Small Talk: Big Ideas About Little Learners

Season 1, Episode 3: Pay Equity: Berna Artis and Owen Schochet

TRANSCRIPT

(Music + sounds of children playing)

NARRATOR: You’re listening to Small Talk: Big Ideas About Little Learners, brought to you by NAEYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children. As we celebrate our centennial year, we’re diving into conversations that matter now – to little learners and the big people who show up for them, bringing you stories of struggle, inspiration, and hope for our children’s future. 

DANIEL HAINS: My name is Daniel Hains. I’m the Chief Policy and Professional Advancement Officer at NAEYC. I’m really excited to be joined here today by our friends Berna Artis and Owen Schochet for an incredible conversation about a policy in DC that has significant implications for the ECE workforce across the country. So I’m going to let my friends introduce themselves. We’re going to talk a little about the DC Pay Equity Fund, and go from there. So I’ll start with you, Berna. 

BERNA ARTIS: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Berna Artis. I am currently executive director of the DC Association for the Education of Young Children and I have been an educator, head of school for 20-plus years, and an advocate for children, families, and educators. So here I am. 

DANIEL: Owen. 

OWEN SCHOCHET: OK, hi, my name is Owen Schochet. I am a senior researcher at Mathematica, where we conduct research to inform public policy debates. So I’m a quantitative researcher, a  social scientist who studies programs and policies related to early childhood, family support, and nutrition, among other areas. 

DANIEL: So to provide a little context on the DC Pay Equity Fund, I just want you as the listener to imagine, you are working incredibly hard at your job. You’re doing great work. You’re providing value and service to your community, and your boss or the people that are paying you recognize that. They give you a $15,000, $20,000 raise because they see how important you are, and they want you to stay. Maybe you’ve gone back to school to ensure that you’re able to achieve this full raise and working at the level that is expected for the work that you’re doing. And then let’s say you boss says, “Well, actually, we can’t fund that anymore. We’d like you to continue to do this work, but we’re going to take that $20,000 back.” This is a reality that educators in DC have been grappling with in the early childhood community for a few years now as a result of threats to the DC Pay Equity Fund. And I’m really excited to have you here, Berna, because you have been at the forefront of these conversations, both shaping the fund and fighting to maintain its existence. And so I’m hoping for our audience, you can give them a more clear explanation of what the DC Pay Equity Fund is. 

BERNA: OK, so as you said, there are educators who are working with young children, and they choose to work with young children in community-based organizations, including center and home. And that means the work they do is education. It’s not just the care part of it. They go both hand-in-hand. And the Pay Equity Fund was created to address this longstanding inequity in teacher pay. So if you are working in a community-based organization, you were receiving $40,000, sometimes even less than that, a year. And if you choose to go to public school or charter school, definitely public school, the numbers were incredibly different. So we advocated, and the goal was really to move toward that compensation that’s parity-based on education and experience. And here today there are over 4,000 educators who are actually participating in Pay Equity Fund, and that means they are working in organizations or early childhood programs who are supporting this initiative, and they are really trying their hardest to make it work. That said, we asked the educators what they would need or what they would want. And one of the things we encourage them is to go back to school to further their education. Some are getting their AA degree; some are bachelor’s. And that means now we promised them something, and we need to keep that promise. Otherwise, the picture does not look good. 

DANIEL: Yeah. And so I want to talk a little bit about why DC needed to invest additional money to bring educator wages up to par with K-12 educators. I think there is a kind of longstanding societal assumption that the work early childhood educators do is not as important or not as skilled or not as complex as the work that educators do when they’re working with 6-year-olds or 7-year-olds. You know, from the science of early brain development that children’s brains are developing really rapidly in these early years. Education might look a little different in the early years. And so could you talk about the expertise that the educators in DC have, what that expertise looks like in practice, and why it is so important to have this additional money and the skill and the competencies that they developed. 

BERNA: Absolutely. So when we are talking about early childhood education, we are definitely talking about being intentional with children, so yes, of course, it’s very important to keep them safe, keep them engaged and happy. But there is science behind all of that. And the difference is when, as an educator, you have this degree, that means you specialized in this work. We’re talking about trauma-informed care, family engagement, social-emotional development, language acquisition. There are so many different layers of working with young children. Everyone cannot do it. And I know I used to interview a lot of teacher candidates when I was head of school, and the individuals who would say, “I want to do this work because I love children,” I respected that and I understood. I was happy about it. But loving children is not enough. There is so much more to it. Just looking at brain development and the research and what the research is saying to us, we really have to be on our tippy toes about that. These are young children and trusting and being safe is just not enough. 

