Meet Nico Addae

Janelle Leung: Hello, and welcome to Mind the Gap, a podcast that interviews and spotlights different perspectives in the world of computer science. My name is Janelle Leung, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we are joined by the incredible Nico Addae, who is a Wellesley college graduate who majored in computation and neuroscience and sociology.

 

She attended to emerging leaders program over at the Yale school of management and was also crossed registered at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is currently a product marketing manager at Gradient Health, and she is an AI enthusiast and currently works with the MIT STEP Lab to increase AI literacy for students. And on top of all of that, she has her own consulting firm. Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Nico, we are especially excited to interview you because you are our very first guest. Nico, how are you today? 

 

Nico Addae: I'm doing great. How are you? 

 

Janelle Leung:  I'm doing great. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. We are so excited to have our very first guest. And before we dive into our questions, I'd just like to start out with some icebreaker to get the conversation started. So my first question for you is: as the holiday season has begun, do you have any traditions or plans you are excited to celebrate? 

 

Nico Addae: So, I'm not sure if this qualifies, but I know with my siblings, we do not traditionally watch Christmas films. We, like last Christmas, instead of watching, like Deck the Halls or um Home Alone, I think we ended up watching Chernobyl and that like, we like watching really intense dramas, and horrors. This year we're going to be having the theme of like classic American drama. So we're going to be watching American Psycho, um, Silence of the Lambs and then probably Scream. So like we postpone all of the horror that we should have been watching around Halloween for Christmas. 

 

Janelle Leung:  Interesting. So your tradition is not to follow the tradition. 

 

Nico Addae: Yes. Something of the sort. I think growing up, my parents didn't instill in me a love, like not a love of Christmas? They for, we would go when we would go out, we would get one present and we would go to Toys R Us the day after Christmas. And so it was gutted from everyone else doing their Christmas shopping. And so Christmas was always sort of a little bit of a horror show and that's how we continue the tradition. We watched very dramatic, very horrifying films together, and it, and it's nice. It's really nice to see how everyone react. The one film that we've watched together that doesn't fit the mold is Dream Girls, but both of my younger siblings say that that gave them emotional trauma for watching all the things that the black woman went through in that show. But otherwise, yeah, that's what we do every Christmas.

 

Janelle Leung:  Wow. That's fantastic. I've never heard that before. All right. All right. The second one, there are three icebreaker questions. Our second question for you is: what is your favorite college memory? 

 

Nico Addae: That is a good question. I graduated 2020 when everything was shutting down. And I think that one of my best college memories was probably fall commencement when the Trans Alliance at Wellesley, in one weekend, put together a commencement that was going to be probably better than our real commencement, where we were able to say our own names and we were able to say what we learned at Wellesley, whether it was our major or like one thing that was a hobby that we became obsessed with and being able to, in chaos, of everyone getting home, everyone trying to figure it out, realizing how amazing the entire Wellesley community was. I think that was my best Wellesley memory.

 

Janelle Leung: I'm glad you were still able to get a good, as good as you can get, fall commencement. My last question for you is: what is your favorite food and why? 

 

Nico Addae: That is a good question. I am definitely a foodie, so it depends on the culture you're talking about. It depends on the day, but I will go for the overall, which would be my mother's fried yam and tilapia, which is a Ghanian cuisine where you take these huge tubers of yam, not like the yams that you would use during Christmas or Thanksgiving and you chop them up and then you deep fry them. And then you use with sweet pepper, which is just like a mashup of tomato, onion, garlic, and a lot of pepper and then tilapia because that is really common in Ghana. And then you would just cover the tilapia with ginger and more spices. It's delicious. Absolutely. 

 

Janelle Leung: That sounds divine. All right. And now we will dive into the nitty gritty and all about your professional and academic career. So just to start off with kind of an open question, how did you get at your current job today? 

