Conversations: Rethinking the Ecosystem

Roxanne Varza (Station F, Sequoia Capital)

Roxanne Varza is the director of Station F, the world’s largest startup campus, which gathers more than 30 incubators in one campus in Paris. Based in the 13th arrondissement of the city, it opened its doors in 2017. One of her core goals with Station F is to make the startup world a more inclusive space. We talked to her about Station F’s Fighters Program for underprivileged founders and were lucky enough to include two of the Fighters—Dinal Kurukulasooriya (founder of Autochatic) and Brian Thielly (founder of LinesDude)—in the conversation.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): We really want to talk about how you make space for underprivileged founders at Station F with the Fighters Program. What is this program? Why did you start it? What are the features of it?

Roxanne Varza (RV): The Fighters Program is our program for underprivileged entrepreneurs. At Station F, to be completely inclusive, we do not specify what it means to be underprivileged. Our assumption is that we cannot even begin to imagine all of the different situations that people may have found themselves in. We provide some examples for guidance, but we are open to people from all contexts and walks of life.

JL: Can you share a little bit about what the Fighters Program entails? How many people do you take? What do Fighters receive in terms of benefits? Is there an education element to the program? Is there a stipend? I can imagine moving to Paris in normal circumstances is expensive. Where do Fighters live?

RV: Firstly, I must put this into context and comparison with the other programs on the Station F campus, which are very hands off. Entrepreneurs are usually provided with workshops and access to support and it is largely up to them to make use of the provisions, or not. A lot of the startups on campus—because they are part of a dedicated partner program with a dedicated team—won’t necessarily have contact with the Station F team, unless in a specific context of specific groups, events, or meetings. For the Fighters, we have a very different approach; we started small, because we thought we really needed to get to know each of the Fighters, see them regularly, work with them very closely. It’s a much more hands-on approach. Our first batch was three years ago, and we are, for the first time, increasing the number of startups we take this year from 15 to 30.

Erika Brodnock (EB): I am intrigued. How does someone who has previously been imprisoned or homeless afford to do the program? Do you allow mixed teams—can there be just one Fighter in a team if it’s a team of two, or do both team members have to be Fighters?

RV: Yes, we do have mixed teams. I think what we are looking for is a mixed team that is somewhat balanced. We don’t want somebody who has a big-name MBA and has built their business and then they find a Fighter to add to their team as an easy way to get a free year at Station F.

EB: How do you find the right people to support? How do you encourage them to apply? And how do you look beyond your existing network that may indeed be privileged, in some respects, to find the right people for the program?

RV: There are two things. One is we have actually changed the application criteria for Fighters who are applying. For all of the other Station F programs on campus, we use a lot of startup lingo, we require that you apply in English, we say you need to show us a working MVP, and that you need to have traction. These are things that I think people who are less familiar with the startup ecosystem would not be able to provide. So, for the Fighters Program, we opened up the criteria by saying applicants just need to show us that they have an idea and have done something with it. Some entrepreneurs applied with a Facebook page and a multitude of subscribers, while others had launched a series of YouTube videos they were struggling to monetize. We take the fact our Fighters had an idea but didn’t just sit there with it as a proxy for having the hustle they need to succeed. The second element is that it is the only program on campus that can be applied for in French. Both English and French applications are accepted to enable Fighters to apply in the language that is most comfortable to them.

JL: Perhaps one more question before we move to questions for the Fighters: from your perspective, what is the biggest success story you have seen from the Fighter Program so far?

RV: It takes longer for the Fighters to mature their companies for two reasons. One is they’re coming to us at a much earlier stage, a lot of them are coming pre-product, pre-team, pre-everything, and in a lot of our other programs, they already have some kind of metrics and traction and revenue when they come. The second reason is simply because Fighters face a lot more barriers and challenges. The biggest success we’ve seen so far is Tally. He is a former prisoner and the founder of DigiTall Paris. His story is incredible. He was initially arrested for car theft and went on to create an anti-theft device for cars.

JL: Let’s also hear from two of your current Fighters—welcome Dinal and Brian. You are both Fighters from Season 2, so are still at Station F as we speak. How has the program helped you so far?