DANIEL: It really, it’s expertise that it takes to support young children’s development and to really prepare them for the rest of their engagement in school and life. And that is what the DC Pay Equity Fund is recognizing when it is beginning to pay these teachers more. Can we talk a little about the payment structure in early childhood? It’s pretty clear we spend far, far less on young children – less than $1,000 on average – for infants and toddlers that we do in the K-12 education, where we spend about $13,000. So if the Pay Equity Fund didn’t exist, and we wanted teachers to keep having this parity in pay, who would have to pay for that in DC? Would it – is it something that businesses have the income to support on their own and are just choosing not to, or is that public money really necessary? 

BERNA: Businesses don’t have the money, especially the ones who are about quality, because quality comes with high numbers. And being head of school, or previous head of school, anytime I looked at my numbers, anytime I would talk to my board about different budget, you know, line items, we would have to have really deep discussions because we did not want to cut from the quality of the work we are doing and quality experiences the children are having in our program. But at the same time, we had to make sure that we can keep our doors open and we can keep paying our teachers. Anyone who is familiar with early childhood settings, they also know that 80 to 85 percent of the budget is about teacher salaries and benefits. And there are so many programs out there, not just in DC, who are not able to afford to have compensation package. It’s like, pay, OK, which is very minimal again. But in terms of benefits, we are not even talking about benefits. It’s just not existent in so many places because it’s so costly. And you cannot simply transfer that to tuition because then we will talk about how affordable is this for the families. And quality experiences should not be only for some children who can afford it. It should be for all children, regardless of their income. 

DANIEL: Absolutely. So I know the Pay Equity Fund has been around for a few years now. Can you remind us when this first took effect in DC? 

BERNA: 2022 was the first year the initiative came to life, and I served on the task force the second term. I was very involved, along with several of my colleagues, in these discussions as to when we do this, we also have to factor in the increase that will come with it because we want teacher quality to increase, knowing that that will transfer into practice, and it will transfer into children’s high-quality experiences. And it wasn’t surprising that we needed more money. So right now, sometimes we’re looking at each other, it’s like, “Where did this come from?” We knew this would come. We just didn’t plan it correctly. And when I say “we,” I’m really talking about our leaders in the city specifically. So it’s, you know, we increased tax for the highest earners in the city and we rallied our families. They were glad that, you know, they were going to do something like this because they knew where the money would go. But then the fund was swiped and since then we have to fight for it every single year. I want to fight for other things for the children and for the educators, not the Pay Equity Fund or their salaries, every single year, quite frankly. It’s pretty frustrating. 

DANIEL: I’m going to bring Owen into the conversation in a second, but I want to first just – since it’s been around now for about four years, there have to be a lot of really clear stories about how this has impacted educators. And at NAEYC, we love to center educator experience. We think that’s the core of all the work that we do. Berna, I wonder if you can share just a story or an example of an educator that you know in your work in DC who has been impacted, and what this fund has meant for their perception of their work and their livelihood. 

BERNA: I had the privilege to talk to and listen to a lot of the practitioners in the field and what really resonates with a lot of educators is that some are just first-time homebuyers and not just in the family, but generationally. And some of them were able to move out of their home situation where they were living with someone or a family member. Now they are living in their own space with their own child. Some were able to purchase a car to especially go back and forth to work on time. So there are life-changing things that they have been experiencing and it’s really satisfying to see that for a human being, ’cause teachers are human beings first, then their title comes and role comes, right? Seeing them talking about these things and with such happiness and then, unfortunately, seeing that happiness turn into fear right after, that’s very sad. 

DANIEL: Thanks, Berna. I really appreciate especially what you said about, like, the ability of this money to be transformative. And I would love to get to a place in society where everywhere it’s not controversial to say that an educator should be able to afford a home or a car for the most important work, which is educating our youngest children. Owen, I’m going to turn to you now. So the Pay Equity Fund has been around for four years. One of the most important things we do and think of as policymakers and as policy advocates is we need to show that what we’re doing is having an impact and what that impact is. And you have been spending a lot of time studying the impacts of the Pay Equity Fund. 

