Sign-Speak won big at the IHCC LatinX Social Impact Pitch Competition we had a few weeks ago, taking home $12,000 in prize money. We had the opportunity to sit down with Yamilet Payano, CEO and Co-owner of Sign-Speak and she told us about the successes, struggles, and achievements she’s had over the course of just 1 year and 4 months. She’s achieved so much in such a short period and we couldn’t be happier that her journey started here with the help of our incubator program!
How did you get the idea to develop Sign-Speak?
I met Nikolas Kelly, the co-founder of Sign-Speak, and at the beginning, it was really hard for us to communicate because I’d never been exposed to the deaf community. We got to talking and brainstorming to see if there was an easier way for us to communicate and there wasn’t any. He had an idea for sign-language recognition software and I assumed that something like this already existed, but it didn’t. I think what made me start this business was that I wanted to genuinely make an impact and work independently. I felt the pain with Niko, but beyond that, this technology should exist, and it can exist. We invest so much money as a society and sign-language recognition technology is such an important thing to have, especially for a community that is often overlooked.
How does Sign-Speak work?
Sign-Speak is a sign language recognition and avatar solution that lets deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals sign [use sign language] into any camera. Then that gets translated into English on your computer, phone, or laptop. What makes us unique is that we’re speaking in English and we translate that into ASL and we display that to the deaf individual as an avatar. We’re closing the loop of conversation and interaction between someone who signs and is deaf or hard of hearing, and someone who can’t sign and is a hearing person.
What has been the hardest part of your journey so far?
I think that as women we’re the biggest luchadoras out there because we understand that we need to work harder for everything to get it right and we are multifaceted. Fundraising has been a challenge, not only because I’m a woman and Latina, but I’m also Afro-Latina. I am grateful for places like the IHCC and 1871 that have opened their space to make sure that founders like me and companies like mine can succeed.
Besides funding, I think that another big issue that I face is mental health, and I think many people don’t talk about that. I haven’t had a day off in a year and four months until yesterday. We don’t get to enjoy the freedom to sit down and enjoy the little things because we’re always so much on the go-go-go. Half of the business is your confidence and it is tied to your mental health. If people around you believe that you don’t have it together, then your business is not going to succeed because you are your business.
How long have you been working with the IHCC?
I’ve been working with IHCC since I started the company in 2020 and I didn’t know anything about the startup world. They say to fake it til you make it, but there’s a point in time where faking it doesn’t work anymore. I was looking for incubators that didn’t take equity because I’m building this company and I didn’t know how much it was worth at the beginning. I didn’t want to give up equity and I was looking for like-minded people that I could go to and be vulnerable and be like I don’t understand this or can you explain this?
My first language is Spanish and sometimes my brain processes things in Spanish. I’ve been working with IHCC LatinX incubator since I started back in 2020-2021 and it’s been great. Esteban Perez, the Director of LatinX Incubator at IHCC has been amazing, and he speaks Spanish! You don’t know how you’re affecting the lives of founders, the knowledge that you get from being in the incubator and being part of IHCC follows you no matter where you go. It’s very powerful knowledge because what we as Latinos do not understand is that the fastest way to obtain wealth in this country is to build your own company and in the tech startup community you can go from nothing to a millionaire really fast. Equipping the next generations of Latinos with that idea to always think about business and innovation, I think that there’s a lot of power to that. So I’m grateful for that.
How did you endure Covid?
I think I had a crisis during COVID and I don’t think I’m alone. I’m an extrovert, so I enjoy going out and doing brunches and doing all these things. COVID allowed me to be introspective and understand that I wasn’t happy at my job. I used to be a quantitative analyst at Fannie Mae on the fair lending team, so my job was to analyze financial models to make sure that people from all types of backgrounds were receiving mortgages. I had so many distractions and COVID made it go boom!
I was able to connect with people, develop genuine relationships, and talk about things like sign language recognition. Then it hit me, that I can die at any moment and that made me put myself out there and take that leap. If you go out there and you get COVID today, then you don’t get to stand up from that. Would I be happy with what I’m doing? And the answer was no. So I went full force on Sign-Speak. It’s a good thing because it also made me pivot into the API solution that we’re now offering, where it’s both physical and online (Sign-Speak is currently looking for investors for the API solution). COVID made me realize that what seemed horrible turned out to be ok. I’m living and learning.
How do you feel that you stand against the competition?
There’s competition and my competition is not cheap. Microsoft is trying to do the same thing, and so are Google and Apple. Even though they are very big supporters of what we’re doing, they have a team internally that is building this. A lot of people are trying to get this right and they either see it as a competitive advantage or they see it as a possibility to expand into a community that is worth $87 billion. The difference with my company is that I’ve created a diverse team that has deaf people, that has native signers that understand the problem from the end-user perspective. My teammates will go into the community, the deaf and hard of hearing community, and vouch for this company. We’ve been able to build what we have today in just a year and deploy and do all these things because of that strong diversity in my team and I’m very grateful for that.
Life-changing technology
If you think about it, this technology can be on TV, it could be on your phones, on Zoom, and on Google. It’s life-changing and we’re excited about the amount of power that we’re going to unlock. Just think about the number of students that will be able to go to school differently. Right now, a lot of deaf kids only attend certain classes because those are the only classes that are accessible to them and they’re paying the same price as the next student to go to a university. Think about the iPhone and the fact that you and I get to use the iPhone to call our mothers and to call everybody but deaf people don’t get to use the iPhone the same way. It’s about functional equivalency and being able to provide the ability to just do what you and I don’t even think about doing.
What’s the best part of your business?
I think it’s my team. I love my team. I think going to work with people that I enjoy working with has made this so much easier. As a woman-owned business, I think that we’re building a culture that goes against what we see in corporate America and we’re trying to authentically think about inclusion and diversity and what that means. We’re not just trying to scratch the surface, but like really get dirty with it. It’s so sad that I’m saying this, but it’s so toxic in corporate America for black women specifically, or black presenting women. Creating a business is so much easier, it’s so much nicer. I may not have the same paycheck as I did before, but I have so much more than I had before.
What have you learned thus far?
Creating a business takes more than yourself and what I’ve learned is that to be an effective entrepreneur, you need to be an effective team builder and a community builder, it’s just like building an entire coalition of people to come around your business and help you grow. It’s about talking to people, you have to get out there. You need to be the biggest champion of your business. At the elevator, what do you say? I’m the CEO of Sign-Speak and we have sign language recognition technology. You don’t know what conversation leads to what. I’ve learned how to be an empathetic and authentic leader. You need to understand that it’s not about you, which is very counter-intuitive. If anybody in my team wins, Sign-Speak wins, so as a founder, we often need to share our baby and be open to feedback and criticism, and it’s gonna get dirty and some people are gonna say no, and it’s ok. You as a founder need to be ok understanding that it’s not about you. It all has to do with the betterment of your business and how you move forward.
How is the prize money going to help your company?
The $12,000 that we won at the IHCC pitch competition will go to employ deaf and hard of hearing individuals to add to our data collection team and we’re excited because machine learning is nothing without data. We are excited to expand our data collection team to be able to support bigger customers and bring them the best product that we have.
To learn more about Sign-Speak, visit https://www.sign-speak.com.