 

Nico Addae: That is a good question. I, it was mostly networking because Gradient Health is a very small startup, but we are currently in our growth phase probably by the end of next year, we would have hired several dozen people. I met them earlier this year in August, while I was working at my previous employer and we were supposed to do some consulting work with them and ironically, the mission of their startup aligned exactly with what I've been trying to do with all of my work with AI literacy, all of my work with equity work in health, which was to annotate the world's pathologies, annotate all medical pathologies, which are going to be needed to be able to train AI models, to be able to recognize them in whomever and wherever they're coming from. And they already had a really strong, like both of the co-founders have worked together. They already sold and had a successful company. They're both in their twenties, which is wild. They're not that much older than me. And so like, they've already had this previous success. My CTO is a medical PhD at Duke University, so he has medical background to understand what we're creating, and they both have a lot of background within computer science. So from the logistics standpoint of them being able to have not only a great idea that is much needed in the world, but also the skills and chops to execute on that idea, I decided that I wanted to bet on them and that's why I joined. 

 

Janelle Leung: That's incredible. For our listeners, could you give a short summary about what Gradient Health's mission and vision is? 

 

Nico Addae: Sure. Gradient Health is a radiology medical image firm that is supposed to create data sets that are going to be used in AI models. That's one segment. The second segment is that we have a labeling software that allows radiologists to be able to annotate their chest x-rays, MRI scans, PET scans, whatever. All their system on all  premises, that is the second component. The third component is creating a community so that there's going to be more communication between health professionals and AI professionals because I think that at this point in time, medical care and health are really siloed in the sense that once you, once you're on that path, it's very focused, only talking to other clinicians, only talking to other health professionals and while computer science and AI has started to seep into all sectors of life, it's been slower to seep into health care because we're concerned about HIPAA. We're concerned about the privacy of people and also every hospital has their own different annotations. Everyone has their own different system. And so we're trying to be an all-in-one platform that allows people to find datasets, collect those data sets, label their own data sets and then communicate with other people within a similar community so that they would be able to improve the health care that they provide to their clients.

 

Janelle Leung: That sounds like it would be extremely helpful. 

 

Nico Addae: It is very. It's. It's really exciting. I'm not gonna lie. 

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Janelle Leung: Something you've mentioned is how you're passionate about AI literacy and equity. Could you talk more about that?

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Nico Addae: Most definitely. At this point in time, we are already living in a world that has been, has implemented several different types of narrow artificial intelligence, whether it's prediction systems that are used in Netflix, YouTube, most of your social media, to automation where things that used to be done by hand, data entry, can now be programmed away using Python, scrapers, and other types of tools. What we're finding is that to get to the next level of "evolution of AI," everyone needs to understand how the basic AI that we live with today works.

 

The work that I do with MIT works with the daily curriculum, which is a curriculum that is supposed to expose high school and middle school students to the basic understanding of what it takes to create a dataset, what it creates, what it takes to create an AI model, what is AI and how those two can communicate with the other to be able to create systems that are now being used and implemented in our everyday lives.

 

I think that it's really important because people sometimes take for granted that AI is not magic. It's math. It's a lot of work, a lot of human intelligence and brilliance and creativity that goes behind it. And even though there are things to be concerned about, it is not all doom and gloom with how we're going to implement it.

 

We, everyone who is working on it now represents the diversity that exists in humanity. I think that at this point in time, the people who are creating AI are too fairly focused on white men and Asian men. Full disclosure, the rest of my team with the exception of our CMO, they are whites and Asian men, and they're great. I'm not saying that they're not, but it's really important for everyone who exists on earth to be able to have a say in the way that we're creating technologies that are fundamentally going to change how everyone exists, works, lives, everything in the very near future, if not currently today. And the crazy thing is we're not even at the end of it. What we're doing right now is narrow AI. We haven't gotten to general AI. We haven't gotten into quantum computing. There's a lot that's coming out. So just knowing the basics is what I'm really passionate about.

 

Janelle Leung: I suddenly feel motivated to up my AI literacy now. 

 

Nico Addae: It's really important. And like, once you get the basics, it's easier to implement it in further in future. For example, like while at Wellesley I took, um, 232, which was artificial intelligence. It was amazing. I only regret that I took that class the second semester of my senior year. I regret that I didn't realize that this was the path I wanted to take earlier in my career, so I could have invested more in taking more classes at MIT and other institutions that would have deepened my understanding. But in the past year between graduating, I went and I developed myself independently. I took a Stanford, um, evening course that was on AI ethics and policy, which deepened my understanding of the sort of medical humanities that AI is going to be interacting with. And then I took coding courses to better understand how we think computationally so that we would be able to implement those algorithms better. And then I just kept reading because it was a really interesting topic for me. 