OWEN: Yeah. I’m interested in studying questions about the effectiveness of public programs, in other words, programs or policies that require investment of public resources, in the case of the Pay Equity Fund, taxpayer dollars. The Pay Equity Fund was personally intriguing because of kind of its novelty and importance. I know we’ve already discussed some of the broad overarching goals of the program, but I should just emphasize it’s the first program of its kind in the nation. There have been several smaller, more incremental, public efforts to increase early childhood educator wages, including through existing public funding streams like the Child Care Subsidy Program. You can increase reimbursement rates. There was a lot of money in the Covid relief funding bills that have since expired of course. None of these funding streams were large enough, right, to provide the funding that would be necessary to, you know, to close the gap between what a community-based early childhood worker, in DC at least, makes and what a public school teacher who works for DC Public Schools makes. We now know that gap when the program was launched, you know, is about $15,000 on average. So this was like a monumental public policy. There had been nothing like it. It seemed important to study, um, even more broadly than the early childhood world, right, this is an instance of essentially the local jurisdiction, government, putting large sums of public money into predominantly a private sector, right? So these are private businesses. I can’t personally think of another example like this. Berna, you know, cited a statistic about the share of, you know, total revenue that’s spent on labor. It’s high. It’s at least half. It’s as high as 80 percent perhaps. So this is a massive, you know, kind of intervention, right, into a private marketplace. In most places, parents are paying, you know, private tuition for care. In my case, I do it for two young boys. So it was interesting, and then of course, it’s substantively important. So we think about effectiveness of this program in two ways: One is in terms of its impacts, as you say. Now, if those impacts are positive, you could call those things benefits. Another way is in terms of economic effectiveness, right, or cost-effectiveness. Do those benefits have a value associated with them, right, that in total is higher than the cost, right, of investing in the program in the first place? And it that’s true, then you might say you have a positive economic return of a program or so forth, and that’s important because it speaks to the efficiency of taxpayer investment in DC. 

DANIEL: Awesome. And so over the years, you’ve been studying this program and really recognizing its uniqueness. What are some of the key findings when you’re looking at those benefits, when you’re looking at those costs, when you’re looking at the economic benefits and the individual benefits? What are the data showing us? 

OWEN: OK, so I’ll approach the research in each of those types of studies of effectiveness, OK? So first, the impacts: Our research thus far, focused on the impacts of the program have primarily used federal labor market data. We’ve looked at the health of the early childhood sector, and what we’ve found it that the general story is that the introduction of the fund, after one year increase the labor supply or the number of early childhood educators, let’s say, in the District, and increased relative to what we call the counterfactual – what would have happened if the fund didn’t exist. Now, we can never truly know that, but the idea is that we tried to kind of simulate that, OK? So we used fancy methods to do that. In doing so, we found that the size of the early childhood workforce after not even one year, really just kind of one or two quarters, because the program started in the middle of 2022, increased the size of the workforce by about 3 percent right away. That may not sound large, but in such a short period of time, it was one of the largest increases in any county in the country. By the end of the sort of the first full calendar year or the second program year, 2023, that number was 7 percent, and we just released a report on the three-year impacts, finding the number to be 11 percent. 

DANIEL: Wow! OK. 

OWEN: Yeah, so that translates to, you have about 4,000 educators in the system, give or take, right? You can do the math, it’s 400, maybe, you know, 500  more educators, and that’s meaningful as well because more educators means more children and more families can be served, right? 

DANIEL: I just, I think I want to just set expectations again across the country. This is not a trend we are seeing nationally right now. As we’re seeing 3, 7, 11 percent growth in the workforce, we are not seeing supply grow at the same rate. And actually, in a lot of communities, we’re seeing supply be a challenge. We actually see this in NAEYC’s own workforce survey data, where we see that one of the biggest factors in preventing programs from enrolling as many children as they’d like is that they cannot afford to retain staff. So I just want to emphasize for folks who may not be living and breathing childcare policy like those of us on this conversation are, that that is really huge nationally. You also talked about economic benefits, Owen, and I want to get into that a little bit too, because the challenge that we’re talking about in terms of the threats to the fund are being framed as a budget challenge and are coming about in terms of like, “Where’s the money?” So have you studied, like, the economic impacts and the benefits of the Pay Equity Fund? 

