Building with Purpose: The Marathon of Product Development with Inspírame's CEO María Medrano

Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background?

I am María Alejandrina Medrano, very, very proud to be Mexican-American, born here in San Francisco, California. My parents are from Zacatecas, Mexico. I was the first born in this country, the only girl of four brothers. Education has always been very important in my house, even though we were very humble and had very little.

My dad only went to school until the third grade, but he loved school. He always talked about how wonderful school was, that it was a place to respect teachers, and that if you respected teachers, you could learn a lot and become something great in life. My mom, although she grew up here, didn't like school much. She would always say, "School isn't for me, but you'll like school, and you're going to go to a place called college. I don't know what that is, but I know that college is where very intelligent people go, and when you go to college, you'll get a job that pays very well."

I grew up with the dream of going to school, going to college to get a good job—not just for me, but for my parents and my brothers, because as we know, as Latinos, it's not just about us; it's about our community. That's who I am—someone who grew up with that mindset and who still lives that way, now with my own children, always thinking not just about what we can do for ourselves or our families, but how we can take what we've learned or suffered through and use it to help others. And that's what we're doing with Inspírame.

Tell me a bit about your journey—what did you study, and what’s your professional background?

I went to study business at university, and I'll say it was by accident and out of necessity. Growing up in high school, my mentors were always teachers, so I always said I was going to be a teacher. When I went to college, I was planning to become a teacher, but in the first two months, I quickly realized that the classes for becoming a teacher were only offered during the day. I had to work full-time while also going to school full-time, working from eight to five and then taking classes from six to ten in the evenings. The only classes available in the evenings were business classes, so I ended up taking business classes by chance. But the more I learned, the more I saw that business was something I really wanted to pursue.

After four or five years in college, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in business, and since I was already working full-time, I also had experience. So, when I finished, I was able to use that degree to say, "I'm ready to be a manager." The area I focused on in business during the first three years was finance. I worked with sales teams and businesses to collect the money made from sales. Accounts receivable taught me a lot about relationships—being able to talk to the company, understand who they are so that when they get their money, they can pay us first.

After that, I was given the opportunity to return to school and get a master's degree in Organizational Development, which, to put it simply, is about how people work together, how you can influence or make changes, or talk about change management—all the more complicated aspects of business. Because running a business is most complicated and important when it comes to who your employees are and who you have as leaders to get the job done. After receiving my master's degree, I learned about a job at a tech company called Webex. Webex was brand new at the time—it was a new idea of video conferencing, long before Zoom and Teams. They didn't know how to not only sell the product but also how to communicate to companies that there was value in connecting this way without having to get on a plane to travel somewhere.

At Webex, I had the luck that six months later, Cisco acquired Webex. So, it was the first time I experienced an acquisition, which is something completely different—joining a company while knowing that your company has been acquired by a much larger one that sells much more than just the service. And I've always been the kind of person who likes to learn, and to do something well, I need to understand it very well. I love, as they say, going really, really deep to be there and do the job.

A year after that acquisition, I was in Cisco's finance department. Cisco, being a global company, was much larger. I spent 14 years at Cisco, in eight different organizations, holding various titles, and working in engineering, data and analytics, customer success, and finally ending my work there in diversity, working with human resources and talking about the importance of employees. I focused on building the department, making many of the commitments we made from a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) perspective, and working with the CEO and CHRO of a Fortune 500 company.

From there, I moved on to do similar work at Visa. And in the year I joined Visa, COVID hit, and it was very stressful for everyone. But I think about it, and I know it wasn't by accident because when I got there, Visa was all about being in the office every day. Well, I had already come from a culture where I worked remotely, with my team spread across the world. So, when I got to Visa, I said, "Well, I'll help them at least have one day a week where they can work from home." And two weeks in, the world shut down due to the pandemic. So, I was there to guide the entire team, not just for one day a week, but everyone had to work from home.

