies
like the language at Babbel,
has set out to remove some of the barriers
that refugees face when arriving in a new place.
A place they hope to call home.
Our planet and our civilization are changing faster
than ever before.
Join me as I travel the globe talking to startup founders
using technologies to make our world
more interesting, accessible, and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs that are creating the future
we will live in.
This is Now Go Build.
There are few cities in the world
with as much experience with refugees as Berlin.
As far back as Frederick the Great encouraging people
of all faiths and backgrounds to make Berlin their home
through the modern cases of World War II,
and the influx of East Germans
to West Berlin during the Cold War.
Berlin has seen its fair share
of refugees moving in and out.
Today they arrive from all over the world,
encountering obstacle after obstacle, walls, wire,
lines drawn on maps, all barriers in the path to freedom.
Now, technology offers new solutions.
Rami, a graduate of the ReDi School,
was one of the people that made the trip
from war-torn Syria.
Now a successful coder and entrepreneur
at the beginning of his career,
he agreed to tell us his story.
- [Rami Rihawi] Hi I'm Rami nice meeting you.
Welcome to Berlin.
- So how long have you been working here?
- I've been working here for two years.
- You're one of the great stories of success
from the ReDi School, so tell us a bit
how you got here at all.
- Yeah, so, at the end of 2015 there were reasons to get out
but one day I started to get second thoughts
and then my brother was just, "Come on man,
"don't right now, chicken out, just do it."
And the same day I just went,
I bought a backpack, we found a bus, and I told him,
"Okay, I will just take this bus and see what happens."
And this was the worst part, getting out of this area
to the other areas and then to the borders
and then to Turkey.
When I was on the borders in Turkey,
we could not get in and they took my military book
and they just teared it down
and that means that there is no coming back.
We found a new route but it's dangerous
and then I tried it and it worked.
I got into Turkey and then from there I went to İzmir
which is on the beach and then I got into the boat.
People think when you actually get into the boat,
that's like the scary part,
but I am a really good swimmer so (laughs).
And then I got into Greece and I was like I just, all right,
now I'm going to go to Germany.
I didn't know which city.
I didn't plan that far ahead.
And I called my brother and he was like,
"Oh you can't go wrong with Berlin."
And I was, "Okay, let's go to Berlin."
And I just came to Berlin.
- [Werner] So did you have a plan then
what you were going to do here?
- [Rami] I had no clue.
I got into a basketball court with like 300 people.
It was a great place, I was pretty happy
because it was safe.
This is the center where we were staying.
Those guys are helping us.
I mean I was pretty grateful that we have this,
but it was not something for me to stay there.
- [Werner] Did you already speak English
before you actually came to Germany?
- When I was in Syria I was always speaking to my brother
in English watching TV shows, movies.
- Okay. - I like Matthew McConaughey,
he was like, "all right, all right, all right".
(laughing)
- So how's your German?
- My German is pretty good.
- [Werner] Language can be a barrier,
just like a wall or a border.
Rami survived the journey to a new home
only to be stuck without the words to move forward.
It was technology that bridged that gap.
The language at Babbel has not only created
a fantastic new way to learn a new language,
they've created programs and credits specifically
for refugees to get started on their language skills
so they can get an education and can get into
the working market.
We were very fortunate to visit the ReDi School here,
which is all about helping refugees learn IT skills.
But language learning was tremendously important as well.
There's a large refugee population in Berlin.
- Yeah. - Have you guys
worked with them as well?
- [Thomas Holl] Yeah, so especially around the peak times
and I think like two years ago when there was
that big refugee crisis hitting Germany
or Berlin especially.
We helped out by providing them access to our paid courses
so we give out over a million euros in our subscriptions
and we not just gave that away,
but we actually sent people from within Babbel
to help refugees just arriving,
using the app and installing it.
And so that was a big initiative within the company.
We wanted to make sure we can do everything to help
in that area.
- So cool.
You guys are taking a pretty unique approach
to learning, is analytics an important part
in also how you structure your next products
or the way you improve your products?
- I think that was from the very beginning.
Super inspiring that for the first time,
you could really observe
how people would actually use our courses,
how they would interact with certain elements.
So we look at all of that data, all of the feedback
that we get from our users,
and make sure there is that round trip tool
and we iterate on all of the courses we have,
all of the time.
- So how has that evolved over time?
- What the cloud allowed us to do
was to move up in terms of our value creation.
Still remember the time when we did
the MySQL hosting ourself
and the whole replication things across different hosts.
Was so painful, it would break all the time
and it would get people woken up in the middle of the night
and with all the managed service
and I think we are really able to spend that manpower
in a much, much better way which is taking care
of the learning part and not on managing the infrastructure.
- And there's a lot of talk about sort of how to use,
are they meant to be corrected,
using natural language, understanding text to speech,
all those kind of tools,
are you guys using any of those as well?
- One area is around error classification
because especially on mobile, I have like a big thumb,
so sometimes it's pretty easy to make mistakes.
But then the question is, is that a mistake
that you make just by mistyping or is that like something
more going on in your brain?
Like you didn't get any grammar constructors
so there has been quite a lot of progress
in the NLP area around classification of errors.
