Exponential Growth with David Olivencia
Sep 18, 2026 · 56 min · 10 segments
In this episode of the Exponential Growth Podcast, host David sits down with Fidel Vargas—President & CEO of HSF, Snap Inc. board member, California Science Center trustee, former presidential…
Well, right now, the trend that's the pervasive trend, the one that's sort of dominating the conversation is AI.
And there's lots of aspects to AI, artificial intelligence and the large language models, the infrastructure, everything related to that and the impact of it, how it's impacting existing roles, careers, what it's gonna mean for what's coming ahead.
And I think the most important aspect of that is trying to do our best to understand where we are, but it's moving so fast It's moving so quick, it's changing constantly that it is a little hard to keep up with.
As a board member at Snap, I see a little bit around the corner with what's coming and it's exciting at once and at another, it's a little overwhelming to think about what we're facing with, what we're facing.
from the perspective of one hsf we're leaning in we we don't have a choice where we've built a technology platform that helps us do the things that we do that technology platform enables us to have now 2.2 million individuals that have a MyHSF account every year, anywhere between 60 to 120,000 applications only just for the HSF Scholar Program.
Most people don't know that HSF administers the Gates Scholarship using that technology platform.
And just to give you a sense for what it means to leverage a technology platform, last year we sent out over 100 million emails to do the direct targeted recruiting that we do for all of the scholarship programs that we do.
And with that platform, we've now incorporated AI into almost every aspect of that.
It could be a little overwhelming for people to imagine this, but all the documents that we verify, which we used to verify with eyes, people, temp employees, our team, all of that, is now done by AI.
And what's super interesting to me is that initially there was a sense of, well, AI can't possibly be better than humans or, AI is going to somehow bring a perspective that could end up biasing things in one way or the other.
And so we use it to verify transcripts, financial aid award letters, enrollment verification forms, FAFSA documents.
We're still using volunteers to do reads, but What we're finding in the testing phases is that the AI is less biased than humans.
Well, right now, the trend that's the pervasive trend, the one that's sort of dominating the conversation is AI.
And there's lots of aspects to AI, artificial intelligence and the large language models, the infrastructure, everything related to that and the impact of it, how it's impacting existing roles, careers, what it's gonna mean for what's coming ahead.
And I think the most important aspect of that is trying to do our best to understand where we are, but it's moving so fast It's moving so quick, it's changing constantly that it is a little hard to keep up with.
As a board member at Snap, I see a little bit around the corner with what's coming and it's exciting at once and at another, it's a little overwhelming to think about what we're facing with, what we're facing.
from the perspective of one hsf we're leaning in we we don't have a choice where we've built a technology platform that helps us do the things that we do that technology platform enables us to have now 2.2 million individuals that have a MyHSF account every year, anywhere between 60 to 120,000 applications only just for the HSF Scholar Program.
Most people don't know that HSF administers the Gates Scholarship using that technology platform.
And just to give you a sense for what it means to leverage a technology platform, last year we sent out over 100 million emails to do the direct targeted recruiting that we do for all of the scholarship programs that we do.
And with that platform, we've now incorporated AI into almost every aspect of that.
It could be a little overwhelming for people to imagine this, but all the documents that we verify, which we used to verify with eyes, people, temp employees, our team, all of that, is now done by AI.
And what's super interesting to me is that initially there was a sense of, well, AI can't possibly be better than humans or, AI is going to somehow bring a perspective that could end up biasing things in one way or the other.
And so we use it to verify transcripts, financial aid award letters, enrollment verification forms, FAFSA documents.
We're still using volunteers to do reads, but What we're finding in the testing phases is that the AI is less biased than humans.
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