 

Janelle Leung:  So after graduation from Wellesley College, did you start taking more classes right away, or did you pick some times?

 

Nico Addae: So right after Wellesley, I started my consultancy firm, which is called Normaliz where the whole effort is to try and normalize datasets that are going to be implemented for the AI models. And so, because I was trying to get that started, I did a lot of research to be able to do the pitch competitions and programs that I later on became a part of between, I want to say, April of 2020 and then March of this year. In addition to doing independent research for my consultancy firm, I also took on a course that Stanford was offering for evening professionals that was AI literacy. I'm actually a cohort leader for their 2022 section, but it's for professionals, otherwise I would share it along with the Wellesley community, where I was able to learn more deeply about the AI ethics that were going to be affecting everyday life and why there are certain projects that are potentially capable right now, but haven't been implemented. 

 

why, even though we have automation, why it hasn't been implemented thus far into health at a wide scale. And then in addition to that, I did computational neuroscience in my senior year as well. That course had only mat lab. And so I took on learning about C++ I took on learning about Python so that I would have a better understanding since C++, and more specifically Python, are used in AI coding models to understand how it's done. 

 

And then I was working part-time with MIT's Data + Feminism lab at the time. I'm uncomfortable with not working. I will say this. Wellesley has taught me to be uncomfortable with not working. I work part time of MIT's Data + Feminism lab for a year. And then after that, this position opened up at MIT's AI STEP lab. And I was like, this aligns with my career trajectory, this aligns with my life's goal of trying to improve literacy in this. Let me work here. And so now I'm also on contract with them. 

 

Janelle Leung:  You've done a lot in the past year.

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Nico Addae: I, we were stuck at home and I needed something to do. 

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Janelle Leung:  No, I was also stuck at home, but 

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Nico Addae: it's, and that's fine. You do not need to force yourself to do anything. Rest is also, rest is also a hustle. 

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Janelle Leung: Okay. Um, you know what, I'll just take that excuse. Um, but that's super impressive. I already, I already feel motivated to work harder now, speaking with you. 

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Nico Addae: It's okay. You don't need to. It's important to recognize, and I think that this comes more from understanding how women of color, and specifically black women, are viewed in the workforce. I think that at times I work very hard because I want it to be that the people who come after me don't need to work as hard, to be able to get these opportunities, to be able to be recognized. And I'm doing a pretty good job. So I'm glad to continue going forward. It's not as hard for the people who come afterwards.

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Janelle Leung:  You're doing a fantastic job. I would love to know: did you know you were going to be a product marketing manager? I know you said you got into position through networking, but how'd you end up taking this job?

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Nico Addae: I did not know that a product marketing manager existed while I was in college. I initially started out being pre-med and I love art. I love neuroscience. I had so many different loves. I felt like narrowing it down to just medicine would, in the long-term, harm me more than it would help me. I think that I knew that I liked the technical things about neuroscience. I like writing papers. I like reading papers. I like the process of learning about really complex material. And even more, I like the process of explaining that material to people who have less technical understanding. I didn't recognize what that role could have been like while I was at Wellesley. I think that initially I thought it would be a product manager role where I am responsible for the more technical aspect of what the product is and bringing it to market, only to realize that even though there's room for creativity in computer science, when you're working with code, you have maybe three or four different ways to solve a problem while you are writing the code itself and then implementing it where you have the most creativity is UX and UI. It's how you present that information. And I felt product marketing allowed me to have that sort of technical base because what we're doing has to do a lot with medicine. It has to do a lot with AI, and because I already have that knowledge space, I have the opportunity to now be creative. And then when I'm doing the marketing campaign for it, I can easily talk to a neuroscientist. I can easily talk to, um, a person who is in a C-suite, doesn't know a lot about science, but wants to increase their bottom line. I can talk to the general public who is just thinks that this is cool and having that opportunity to have different outlets for my creativity while still having that knowledge base and building that knowledge base in radiology and in AI, that has been really exciting. 