Dinal Kurukulasooriya (DK): As a foreigner coming from a low-income country, Sri Lanka, it gave me time to settle in since I had no office space cost. I have made a few friends at Station F, too. But a big part of the benefits are financial: I was able to get perks for cloud space and for technologies such as Stripe, which we wouldn’t have had access to in Sri Lanka. What Station F also really helped us with is to see the market we are in with Autochatic from a European or Western perspective; the viewpoint helped us to understand aspects such as pricing, product development, value propositions, and especially sales, better.

Brian Thielly: For me, the Fighters Program helped me so much with visibility for LinesDude in the press. I’m frequently contacted by journalists who heard of me thanks to the Fighters Program and it enables me to grow my business network, which is really powerful in this early phase.

EB: What advice would you give to others in your previous situation wanting to start a business?

DK: First, you need a kind of emergency checklist: always make sure you have enough money in hand. Ask yourself: are you ready to go through a stressful and an anxious period with a lot of ups and downs? Also, make sure there is someone to start the business with—being a solo founder is really hard. To find the right person: make sure the business idea you’re willing to pursue is in your (or co-founders) core competencies. Once you are on it: move fast, validate fast, iterate fast, and fail fast (something we took time to learn). And back to my first point: money. Ideally, you can make sure the business can stay alive on its own for a long enough period of time without external funding.

EB: To wrap us up, Roxanne, I am keen to hear about the next steps you are taking to help overlooked founders at Station F. You mentioned before that you may be able to offer stipends, is there anything else? And what other aspects of the ecosystem are you working on?

RV: Today the Fighters Program has been largely the Station F team meeting with the Fighters companies, organizing workshops, and offering support. We think that we can do more. Everyone is talking about diversity, but people aren’t actually doing so much. We’re looking at strengthening the program one step at a time. We have doubled the program in size. Next year, we also want to find a number of partners and financial supporters so we can provide Fighters with financial aid, but also, we’re realizing that many of the big companies, the Googles, the Facebooks, and Microsofts, they all want to make a difference, but they are not currently doing very much. We are looking at how we can work with them to better support the Fighters Program. Can they mentor the Fighters? Can they provide more tools for free? Do they have content they are not making as available as it should be? We are speaking to a number of different potential partners right now to really reinforce this.

Check Warner (Ada Ventures, formerly Diversity VC)

Check Warner is one of the co-founders of Diversity VC, an organization that was started in late 2015. Check raised a fund in 2020, as general partner at Ada Ventures, focused on overlooked founders and markets. In this conversation with her, we talk about organizational and structural efforts, with a particular focus on the venture ecosystem in Europe, to change the lack of diversity and inclusion, including the power of statistics, internships programs (such as Future VC), and Diversity VC’s new Diversity Standard.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): Tell us the origin story of Diversity VC. How did it all begin?

Check Warner (CW): I had come into VC from a very unusual background for most associates in the industry. I started out in advertising and I studied English literature. When I got my first job in venture capital, it was through a series of fortunate events and some nepotism and introductions. After my first few months in the industry, I was really shocked looking around at all the founders we were meeting, everyone who worked in the investment teams, everybody who worked in the industry at large, when I went to networking events, and all the conferences: it just seemed like everyone was pretty much coming from the same background, which was either accountancy or finance or consulting, from the same handful of universities, from the same private schools before that. And they were all white, and they were all male.

Erika Brodnock (EB): Over the last five years, what best practices have emerged to really shift diversity and inclusion for VCs?

CW: The first one, and what we started with, is actually understanding the state of play as it is today. We were quite horrified to find out when we went to talk to the industry body, which is the BVCA (British Venture Capital Association), that there was no data on, for example, how many women worked in the industry. That was our first port of call. We needed to actually understand what was going on in order to try to design good interventions that would drive change. We’ve done quite a lot of research since then, also in much broader areas than just gender. But in terms of best practices for VCs, actually understanding where they are at within their firms in terms of both who’s working in their firms, and do people in their firms feel included? Do they feel like they have a voice? Do they feel like they can bring their whole selves to work? And on the flip side, who are they investing in? Who are they seeing at the pipeline stage? And how is that translating into invested capital? Collecting and understanding data is a really important and fundamental best practice.

