Capital Region Cares Capital Region Cares 2018-2019 | Page 77

O
“Kids and teachers don’t have to
worry about costs or breaking things,”
says Robert Schmidt, retired chief of
the California Office of Technology Ser-
vices and Yellow Circle adviser. “They’re
encouraged to break things. They can
use servers, firewalls, programming
tools, set up a blog. Normally in school
environments, there are boundaries.
But this environment is there for them
to play in.”
“We are living in
the technology age,
and no matter what
career path students
choose, technology
will continue to be
part of that career.”
— Navneet Grewal, president & CEO,
Yellow Circle
In the past four years, Yellow Circle
has received much support from the
community, including being a Rapid
Acceleration, Innovation, and Lead-
ership in Sacramento grantee and a
Sacramento Entrepreneurs Showcase
Cohort. In 2018, the nonprofit was
named one of 20 semifinalists for SVP
Fast Pitch Sacramento.
Grewal has since outgrown his
garage. The server in his small lab
couldn’t handle the web traffic, but
Quest Media and Supplies, a Rose-
ville-based IT management company,
offered Yellow Circle one cabinet at
their data center at no charge (ex-

cept electricity and bandwidth usage,
which the nonprofit hopes to offset
with sponsorships). This cabinet can
host about 15 Yellow Circle servers,
enough for 10,000 active student proj-
ects. Students come and go, but at any
given time there are at least 2,500 ac-
tive projects. In its first three years,
Grewal says, students have launched
over 110,000 projects total.
“Yellow Circle is helping to build
interest in science and technology,
and we’re big supporters of that,” says
Adam Burke, director of partner devel-
opment for Quest Media and Supplies.
“This was an opportunity to get into
the education space and provide re-
sources for folks to learn development
skills.”
Yellow Circle has seven interns and
six members on the technical team.
Grewal keeps overhead low by adopt-
ing the concept of a virtual company,
where everyone works from their own
locations but stays connected through
technology. In 2018, Grewal’s goals
were to raise $200,000, reach 100,000
users globally and start a regional
mentorship program, where 5,000 un-
derserved high school students can
learn the skills to be qualified for tech
jobs after graduation.
“Health care, construction, govern-
ment, social service, education, armed
forces — they all depend on technolo-
gy experts to deliver services,” Grewal
says. “We are living in the technology
age, and no matter what career path
students choose, technology will con-
tinue to be part of that career.” n
ne day in the summer of 2014,
Navneet Grewal was explaining
to his son, Ajeet, how hackers get
into online databases by exploiting
forms on web pages. Ajeet was 13 at the
time, but he had always been fascinated
by technology. A few days later, he came
to Grewal asking for money.
“Dad, I figured out an easier way to
test security flaws on websites,” Grew-
al recalls his son saying. “I’m going to
build a few servers in the cloud to try it
out, and I need your credit card to pay
for it.”
Grewal realized there was no place
where kids could test such ideas online
without getting in trouble or paying to
access cloud-based labs. But instead
of giving his son the credit card, Grew-
al gave him a digital sandbox. In their
garage in Elk Grove, he built a small
computer lab so Ajeet and his friends
could get free hands-on experience
with information technology (without
crashing the family computer).
From that garage emerged Yellow
Circle, a nonprofit created to foster ca-
reers in technology through an online
computer lab, mentorship programs,
and technology resources for stu-
dents and teachers. The cloud-based
computer lab uses open-source tech-
nologies to connect students with a
host of applications, operating systems
and technology infrastructures. About
65,000 students around the globe now
log on to learn coding, cybersecurity,
web applications, graphic design and
other tech skills.
Grewal has been working in tech
sectors since 1998, from HP to Apple
and currently the State of California.
But in the Sacramento region, he says,
lack of resources in schools puts future
STEM careers out of reach for many
students. Yellow Circle’s mission is to
patch those curriculum gaps by letting
them experiment freely.
Russell Nichols is a freelance writer who
focuses on technology, culture and men-
tal health. His work has appeared in The
Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe,
Governing Magazine and Government
Technology. On Twitter @russellnichols.
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