At the end of 2017, Emile DeWeaver was 20 years into a life sentence in San Quentin for murdering a man when he was 19. Right now, he’s sitting at a desk in San Francisco in the offices of Pilot , a startup that manages bookkeeping for businesses, working as a product specialist and communicating with clients.

How DeWeaver moved from San Quentin to the midst of the Bay Area tech scene is, almost needless to say, quite the story. But it’s one that, as both the criminal justice system in the U.S. and the tech industry continue to evolve, could become much more common.

When DeWeaver entered San Quentin in 1998, he started to work on himself. Through conversations with older men incarcerated at the facility, he began to consider how growing up amid violence and poverty in Oakland set him on the path to incarceration himself. “I was thinking about this not to make excuses, but because in understanding the process, you get to understand solutions,” DeWeaver says. For him, the path to crime “came down to a deep sense of isolation and alienation from society.”

So while in prison—which is a system, he says, designed to perpetuate that same isolation and alienation he experienced as a young person—he began to figure out how to transcend it using a talent he knew he possessed: writing. With two other incarcerated men at San Quentin, DeWeaver founded Prison Renaissance, a nonprofit that highlights works of art and writing made by people inside prisons. “Trying to start a nonprofit from prison is difficult,” DeWeaver says. Incarcerated people don’t have any direct internet access, so DeWeaver and his cofounders “basically ended up patching it together through a lot of social hacks, or analog hacks,” he says. San Quentin hosts a number of programs that bring in outside volunteers to work with inmates, and DeWeaver and his cofounders made connections with people in the arts, and with other artists in the prison, to spread the word about their initiative. Prison Renaissance is now forging partnerships with universities in California—currently UCLA and Stanford—to bring students into artistic collaboration with incarcerated writers and artists.

At the same time, DeWeaver was working on launching the first in-prison chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists to bring more voices of incarcerated people into the public discourse (DeWeaver himself has contributed op-eds to a number of different publications). Through that work, he met Pilot founder and CTO Jessica McKellar, who was there through her work with Life of the Law, a podcast about the legal system. (McKellar serves as member of the advisory board for Life of the Law, which she got involved with through her interest in expanding justice and diversity through tech.)

In collaborating on a storytelling project about life inside San Quentin, “she got a chance to see my workset, which is one that I’ve transferred from career to career—from starting a nonprofit to doing social justice advocacy work,” DeWeaver says. “A lot of the creative and outside-the-box thinking is transferrable to management and product and learning things quickly,” DeWeaver says. McKellar saw almost immediately that DeWeaver could bring some valuable skills to Pilot. “He’s a very incisive mind on various social issues, he’s an incredible writer, and has leadership experience organizing people around causes,” McKellar says.

At the time they met in 2017, DeWeaver was incarcerated. When then Governor Jerry Brown commuted his sentence for his progress and leadership within the prison at the end of that year and he became eligible for parole, McKellar told DeWeaver that she wanted to offer him the opportunity to interview for a role at Pilot. “We were hiring for people who were smart and great problem solvers and communicators,” she says. “I had someone right in front of me with those skills, so why not create an opportunity to hire him for the team?” Because DeWeaver was still at San Quentin during the interview process as he awaited a parole hearing, the Pilot team had to be creative. “There was quite a rigmarole getting a whole interview panel gate-cleared to get into the prison,” McKellar says, and to circumvent the lack of internet, they conducted certain portions of the process that would’ve been done on the computer on paper instead. And because he’d never interviewed for a job before, McKellar walked him through the basic format ahead of time.