OWEN: Yeah. So that’s the second area of work that we’ve gone into and I should say that the majority of our evidence on the cost effectiveness of the program is based on what I’ll call direct evidence, such as I just described, that really does compare the impact of the program, not just relative to its own level. So it’s not a 7 percent, 3 percent, 11 percent increase relative to just DC’s trend before the fund. It’s relative to what would’ve happened absent the program. So that is an important point that you emphasized. Some of it though is based on sort of assumptions that we make looking at other similar organizations or in, you know, industries or professions, like kindergarten teachers or public preschool teachers that now make, you know, the salary. So some of it is based on kind of informed assumptions. Most of it is based on direct evidence. So the costs of the program are fairly easy to determine. It’s a substantial investment of resources. In fiscal year ’23, when payments were going directly to educators, the total costs were about $50 million. In fiscal year ’24, when the program shifted to providing payments through businesses directly, and in the service of implementing an established wage scale, so to make sure that everyone was paid at what their counterparts in public school were making, based on role and credential, the cost of the program was nearly $70 million, which actually exceeded the budgeted amount in the legislation. It was, there was some funds from other places brought in, so clearly everyone was sort of doing their best to pull together what they can for this program to be implemented. So, it’s an expensive program. No surprise. You’re giving an average wage or $15,000 subsidy – and we should also mention that this program isn’t only about payment increases; it also funds something called Healthcare of Childcare, which is no- or low-cost health insurance through DC’s health exchange, so that’s another major part of it – about $12 million or so a year is invested to fund healthcare. 

DANIEL: And that’s also fairly unique to DC, right, for the education sector. And one of the pieces that we regularly see in our workforce surveys and some more national data are that most early childhood educators lack access to health insurance through their jobs and rely on either public sources like exchanges or Medicaid in the case of about a little under 30 percent of the workforce because of low wages. Obviously, with the Pay Equity Fund, wages in DC are not low enough anymore, thankfully, for educators to have to rely on Medicaid, but that’s a really important flag. I’m glad you brought that up. 

OWEN: So it’s a large investment, that is true. Our goal, right, is to value in economic terms the benefits and so, you know, we’ve developed a fairly detailed sort of theory of change for the program. In other words, how does it benefit stakeholders? Stakeholder groups include educators themselves, right? It includes their employers or facilities, and it also includes, of course, families and children. And there are a variety of benefits that we sort of theorize or observe for each of these groups. I’ll give a couple of examples. For educators, when they’re paid more, right, and they stick around longer, right, they gain job experience, right? Some call that workforce productivity. You gain job skills that can be quantified. You tend to be absent from work less. You mentioned a lot of educators don’t have good benefits, among that group of benefits would be paid time off, health insurance, of course, can lead to reductions in medical debt, right, versus being underinsured. It can improve your health status, which can reduce healthcare expenditures. So there’s a variety of educator-specific benefits, and some of these can be also placed in various groups, but this is how we did it. For facilities themselves, right, there’s cost savings from having to recruit less, right? When you have a lot of turnover, you have to spend a lot of time, as I’m sure Berna knows, have run a center, finding new staff, interviewing them, onboarding them, training them, doing background checks. These things are expensive in their own right. Then there are additional cost savings from certain operational efficiencies that are a little bit hard to think about, but take my word for it. Really, the majority of the dollar value of the benefits we come to find are to children and families. By increasing access to care, as I mentioned before, right, if you increase the number of workers, you decrease staffing shortages, you fill vacancies, you can serve more families. There’s a dollar value to each childcare slot, right? And that can be quantified fairly easily. You then, of course, there’s also the quality channel, right? And there’s an economic benefits of improved quality of services as well when staff stick around longer, you know, they improve their own skill set, there’s stability, right, which is one of the most important things, right, is a stable relationship between children and their caregivers, as well as families and their caregivers, as well as between staff, so all of those things have an economic value. We crunched the numbers, we aggregated across all those benefits. We found that really, in both years, as the program scaled and evolved, so too did the value of its benefits, and we found about a 23 percent – not about, a exactly 23 percent return on investment. 

DANIEL: Oh, wow. 