JL: The Diversity VC Standard is a set of practices for everyone who wants to change something but doesn’t know what, right? So, what does the Standard’s toolkit look like?

CW: The first thing we did was training and, again, helping VCs to understand the nuance and complexities of these issues. Because I think a lot of the time I hear people saying, “I want to do something about it,” but they haven’t actually taken the time to even really understand what’s going on, and what’s driving the issues. And you do need to engage with that if you’re going to be successful in helping people feel included within your organization. So we actually ran a training session where we had 16 European VC partners with a group called Fearless Futures. That would be the first really concrete thing I’d suggest people do: D&I training, including at partner level.

EB: What are some of the big issues outstanding in the UK and EU ecosystem? And what are the next steps that you intend to take with Diversity VC to tackle them, and indeed the data?

CW: I think we need to make progress across the board, we are right at the very start. And I wouldn’t want to let any of the issues off the hook by talking about things we need to move onto because actually, we need to do all of it. But what has come through the work with the Standard is that, on two fronts, funds are doing badly. One is actually investing the capital. We’ve seen during COVID-19 that funding going to diverse founders who come from different backgrounds has actually gone down and has gone down quite dramatically. And this is at a time when, generally, venture capital funding has been going really well. And so I think a lot more progress needs to be made in terms of the mechanism of access, in terms of transparency, in terms of mentoring founders in what they need to look like, and what the business needs to look like.

EB: Is the answer then to give the founders more mentoring and to shape their propositions better? That kind of buys into the notion that there is a pipeline problem, that the founders aren’t educated enough or competent enough or running good enough businesses, right? As opposed to, there’s an issue on the other side.

CW: Definitely. It is always a bit of both. But I’m not advocating for more mentoring, more mentoring, because the crucial change will come from sending the wire and making the hire. It’s not mentoring so much as transparency and clarity. Let me give you an example: I heard a stat this morning, from a pitch event I was at, which is that 80% of the female founders that were at this pitch event didn’t know the difference between angels and VCs.

Pam Kostka (formerly All Raise)

We caught up with Pam Kostka while she was CEO of US venture diversifier All Raise for her take on how and why All Raise came about, and how to build a more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable future for all.

Erika Brodnock (EB): Tell us a little bit about the history of All Raise. And when did it start and why? What are the goals for the organization?

Pam Kostka (PK): All Raise started as a grassroots effort. The #MeToo movement in Silicon Valley served as an external impetus. Susan Fowler’s blog post about her experiences at Uber was followed by Justin Caldbeck in the headlines and it just struck a nerve. It was the right time, the right place, and every woman in tech resoundingly said, “Yes, that! I’ve been there, experienced that.” What was impressive is that Aileen Lee went on to become an organizing force. She sent out an email to the community. Thirty-six or so women responded immediately to say, “Yes, this is a time, this is a moment when we can do something.”

EB: Can you clarify what a 501(c) is? Is it a B Corp?

PK: It’s non-profit status in the United States. We call ourselves a startup non-profit, because we take the ethos of how to build and scale a startup, how to be a disruptor in the industry, and apply it to our mission. We just happen to do that via a non-profit structure. It’s interesting that in our financing structure, part of the uniqueness of who we are is the magnitude of power and influence in the community that we’ve brought to the table. It’s traditional philanthropic organizations, and corporations that support the tech ecosystem here in the United States, such as Silicon Valley Bank, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Bank of America, EY. In our recent fundraising initiative, the venture capital firms and high-net-worth individuals in tech themselves are coming together to fuel our mission. We see that as an interesting investment model, where we have this large investment base coming to us and funding the disruption of the industry. That aligns with our mission, which is to accelerate the success of female founders and funders for a more prosperous and equitable future. That mission drives everything that we do and now we’re getting the power and influence curve to say, this is something that matters to us and to women throughout the industry.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): Picking up from this mission that you talked about, what are your high-level goals? And how have you been working towards these over the years?

