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

There is a wide gap between the technology industry and Latinos,

the fastest growing portion of today's workforce and the workforce of the future,

say Loretta Sanchez and Ruben Gallego, both members of Congress.

Sanchez, who represents the central portion of Orange County, California, and Gallego, who represents the Phoenix area of Arizona, joined this segment of the pod to discuss how to bring more Latinos and other underrepresented populations into the tech industry.

We have the innovators. It's just how do you move that Latino innovator into the mainstream of innovation that is what we see here in the Silicon Valley.

Finally, why tech entrepreneurs and government have a hard time working together.

So a lot of tech companies have really been operating very well without our interference.

And so the first time,

you know, when we meet, you know, whether it's tech meeting government, there's like a cultural

divide. Well, the cultural divide exists because we haven't really needed to interact. Loretta Sanchez

and Ruben Gallego. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. So you guys are out here in the valley on a sort of

fact-finding mission or

information-gathering mission, and we had a brief discussion. And one of the things that you guys

brought up was this idea that you are and your constituents are this kind of pipeline to the

workforce of the future. And I want to unpack that, both kind of how you view the work of the

future as it relates to the people in your home districts, and what we mean by work and how we can

get more people involved. Well, we know that just in a few years, one out of every four Americans

will be of Hispanic descent. We know that nine out of 10 Hispanics

in America are actually born here. We know that it is the youngest population. The Hispanic Americans

are median age, the youngest population here in the United States. And in fact, we know that every month,

83,000 Hispanics in our nation turn 18. So we are really looking at the crux of the workforce

...