OWEN: In the first, in fiscal year ’23 and a 21 percent return on investment in fiscal year ’24. In other words, for every dollar that you invest in the program, you get back a dollar and twenty-three cents or a dollar and twenty-one cents. The 21 percent return is quite high, so those are our findings. 

DANIEL: That is really helpful. I appreciate you laying all that out. I’ll also say it is very demystifying as someone who works in this space, who spends a lot of time kind of looking at these statistics and data of the return on investment of early childhood education to really see it broken down in that way. And Berna, I’m going to turn back to you because we talked about the impact on educators earlier, but Owen brought up the impact on children, the impact on families, and how that’s showing up in the data and numbers, so I wanted to turn it back to you and what you’re seeing in communities, and how you’re seeing families’ access to care change because of the Pay Equity Fund over the last few years. 

BERNA: I think the biggest thing that we see is trust. Because when there’s continuity in terms of teachers and children, families, building that relationship and really getting to know the families and vice versa, that makes a big difference. And for me, it’s always about the children. Adults will figure it out somehow, but it really is about the children, and we should not short-change children, which means that continuity of care and relationship-building and trust-building directly impacts the children, especially if a child is coming in and seeing familiar people and trusting adults who also know them and tailor a lot of the experiences in the classroom according to the child’s needs, not just this one cookie-cut thing, “OK, this is what we are doing today,” right? That takes a lot of getting to know the child, getting to know the family, and for the families, knowing that your child’s teacher is receiving this, I will say “benefit,” because it is a positive thing, as Owen said earlier, it’s a really positive thing for families to feel, really. Here is my child. You are getting paid at a level where you can live. I’m not saying, “living wage,” I’m saying livable wage, and also the understanding of early childhood educators being professionals. When families see this, they also see them as professionals, and teachers also feel that they are professionals because they are treated as such, and with respect. So everything is almost like this, you know, structure of a domino, and when you push one, there is no way others are going to stay in that same position. There is an impact when you change one thing, which is, at this point, the Pay Equity Fund. 

DANIEL: Thank you. So I’m going to zoom out to, like, the national context of some of what we’re seeing now, and then I want to talk about why the Pay Equity Fund is being threatened. I think there is widespread acknowledgment, across the board, that we are not doing enough as a country to support families’ access to childcare. There’s one school of thought that the problem is we have too many regulations, we’re spending too much money. We need to deregulate. We need to require less of the workforce. We need to allow more children per adult so that we can just build up more supply. And there’s the other theory, which, spoiler alert, we subscribe to, that this is a profession, and you get out of it what you put into it, and building the supply of care that families need requires investment. It requires investing in teachers. It requires investing in the programs. It requires investing in communities to ensure that we are building the supply of care that meets the needs of families, and that’s what we do for K-12 education writ large in this country, and what we’ve largely failed to do for early childhood education. What I’m hearing from the data, what I’m hearing from the experiences you’re sharing, is that DC is proof right now that that is working. So if it’s working, if the data are showing that the (benefits outweigh the costs) if the stories on the ground are that families are having better experience in child care, that educators are doing better, are staying in the field longer, are coming into this field, why is DC trying to cut the Pay Equity Fund? 

BERNA: First thing comes to my mind is ignorance to the profession, because there is this wide range of understanding – or lack of understanding, I should say – about what we do as early childhood educators and a belief in that. And with that belief comes the treatment, which turns into either respect or disrespect. So what we are seeing right now, as you said, Daniel, if something is working and the research and data is showing this, why would you get rid of it? And for city leaders, or some of them, to think that they are putting the funds to make childcare affordable for families or putting the funds to K-12 education because they are “real” teachers, it’s kind of hard to say anything else, right? Because we should not talk about early childhood educators being educators, because they are. We should not try to convince anyone because the data is showing it. And that’s why earlier I said I think it’s a little bit of ignorance and maybe a little bit public knowledge because some things com from hundred years ago, and hundreds of years ago, I should say, so it’s not something new and that reflects on our values, and we are not valuing children enough in this country. 

DANIEL: I very much hear that. 

BERNA: This is about the community work, and we really have to come together and just, not just talk about it, but take steps towards healing things and making things better. 

DANIEL: And this is not the first time the program has been under threat, right? So your advocates have been fighting this fight for a while. What happened last time it was threatened for elimination? 