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Janelle Leung: And you can talk to me, a senior, who is having her existential courses at Wellesley.

 

Nico Addae: It's ok! We all had it! We all definitely had it.

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Janelle Leung: All right. So could you walk me through an average day in your job? 

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Nico Addae: Sure. So. Since we're all, we're a completely remote based team. So we have two meetings every day. We have our standup, which is 8:00 AM my time since I work in the Midwest. And then we have our review, which is at 4:00 PM my time. Between that time, because we are such a small startup and because we've just closed our seed round, you have a lot of flexibility in what your day looks like. My ultimate goal is for them to implement marketing strategies, to be aware of marketing trends, and to be aware of how that product is going to be able to meet the market and some of the issues that are going on.

 

So for me, an average day, I would say I wake up around 6:00 AM. I do all of my social media, like drawing for the next hour or so, then I have breakfast. I get ready for my standup in which I'm going to talk about who am I meeting for the day, why I'm meeting them? What are my marketing strategy plans for the day and what I'm going to be writing about?

 

And so I typically have most of my meetings in the morning where I'm going to be,  okay. Let's say, I'm meeting an executive from Google X, I will make sure I meet them in the morning, take my notes, send the notes out to my team by the end of day, have all of these meetings in the morning, then I will have the afternoon where I start focusing on the marketing strategies: what does our website look like? What do other B2B market websites look like? What are we going to be publishing in our blog? What are we going to be publishing on our newsletter? How is this going to implement and help the sales team be able to bring more customers in? And then towards the end of the night, and this is not required, I continue to deepen my knowledge about radiology and AI. I tried to make it so that I will be able to write more technical papers that are not just blog posts, like maybe perhaps a white paper or a paper that could be stared around easily between radiology experts and AI professionals. And just trying to understand what sort of audience am I going to be talking to in the next couple of days. It has so much flexibility. And I will say that it's an excellent early career choice, if you're self-driven and you know what you want to do. I would not suggest this role to people who need a lot of guidance. And that's not a bad thing, especially in, in your early career. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be like, okay. My manager says I have to do X, Y, and Z by the end of the day. There's nothing wrong with that. My role at Gradient, the only two people I have to talk to are the CTO and the CEO. And I just need to convince them that by the end of this quarter, by the end of this marketing period, by the end of this round, we're going to have a marketing strategy that gets more and more people excited about Gradient. And that's the goal. How you get to it is your own palava. 

 

Janelle Leung:  Did you debate going into industry versus start-up? 

 

Nico Addae: Yeah. So during my crisis at, in my senior year, I realized that I didn't want to do medicine. I was scared of corporate and I didn't want to go into non-profits. And I was like, what on earth is left? If I'm realizing that these, none of these things I like, and I was introduced to Venture for America, which is a two-year fellowship that allows people who are interested in startups and interested in starting their own business, be matched with companies across the United States, typically in emerging cities, to be able to start learning those basics. So you don't get, even if I wouldn't get that support directly from the startup, I could get that support from VFA as institution, an organization. And so I applied, I was accepted. I was matched with a company in Kansas City that was more of a small business than a start-up. And so that was allowed. That allowed me to have a very least learned, quote, unquote, how to work, how to make your own schedule, in addition to getting the support that I had from Venture for America, where I learned about website design. I learned about networking. I learned about negotiation. It's very important to negotiate. It's uncomfortable, but it's so important to negotiate. I learned about the different roles that are expected in a very early stage startup and why those roles exist and how those roles evolve over time. And so that allowed me to be more confident when I started looking for this role for me to realize, okay, I know the background of startups. I liked the background of startups. I know what I bring to the table. I know what is needed to be achieved for a seed fund startup because we just closed out. I know how to do this, and now it's just having the confidence to do it.

 

Janelle Leung: Could you tell us why negotiating is so important and perhaps the tip for negotiating? 