PK: As I mentioned earlier, our mission is to accelerate the success of female founders and funders to build a more prosperous and equitable future. We fundamentally know that diversity generates better results. It’s not just about the redistribution of power and influence in the industry, but the wealth creation that is generated when you do that. Morgan Stanley estimates that we have the opportunity for net new wealth creation of up to $4.4 trillion. In the industry, that’s huge! Investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a massive opportunity on par with the moonshot investments that the venture community likes to invest in.

EB: Data shows the raw amounts being invested are going up, while the numbers invested in females are going down. As you said, this is statistically improbable, therefore, it appears there is intentionality behind underinvesting in women. There are a couple of things here, because one, how has research shaped your approach? And two, now that we have data like this, what do we need to do to change this?

PK: We’re big believers in data, because what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get fixed. That’s true in life in general: If you want to run a marathon, you’ve got to put yourself on a schedule and know what your mileage is in order to know you can finish the race. Every day, you’ve got to measure yourself. If you do the work, you will complete your marathon, if you don’t do the work, you’re not going to complete the marathon. Simple. At All Raise, we believe data is core to our understanding. We are constantly reporting on our two North Star objectives, as well as on the obstacles that are behind the numbers.

EB: You’ve given us tangible examples detailing how All Raise could be recreated by others in their local tech ecosystems. A cookie-cutter approach that could be adopted and adapted seems to be emerging, which is fantastic.

PK: We have a bias towards action and hope we are creating a platform that other businesses can replicate and leverage.

JL: Looking at this from a systemic perspective, who do you think are the key players that have to move now? What do you think about the role of LPs? Do they form part of the structures you are addressing? And if so, how?

PK: The first part of your question was, who needs to be engaged in this movement, right? And the answer is everyone needs to be engaged in the movement. But there are two levels. One, people with power and influence, absolutely need to be willing to accept the responsibility of sharing their power and influence. We believe that the way to get somebody to do that is not just to appeal to the moral rightness of this movement. Because we are a venture-capital-backed ecosystem, we look at capital gains and benefits as the main driver. Increased DEI yields better results. People at the power and influence curve in the venture industry are always looking ahead at who’s seeing around the corner and what the next trend is … The next trend is DEI. Two key events have occurred. The first back in 2017, which sparked All Raise, then in 2020, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered, and that opened up another aperture around social justice. These are moments in history that we’re not going to move back from. There is a change afoot. The tech and venture industry can either acknowledge and embrace that and be drivers of that change, or be left behind. That serves as one of the key motivators for the industry. The way All Raise started was with 36 amazingly powerful women who had succeeded, and recognized they had a chance to accelerate the pace at which change could happen, and engage their male peers in that conversation too.

EB: What are the biggest success stories that you think All Raise has contributed to, or indeed, instigated and written?

PK: We have a couple of success stories; one is at a campaign level. Founders for Change was the recognition that there was an increasing generation of founders who care deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion in their teams, on their boards, and, when possible, in their choice of investors. We rally these founders together, not only to give them a support framework of others who share this ethos, but also as a communication to, for example, the venture community, that we are your lifeblood. If I walk into your organization, or go to your web page, and see that you’re all white men, I could make the choice not to work with you because I don’t think I’m going to get the benefit from working with a monoculture and I want something that’s more diverse. Founders for Change was very much a social campaign, and we continue to work with it. It served as a wake-up call and that is where we started to see a change from that 9% [of check writers at partner level within a venture firm being women] moving to 12% [in 2019].

JL: We’re actually going to interview two of the Alpha Girls, Sonja and Theresia, for the history section.

PK: Sonja is amazing, as is Theresia. They’re both part of the All Raise network. The work that we do is cumulative. We’re standing on their shoulders. The generations that will come will stand on our shoulders. And that’s the whole point.

JL: Do you think quotas are going to play a role in changing the ecosystem? If so, for whom? On what level? Or is there something else that you think we need to bring onto the agenda?