BERNA: After our advocacy work with educators, families, leaders in the city in early childhood education, the DC Council support was significant, and because there are many council members who really understand what we are talking about, and some of them, they have young children, and they see it firsthand as a parent. With their support, the fund was put in place, and we were not really expecting it to go back to zero this year in the draft budget, so here we are. 

DANIEL: All right. Well, I am so appreciative of the work that you and the rest of the coalition in DC are doing, and the work that educators are doing, to help ensure that children are being supported and developed. We’re thinking about this fund, and we’re thinking about what this means in the context of those broader national conversations about childcare. From each of your perspectives, Owen as someone who is a researcher first, what is the key takeaway you hope that policymakers and similar communities, both in DC and nationally, take away from the research and the study of what has happened in DC over the last four years? 

OWEN: Well, first of all, I think that as, again, pioneering and kind of singular as the Pay Equity Fund is, it’s coming out of a growing recognition of the importance of focusing on the workforce, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in any industry, that focusing on staff is important, particularly in a service industry where they’re, in this case, caring for, you know, among our most important, you know, little kids. I think this could be considered a success story in terms of focusing on the workforce in this industry, as a way to sort of improve the quality of the workforce and increase supply and target it to those who matter, and who need it. I think it was widely understood or theorized when the program began that increasing wages for educators would increase retention, it would anchor them to their roles, right? It would improve labor force attachment, and that’s the pathway through which you see increases in the quality of the service, right? But the access finding, the supply finding, I think was a big more surprising. I don’t think folks had thought about it as much. I think it reflects in large part the staffing shortages that you had mentioned before. A lot of that is contextual, coming out of the pandemic, you know, there were more vacancies than ever. But when you combine, right, these retention effects with filling those vacancies through recruitment as well, right, through bringing in new teachers, attracting folks who are much more likely now perhaps, right, to pursue employment in an industry when their wages are much higher, that increases the overall supply of workers, and I think that was – perhaps it sounds like a kind of obvious conclusion now, but it wasn’t talked about that way then. Another thing that might sound obvious, if you want to implement, you know, what we call a salary scale, right? All public school systems have them. If you’re a lead teacher or an assistant teacher and you have, insert credential level, this is what you make, this is your minimum target salary. Well, if you want to implement that in an industry where it doesn’t exist, and currently wages are determined by employers, right, as a function of their revenue, you got to know what the difference is between what people are actually being paid and what the target is. And DC’s about as sophisticated as anywhere in terms of having good data, but DC struggled too, and you can see that in the evolution of the program. There’s, you know, it’s complex. It’s really nuanced. There’s these funding formulas and lots of inputs, frankly, there’s just not very good information about what folks make. They can report it, but employers have to verify it. These things are really researchy and sound wonky, but it’s kind of fundamental to this whole thing working. I think it’s really important that there’s a growing recognition of the importance of good workforce data. There’s workforce registries across the country and you know, increasing numbers of states and localities are requiring workers to enter data about themselves for employers to verify that information, linking it across different databases and other programs and systems, so I think that’s really important that people focus on that as a first step. 

DANIEL: Thank you. Appreciate that. Berna, we’ll end with you. Final thoughts in terms of what policymakers should take away from the experience of the Pay Equity Fund in DC, both here and nationally. 

BERNA: We can make childcare affordable for families, but that doesn’t help if we don’t have teachers in the classrooms. And unfortunately, if the fund is really cut – I’m saying, “really,” I’m still very hopeful, obviously, there will not be enough teachers, one, not enough classrooms open, and also some of the programs already started closing, unfortunately, after decades of serving the community. And the question is not really, “can we afford to invest in early childhood education?” It’s the opposite: Can we afford not to, knowing what we know today? So I will leave you with that. 

DANIEL: That’s a really great thought to end on. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for being part of this conversation. I’ve learned a lot. I hope our listeners do as well. Take care, all. 

OWEN: OK, bye. 

BERNA: Thank you. 

(Music)

NARRATOR: Small Talk: Big Ideas About Little Learners is brought to you by NAEYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, celebrating its 100th year of advocating for little learners and the early childhood education field. To learn more about today’s guests, read the transcript, or listen to other episodes of Small Talk, visit NAEYC.org/SmallTalk or find us – and subscribe – wherever you get your podcasts.