At Visa, I was approached by Google, and they understood what I was doing there. They said, "Come to Google; we want you to help us here with what we're doing in diversity and inclusion, but also in our work with national leaders." It gave me a lot of time to understand more and apply myself more in public policy and talk about my experience of living in this country and the importance that education has had in my life to reach these levels and do this work with these companies. And it was through this that I understood the importance of focusing more on Inspírame.

The idea of Inspírame started 20 years ago. It began with my experience as the first in my family to go to college, how difficult it was, and how hard it was for my parents to understand what college was and how they could support me. When the pandemic hit, when I was at Visa, we said, "You know what? Inspírame is not just an idea; we can create products that can help many more people." That's why in 2019, we decided to establish Inspírame as a corporation and start developing our product. We didn't just set up the company; we built our engineering team. We're now in the fifth year of our company, and we still have the same engineers who helped us from the very first idea to grow what we have now with our product, which is called TecoGuide.

What do you enjoy most about education? What connects you to it the most?

What connects me the most is the impact we can have on families, not just on one person, but knowing that if we're talking to a student, we're also helping the parents who may not know much about education, especially if someone comes to this country as an immigrant or even as a refugee. But there are also many in this country whose parents may not have gone to college because times have changed. So, that's what matters most to me about Inspírame because I see every day in what I've done over the last 20 years that the conversations are always the same. "We don't have the right talent; we don't have the right skills..." And no one was talking about the basics of looking within our own communities, looking at where we're doing business to see that there are many neighborhoods of people who have the potential, but maybe they don't know.

With Inspírame, we will provide that exposure and those options, even if someone doesn't know what they want to do. But when they do say, "I want to do something," they'll know they can come to us, and we will tell them the truth about what options they have. And when they decide what that option is, then we'll guide them, letting them know what classes they need to take, where to take the classes, how long it's going to take, and always doing it with the interest of finding the most affordable way, so they don't have to take out loans. Because that also happens, especially in our community, where people say, "I can't go to school because it's too expensive." And I always say, "If you're going to invest in something, invest in education because it's investing in yourself, and no one can take that away from you."

What are you most proud of in your career, professionally or personally?

I'm very proud to be able to be in the jobs I've done and where I am now, and to be able to proudly say that I'm Mexican-American. And I say this because it's something very different when you're Latina or Mexican-American and growing up in this country—it's a beautiful country, but there are also times when it's very hard to be Latino. And I've experienced that, and I say it because we've started together, and then we've reached this level, and people lose themselves, lose who they are and how they want to be. And I say, "Where am I?" Proudly, everyone knows I'm Mexican-American. I've been married for 26 years, I have three children who are also very proud to be Mexican-American, even though they're second-generation. And I'm so proud of that because not everyone—I have seen this—my children proudly dance folklorico, they speak Spanish, they are dedicated to supporting our community. And that, for me, gives me so much light and strength to continue doing what I'm doing professionally.

Because I know that at the last moment, the last time we're on this Earth, people are going to be thinking about what you did in these roles, but more about how you treated people, how you lived your life. And up to this point, that's what makes me so proud because I know that I'm who I say I am, and I don't hide behind anything else. And that means a lot to me.

What advice would you give to 20-year-old María, who is just starting college? 

The advice would be not to lose everything you learned in your youth, in your childhood, in your home, in the importance of relationships. If I look back, I’m just thinking, "Gosh, I had so many great relationships and so many great people I met and learned from. If I had appreciated that as I do now, how many more relationships could I have built?" And at the same time, also reminding the 20-year-old me just to keep going because everything you’re doing is in service of something much bigger. And I think the other piece as well is not undermining and not shortcutting the lessons learned and all those little pitfalls that happened because there are so many along the way. And I don’t think we take enough time to really learn.