PK: I don’t think quotas are inherently good or bad. They’re neutral. We talked about the importance of measurement, right? Quotas, in some ways, are just measurement tools. What gets measured gets fixed. Quotas can have a negative side, of course, if people are using them for checkbox reasons. Where I see quotas being effective, and quotas mean something different to everybody, is when you’re tying the quota to an economic imperative. It is NASDAQ saying, “I’m not going to tell you how many people per se you need to diversify your board, but here’s the de minimis that you need to do. If you don’t, you can be delisted.” Is that a quota? Yes. Is it a quota tied to a relevant economic incentive for the organization? Absolutely.

EB: Finally, do you think that tech has a role to play in terms of real-time measurement? It’s almost as though diversity, equity, and inclusion tend to be surveyed once a year, and not focused on much for the rest of the year. There isn’t an All Raise in every single country where there is venture and tech. So how do we keep this current at the front of mind, all the time, rather than just some of the time?

PK: I think tech absolutely has a role to play in how we approach diversity, equity, and inclusion going forward. And where we focus, I think there’s been a lot of focus on the “D” in DEI. And that’s measuring the inflows, but not a lot of measurement on the equity and inclusion piece. Tech runs on data, we have a lot of data, but we still need to add data! So we’re talking to, for example, Crunchbase and PitchBook about how they, as trackers who have data on the industry, add data on race and gender, and do that in the right way for self-identification. They do a good job of producing quarterly reports, but how can they start to report on a regular basis and allow people to make informed choices, while making the state of the industry transparent? I don’t think you can measure this in days. This is not real-time trends. But when we look at moving the numbers and measuring the industry, we look on a quarterly basis, and by doing that, then you avoid that end-of-year shock. DEI needs to be woven into the fabric of organizations. It’s also why we say that at the board level, it’s a strategic imperative to measure. The board’s going to meet at least quarterly and if your obligation is to report to the board and have a strategic conversation about DEI—where you’re succeeding, where there’s room for improvement—you’re measuring, again, what’s happening on the back end, who’s leaving the company and who’s not, as well as issues like pay equity.

John Lynn (Cela)

Camilla Sievers (Qi Health, Female Founders)

Kevin Liu (Techstars)

More and more startups go through their phase of initiation with accelerators and incubators; dozens of these institutions are appearing each year, many with a specific focus on an industry, a particular group of founders, or a geography. We spoke with three accelerator experts: John Lynn, who has built many accelerators over the years with Cela out of New York; Camilla Sievers from Female Founders in Austria; and Kevin Liu, investor in San Francisco for Techstars. We asked them about the role and responsibility of accelerators in considering DEI. We also discuss unconscious bias, opening up the funnel, and the importance of fostering not only diverse hiring and accelerator intake, but also inclusive practices within the accelerators and portfolio companies.

Erika Brodnock (EB): Camilla, you’re a part of the Female Founders accelerator in Austria. What motivated you to start at FF and what are the aims of the program?

Camilla Sievers (CS): I became part of the startup world from early 2013. At that time, while there was only a small ecosystem in general, there was for sure no visibility for women at all, no female role models, no network, no female investors—none of that. As these things go, the couple of females that were in the space in continental Europe found each other very quickly. We immediately saw that there’s huge potential in this market because people don’t know that they have a place to come to, where they will be understood and welcome. So we want to encourage women to become part of the industry, to have role models and mentors and people they can talk to about ideas and about problems that they’re facing. We started by building a community for women to meet each other.

Johannes Lenhard (JFL): John, you’ve helped quite a few accelerators over the last five years get off the ground. How important are different principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion when you set up a new program, and why is that something that you care about?

John Lynn (JL): We believe that the essential function of an accelerator is to systematize access. So it’s inherently a tool that can be a vehicle for inclusion and diversity. Installing an accelerator system that can be applied to address the problem of inclusion and set up in the right way is essential to a good accelerator, even if it’s for a homogenous group. I think from the perspective of what makes an accelerator work, being able to understand what kinds of access someone needs and prepare their contact with your network to achieve that need—that should be at the core of an accelerator. But from the other side of things, it’s also what makes accelerators a really good tool for solving the problems of diversity to some extent. So not only is it something that makes an accelerator work, but it’s also a resource that’s only beginning to be tapped in the right way to solve this greater problem.