 

Nico Addae: So, and this, and this is especially important for gender minorities and women of color. They will never give you their best offer in the first conversation. Never. You will have so much more room to have a conversation about where your salary expectations are. I remember for my first job, my boss was offering me a paycheck that was going to be almost $8,000 cheaper because one of the things with Venture for America is that you should not have the expectation that your initial salary is going to be really high. I will say that. But it was much lower than what your worth is as a Wellesley alum. Wellesley alums are really expensive for a reason. They are expensive because they had come from a wealth of knowledge. And so having being able to be confident enough to just be okay, I know my worth. And even as a recent graduate and saying, I graduated from this school, I graduated with this major, that is too low for me. We are in the private industry. This is not an academic institution. This is not a nonprofit where the mission makes up for it. This is a private company. I need more. And I was able to bump my paycheck up a couple thousand dollars, a couple of perks, which is really nice because if you get to the point where you're having a salary negotiation conversation, they really want you. They really, really want you. And so realizing that they want you, and that you bring something to the table, you need to remind yourself that you are the prize in this conversation. And if you're not comfortable with their amount they're giving you, be comfortable with walking away. Even with my role with Gradient, I initially was offered, it was a pretty nice salary, but I was able to add $5,000 to it and then also get equity by simply asking. By having a conversation and being okay with being walking away, which is one of the reasons why I have so many jobs. So it's never like, oh, if you don't pay me, I have no one who's going to be like paying my rent. There are other jobs that will get paid my rent. Cause I know it's uncomfortable. But once I go into the negotiation knowing I've done the research, knowing my knowledge base, knowing how much I've invested into myself, and knowing how much my communities have invested into me, I forced myself to speak up and be uncomfortable in that moment to ask for more. 

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Janelle Leung: As somebody who's in the job process right now, and this is very applicable to me. 

 

Nico Addae: Yes. You can ask for more, the worst they can say is no. 

 

Janelle Leung: Okay. Alright. It's kind of intimidating. 

 

Nico Addae: It is, but then remind yourself, always, always remind yourself. Wellesley should patent this. Have the confidence of a mediocre white man because they walk around, they walk around as though they own the world and recognizing that because there is still a wage gap between men and woman that is not completely due to maternity leave or like stepping back for the sake of your family. More often than not, I think that a lot of women and a lot of gender minorities are trained to be agreeable. So that's almost as if you're asking for permission to be in that space. You do not need to be, you do not need to ask permission to be in the spaces that they're in. You deserve to be there and you bring something to the table that they cannot bring.

 

One of the reasons why I'm so excited to be working with Gradient is because I already see like they're, one, they're a great team. And two, I already see the gaps in which I fill by my presence. The ways in which they would, questions that they probably wouldn't have asked or would have asked in later stages. I am able to ask because I'm coming from my lived experience, in addition to having my knowledge base. For example, one of the big issues that's coming around in artificial intelligence right now is realizing that models are biased because there is a lack of racial diversity in machine learning, datasets that are being utilized and then asking the pointed question: how many of our data sets are from black populations? How many of our data sets are from specifically Africa? How many of our data sets account for different sorts of features and attributes that are more common to other populations than what the average quote unquote WEIRD population is utilized in these machine learning programs? WEIRD being an acronym for whites privileged. It's, it's an acronym for commonly white privileged populations that are utilized inside of research because they do most of your research in college institutions that already have biases against people of color and woman, et cetera. And then being able to say, honestly, we don't have these answers right now, but we can work towards it before it becomes an issue, before it starts negatively affecting algorithms that we're helping implement.

 

You don't need to ask permission. Your presence is good enough. 

 

Janelle Leung: I think a lot of people here at Wellesley need to hear that and all around, all around the world.

 

Nico Addae: And you will underestimate how much your lived experience is worth. And you, I understand that it's important to also have the knowledge base that you're earning while you're getting your degree, but simply being able to say, I come from this background and this is how it's affected me. This is how this product would probably affect people from my background. That in and of itself is powerful.

 

Janelle Leung: Tens all around. Snaps to everything you just said. To take it back a little bit and reflect on college: what were some of the challenging parts of your college experience?