- [Werner] It's an interesting time to be in Berlin
as a language startup.
- Yeah, because we're doing all
of the content in house.
Need to find all these translators
and people actually working on the content side.
And if you try to hire a Portuguese speaker
who also speaks Swedish at the same time,
I don't think there's that many places in the world
where you can find these people.
- So it's very human intensive.
It's not just tech.
- That was probably my biggest learning curve
because I'm a techie by heart, I studied computer science
and I was always into building products and technology,
but what really made the difference for us was
to see that there is that other part
around language learning which really takes care
of humans, which takes care of helping people
to express themselves.
It's about connecting with other people.
- [Werner] How did you find ReDi?
- I did a check in on Facebook saying that I'm in Berlin
and a friend of mine was like,
what the hell are you doing in Berlin?
And so we started going to events together,
exploring the city.
And then one day he called me and told me
there is a new school that will give you laptops.
A laptop was a huge thing.
But you have even teachers
that will teach you how to program.
- [Werner] Started in the wake
of the migrant crisis of 2015,
founders Anne Kjær-Riechert and Ferdi van Heerden,
recognize that these new arrivals needed more
than a donation drop box.
They needed work.
And Berlin needed these people specifically
in the tech sector.
It was a match that Anne and Ferdi were eager to make.
- [Werner] So when did you guys start?
- [Anne Kjær-Riechert] So the idea came
in the middle of what is called
a refugee crisis in Europe.
So in the summer of 2015 I was in a refugee camp.
I was invited to the end of Ramadan to celebrate
and I was sitting next to a young man from Iraq
and Mohammad told me about his life,
what his dreams were, and that he really wanted
to work here but that he didn't have a laptop.
And I said, "Wow, I've got at least two full laptops at home
"and they might not be the fastest, but they still work."
And that's when the idea started coming together.
I then went back home, put a post on Facebook
and said if I started a coding school for refugees,
would you help?
I went to bed not thinking much about it
and the next morning there was just this outpour
of people who were like,
I have space, I have a laptop, I can teach.
And that was sort of the first proof of the concept.
- [Ferdi van Heerden] And for me, there was a personal motivation.
(gun firing)
Growing up in South Africa and then also traveling
to Mozambique and seeing firsthand the devastation caused
by civil war, this was a topic that was very close
to my experience.
So, when we looked at the challenge that Germany was facing,
we really zeroed in on the fact that technology
had the ability to address this in a way
that nothing else could.
When I moved to Germany in '96,
I remember being excluded very strongly
because I couldn't speak German.
So, I would go and apply for a job as a cleaner
in the local cafe and they would say,
"No sorry, we put a lot of value on our team
and because you can't speak the language,
we can't really have you."
And if was experiencing that level of discrimination,
I was like I can't even begin to conceive under
the political context of people coming in
how they handle integration.
- [Werner] So tell me a bit about your students.
- Oh, yeah, there's a lot that can be said
about our students.
First of all, they come from 43 different countries.
So we usually like to call them a small United Nations.
The average age is about 30.
Right now I'm so happy that we have 40% women
in our courses.
My goal is still to have 50% women,
'cause I think that's what the world looks like
and that's also what the tech world should be like.
After leaving ReDi School, we can see about 50%
of our students will get jobs, part-time job
working as freelancers.
About 20% go back to university to complete their degrees.
And 6% start their own startup, which is really exciting.
So I think that entrepreneurial feeling
that they get here at ReDi School is also
something that makes them believe well.
I can go out and do this as well.
- So I joined Klockner as an intern
and from there they offered me a full-time job contract.
At first QA, and then I moved to a developer,
so I am working full-time
and then I have also multiple projects
that I started and that's what I'm trying to do.
(people clapping)
(speaks foreign language)
- Berlin is very multicultural.
It's people coming from everywhere coming together
and at the same time because of the history of Berlin,
massive changes is something
that the city has lived through many times.
When you put those two things together,
it definitely creates a very special environment
where people want to help out,
want to seek new opportunities together.
(people clapping)
- Thank you all for being here tonight.
What we decided to do is actually talk a bit
about machine learning.
The challenges are with machine learning
is that traditionally machine learning has been
the domain of data scientists.
And this is something that basically went on in Amazon
for almost 20 years and so our goal
is to get machine learning in the hands
of every developer.
There's 82,000 open IT positions in Germany alone.
I think if you are looking for a career,
this is a great time to be in IT.
This is one of the few jobs where you can go
to work every day and create something new,
or build something and be building things.
It seems unlikely that the flow of humanity
is going to stop anytime soon,
ensuring that people have new opportunities
to integrate and contribute to the new communities
to make them their own is work that needs to happen.
Work that Babbel and the ReDi School have taken on.
While the world still has plenty of borders,
walls, and barriers, it's good to know that technologists,
educators, and visionaries, like Anne, Ferdi, and Thomas,
are knocking some of those walls down.
(upbeat music)
Our planet and our civilization are changing faster
than every before.
Join me as I travel the globe, talking to startup founders
using technologies to make our world more interesting,
accessible, and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs that are creating the future
we will live in.
This is Now Go Build.