EB: Kevin, you’ve been with Techstars for more than two years and you mentioned before that you’re doing some interesting things around DEI. How important is it to you, and can you go into the specifics of what you’re doing to increase DEI in your programs and investments?

Kevin Liu (KL): At Techstars, DEI is very important to us. Over the last few years, we’ve done various efforts at the strategic level. For example, we kicked off our 1,000 diverse CEOs initiative. The goal is to invest in 1,000 diverse CEOs through our accelerators by 2026. This has been primarily led by our head of D&I, Andrea Perdomo, and she’s done a fantastic job to push that create a culture of awareness for D&I within Techstars.

JFL: Camilla, you have already built in a certain bias in your accelerator given your specific focus. And Kevin, you just talked quite a bit about how you’re trying to widen your lens as much as possible. But do you believe that you have had unconscious bias in your programs before and that you have been able to eliminate it?

CS: We explicitly talked about certain biases we needed to avoid and eliminate. We also went the other way and tried to not completely overcompensate; we decided that we didn’t want to have a female-only funnel, a female-only investors network, a female-only venture partner network, ambassador network, etc. It needed to be diverse, as we can only achieve our goals in equality if every stakeholder (and sex) gets involved and contributes to the conversation. We believe that in terms of age of gender, ethnicity, and probably also life experience, we need to be diverse in order to build the best product and I think we are on a good way to raise awareness about bias and be mindful in our day-to-day operations to foster an unbiased environment.

JL: In the overall ecosystem, we see the element of unconscious bias permeating many business relationships. It is especially hidden in language—the culture of emailing and calls (VCs are known for using subject-only messages, or messages in the body of an email that have no capitalization, punctuation, greeting, etc.), entrenched terminology (almost any startup term: hustle, scalable, innovative, disruptive, etc.).

EB: In the interest of sharing good practice, what are some of the key processes that you are using in your respective programs to widen participation and filter applications?

KL: As Techstars evolves, we’ve played around with many different methods around sourcing companies into the accelerator programs. Historically, sourcing was done very locally, the managing directors would go out sourcing companies; these days, we have a central sourcing function with a team of people who do sourcing very broadly. What we are trying to do is engage in a more systematic discovery process of what opportunities are out there; we believe that doing this centrally can help with eliminating some of the more local biases. So the sourcing effort now involved a lot of different puzzle pieces (in addition to MD-led sourcing efforts) to achieve this goal: it is everything from having associates go through conference schedules, looking at relevant companies in Pitchbook (and Crunchbase), and plugging into special interest forums—for example, Techstars worked with Barclays to run their Female Founders First program. The global pipeline team aggregates those leads and then distributes them to the MDs, making sure they’re a fit for specific programs, corporate partners, and themes that the programs are focused on. So that’s a big piece we’ve done in the last year or two to invest in some central resources that we hope will yield a lot of longer term benefit in terms of increasing the diversity of our sourcing channel.

JL: A concrete step for every accelerator is to have a systematic process for applications, and to minimize warm introductions. What you see happening a lot is that a system or process is lacking completely; the investors see a startup out on a platform or an article and they hunt them down. The number of startups that are applying and getting in is often quite small, there are accelerators that get thousands of applications and half of the 50-company cohort that gets into the program has been found in other ways, based on the personal preference of individuals. So there should be an institutionalized application process that every company has to go through and that is influenced by a large group of people. The diversity of decision makers in that process can again eliminate a lot of bias.

JFL: For portfolio companies, or the companies in the accelerator, how do you think about D&I and address it there? What are tangible actions when it comes to increasing DEI in the companies?

JL: This is right—while accelerators can help produce progress on DEI, the ultimate outcome for the ecosystem is that companies themselves can bring on more diverse leaders and team members. One of the key struggles of entrepreneurs is that they are looking to move too fast—helping them realize that they themselves are investors of time, energy, skills, recruitment, and that they should take time and care in making those investments, is a fundamental concept that can help them build more diverse teams early on. Accelerators are in a key position to make this case, and to start making it a part of the startup’s DNA by including it in the curriculum or other program activities. Next, attaching key outcomes to greater diversity can work as well: diversity can help attract better talent, capital, and overall make for a more comprehensively creative and productive environment.