 

Nico Addae: I think it was just not, the entirety of my first year that Wellsley had made a mistake cause I struggled in my classes. I struggled with mental health. I struggled with my weight. I struggled a lot to just get to a point where I was treading water in my second and third years. And I really struggled in just recognizing, far later in my career than need be, that when Wellesley professors say they want to help, they mean it, but they cannot read your mind and you need to ask for help. I wish I had asked for help a lot earlier because it would have allowed me to have explored more deeply some of my interests while in college, then trying to make it up after I graduated. I think that especially coming from a low income background and then immigrating from Ghana to the United States, the culture shock of being here, not recognizing how important it was to cultivate relationships with your professors because they come in clutch even after you graduate. I didn't recognize any of that. And I wish I had recognized it sooner. 

 

In the end, I will say this: you'll be surprised how much gratitude gets you. When I was graduating, especially because I was graduating during the pandemic, all of the professors were really like just there for their students. They were understanding, they understood that it was difficult to keep up during my second semester. In my senior year, my father got COVID and this was during the height, when we did not have health insurance. There was no way he was going to be able to get help with, god forbid, he, he needed it and I was just not right for the next two weeks. I stopped my thesis because I couldn't concentrate on anything. The majority of my professors were just so supportive in the end, I ended up writing a letter to every single science and stem professors that I had during my four years of college, just to thank them for believing in me when I didn't. And I wish that more Wellesley students believed in themselves because you all deserve to be there.

 

Janelle Leung:  Is your father alright?

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Oh, he's alive and well he's kicking. He's fine. It was a scary two weeks, but he's, he's doing he's fine. Thank God. 

 

Janelle Leung:  I'm very glad to hear that. I suppose, to kind of wrap things up, a lot of our listeners are studying CS themselves right now, or pursuing many different industries. Could you give us some advice for current Wellesley students that you have not already said, who might be identifying with the issues you're describing?

 

Nico Addae: One, always ask for help. Your professors want to help you. And they do not think you're dumb. If you're asking questions. I remember that for computational neuroscience, I really struggled with the MATLAB assignments and I would spend two hours with my professor just going through the most basic renditions of it. And then he would be so proud when I got it by myself. Shoutout to the whole neuroscience department. Seriously, they want to help you. They should, you should try and talk to your professors as much as possible, talk to other students and especially students from your similar background. I had a study buddy in my computational neuroscience that was Latinx. Who was also from a less privileged background. That made it so much easier to ask questions. That I would feel less comfortable asking to other members of our class, who I felt were better prepared to be at Wellesley, and we would struggle with it together. And we would study together and we would hustle together. And that made it so much easier, especially as we were doing this in our second semester in our senior year.

 

Be honest with your interest and pursue them, regardless of what your expectations are of how they're going to be utilized. I probably knew from my first year that I didn't want to do medicine, but I did not consider other paths until my junior and senior year. And I wish that I had had the opportunity to start building out the networks that I am now building a little bit earlier. If I had just been honest and said, Hey, I want something that gives me a lot of flexibility. I want something that is technical, but has creativity. I want a lot of things and I want to pursue them in a way that is not in a model that I currently see in the world right now. Because there's a lot of jobs that are literally being created as we speak, as technology continues to rapidly evolve in the next couple of years.

 

Be nerdy, read as much as you want about whatever you want. I mean, people can monetize anything nowadays. So if it's something that you're interested in and you're passionate about, even if it's just, let's say a program that is supposed to match you with your, your drag persona. Do it, do it. 

 

Janelle Leung: Did you take a program that matched you with your drag persona? 

 

Nico Addae: I wish I did. I now feel like writing that program. 

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Janelle Leung:  All right. I see we've come to time. Thank you so much for joining us the day, Nico. It was such a pleasure. I know I personally have learned so much.

 

Nico Addae: Feel free to reach out. It's like, honestly speaking, I love talking. I think most alums will say they love talking with Wellesley students. Reach out. I'm on LinkedIn. You have my Wellesley email. Just feel free and talk. And that Wellesley email is forever. Don't like. Wellesley institution, don't. Please allow us to continue to keep using that email forever and ever, and ever. That's it. 

 

Janelle Leung: All right you hear that Wellesley? Can't go anywhere. Alright. And that concludes our episode of Mind the Gap. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next time. 

 

Thank you again for Nico Addae for chatting with me. This episode was edited by Janelle Leung and brought to you by our executive producer Smaranda Sandu.