Dan Gonzalez, Co-Founder District C




First in Future: Where Emerging Ideas Take Flight show

Summary: In 2016, the Institute for Emerging Issues looked at the future economy and tried to figure out the kinds and numbers of jobs that were likely to go away over the next 20 years in every corner of the state and the answer appears to be 25% overall. That is one in every four jobs in North Carolina that is likely to disappear by 2040, as technology and artificial intelligence replaces the jobs humans used to be able to do. As IEI noted in our FurtureWork report, that means the way we educate people is going to need to change if they are going to find the next set of jobs. That is why we are talking to this week’s First in Future guest, Dan Gonzalez, the co-founder of District C. It is a new education-focused startup that focuses on helping high school students, our future workforce, discover how to work together on diverse teams to solve complex problems for businesses in the Triangle. Rather than teach students how to do better on getting a single answer on a test, he tries to equip them for the world of problems where there is no obvious answer. Those are the kinds of problems humans, working in teams, may be uniquely qualified to solve.