I remember I was maybe about 24, 25—I was managing a team of 20 people at a big Caterpillar dealership, and I was having a really hard time with a certain employee. And I remember I was doubting myself, thinking maybe it was me, maybe there was something I wasn’t doing right. And I remember meeting with a person from HR because I wasn’t in HR at the time, and the person said, "Don’t be so hard on yourself; just think of the learnings because this is..." And now, being on this side, I’m just thinking about what I’m doing. Time flies and passes so quickly. And yeah, what was happening there was really preparing me. I remind myself, even today, that this is preparing me for whatever is still yet to come. So that’s what I’d tell my 20-year-old self: "It’s a marathon."

Tell me a bit about product development. When you have an idea—you had the idea—how does the idea of the guide come about?

What’s important is having the experience and really knowing exactly what you’re creating for. And the beautiful thing I’ve had is, as I said, my husband of 26 years dedicated his life to being a college counselor. So, he has more than 50,000 hours of customer tape, working with students and parents, knowing exactly what our schools have now and what’s needed to help those students. So, we spent a lot of time doing the customer journey and understanding their gaps, understanding their needs, and then being able to build what we knew we could create as the most viable product—just the very, very basic. And it’s something I’ve learned, that as much as we wanted to get a perfect product, we can’t get that perfect. If we waited for the perfect product, then we’ve spent too much time. So, if we took three years to build that product—because like I mentioned, we built it from scratch, we built the infrastructure because we didn’t buy anything, we built it because we knew what we had to build didn’t exist anywhere.

And so we took three years to build the algorithms, to build the structures, to build the tables. And then in March, we went live with what we know is our product. It’s not 100% complete, and the reason I say that is it doesn’t have all 116 community colleges that I want that are here in California. We have about 55 colleges, but we know that at least what we have there is already helping many people. And as we add more and more, it will be able to help more and more students. So hands-on, like what you need is expertise, knowing what you’re solving for, and the customer interviews so that when you actually have an MVP product, you then go searching for that market product fit.

Tell me a bit about your transition from working in large companies to entrepreneurship.

Yes, this is probably the biggest change management. The good thing is that in all the roles I had in the big corporate space, you would think that in a corporation, you have all the resources available to you for everyone. But in reality, especially in the companies where I've worked, it’s not that way. So, I learned how to be scrappy, as we say in English, how to be nimble and agile. So, for me, it’s about bringing that experience into the startup world and really being scrappy, being resourceful, networking, reaching out to partners who would want to partner with us.

I think the hardest thing for me is that, at least on the corporate side, I had a start and end time for the most part. With a startup, there is no start or end time—it seems like it's all day, every day. So, it’s about how I pace myself to not burn out because there’s so much to do. And being in a startup, I say I do everything, whether it’s sales, investments, pitching, conversations, helping a student—you name it. There’s no job too big or too small. And not having a team as large as the one I had in the corporate space, I’ve had to adjust to be able to prioritize. And it’s difficult because I know that’s something I don’t do very well, you know what I mean? I want to keep doing more and more and more, but that’s where I’m focusing. For me, it’s about where I’m spending my time, because like any founder, you’re here, you’re there, you’re everywhere.

You have a vision of impact on the community. What is that vision? How do you know you’re reaching what you want to achieve?

The vision, I say, is simple, but it’s very big—that every person in this country knows they have options and that they have different options to get any preparation they need to enter the workforce where they have the opportunity to be paid a fair wage. And I say this for everyone—I know many people who in our conversations think, "I would like to do this; I would like to do that." And my vision is that everyone no longer says, "I wish," but says, "I can do this, I did this, I did it for this reason." And by doing that, I believe we can all achieve something better.

So that’s my big vision. And I say it because I talk to communities that are very underserved, whether it’s those who were formerly incarcerated, who come out and say, "Well, I would have liked to be able to do this," to be able to say, "No, I did my time, and I have this goal, and I know how to reach that goal, and now I’m able to do this." I know that for more and more people who do that, they themselves are going to look back, and they’re going to be able to bring others along. And that’s the biggest vision—to not only help one person but to help someone who may also want to help another and another and another, and that together, we can all move forward.