Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

South Central Los Angeles, which includes Watts and Compton, in many ways still hasn't

recovered from the Rodney King riots of 1992. In South Central L.A., there isn't the same

opportunity found elsewhere in L.A. When Oscar Menhivar returned as an adult to his South

Central community, what he found

were too many teens facing options that went from bad to worse. We saw lots of teens, especially

young men that were dropping out of high school, but out of them were incarcerated. I personally

had friends that either not doing lifetime or are dead because of

gangs, because of the situations in South Central. So we ask ourselves, how do we solve that issue,

that problem? How do we engage these teens academically? We decided to use coding.

Menjivar started the nonprofit Teens Exploring Technology, TXT for short. Two, in practical terms, teach

coding. But his ultimate goal is far more profound. Through coding, Menhivar aims to change the

outlook of teens, to use the opportunity that technology affords to expand their notion of what is

possible and ultimately change the economic

and social fortune of South L.A. by building a local tech ecosystem from the ground up.

We are in a very critical time right now with technology and people of color and being able to

get involved in that intersection. We have lots of talent in South DeLay. We have

young boys who understand, you know, what a tech startup is, who understand how to hustle,

who want to work really hard, but they don't have the tools necessary to get them started.

TXT offers those tools year-round to classes of primarily young Latino and black men.

As in any startup, participants learn the fundamentals of working in teams

to design, build, and launch software products that are often informed by the world that these young men inhabit.

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