CS: It starts with the startup team itself; we need to foster the mindset in them that it is in their biggest interest to increase diversity. At the end of the day, they will make the decision on who to employ. Again, role modeling can play a big role here, we need to show them what works and connect them with the right people to implement change if need be. At Female Founders, we have a job platform, where they can put up job posts, for instance. We actively share best practices on how you can diversify your funnel. We give them some input on how to win female talent, for instance, because women have to be addressed differently.

Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate)

Chuck Eesley (Stanford University)

We chatted with Chuck Eesley (professor in engineering at Stanford) and Ann Miura-Ko (GP at Floodgate but also a teacher at her alma mater, Stanford, in Chuck’s department) about the role of education for DEI in tech. We touch on issues such as how to achieve fair representation both for faculty and students, the right teaching materials, and diversifying the educational experience as such. The bottom line: schools like Stanford absolutely have a responsibility to drive this effort—and they are standing up for it; the difference they are pushing for now will take a while to pay out in tech, but then will hopefully help us achieve a sea-change that does away with the often cited “pipeline problem.”

Johannes Lenhard (JL): We are talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we are thinking about what the role of educational institutions can be when it comes to driving change on this front in tech and venture capital. What do you think the responsibility and the opportunities are for places like Stanford when it comes to producing a more diverse tech and VC ecosystem?

Ann Miura-Ko (AM-K): I believe the years of schooling, of university, are such formative years. How you think about yourself and how you relate to other people are formed in high school and college. I reflect back on my own days as a student; one of the magical pieces of being an engineer, and being at PhD programs in quantitative sciences, was that I had this opportunity to meet very diverse groups of people that I normally would not be friends with. This is really important as an experience. In college, I remember complaining to my mom that I was the only woman in most of my classes. My mom said to me, “Why does that even matter? Are you looking for friendship in your classes?” That was a turning point for me about the way I thought about this; I can form different kinds of relationships in different kinds of contexts. It turns out, I made great friends in undergrad with people who were very different for me. That became a skill set that I learned in college to forge those relationships.

Chuck Eesley (CE): There are so many opportunities, but there are also so many challenges for universities indeed. I often think both about the teaching side and the research side slightly separate. On the research side, we have increasingly strong evidence, larger data sets, and more context that there are real benefits to diversity, but also more research about how homogenous both venture capital firms and startup teams tend to be. Due to both systemic racism and unconscious bias, we are really innovating with one hand tied behind our backs. If you look at engineering schools, the faculty and the students are not particularly diverse. There are real challenges to changing that. Business schools have this problem, as well as the university as a whole. There is a disconnect there, between what we see in the teams, faculty, and students, and what we know is more beneficial for innovation.

AM-K: When it comes to diversity, I am a co-director of a program called the Mayfield Fellows Program, which is for 12 undergraduate students to get exposed to entrepreneurship and leadership. We are making a really big push this year to get many more students just to apply to the program from a diverse set of backgrounds. We have specifically targeted Black, Latinx, and low-income students. What has been interesting for me is that there is not only a lack of awareness about the program, but also fear of entrepreneurship in many of those communities. Many believe that the lack of stability in entrepreneurship may be a risk that they cannot take. A lot of [the push] has been real targeted outreach to talk about the fact that, if you work at a startup, your salary is just as good as many of the other large companies. You just get the upside of equity, and if the company does not do well, that is actually okay. From a venture capitalist perspective, or a hiring manager’s perspective, that is not seen as a blight on your resume.

EB: Chuck, you are faculty in one of the programs that produces quite a few of the Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs, the STVP program. What kinds of responsibility do you, your department, and the university have to actively increase DEI? What specific measures are you taking at the moment to make sure that happens?

CE: First of all, it is good to also take a step back and take a look at the big picture of the university system, and to put into perspective Stanford’s specific responsibility. We have an important leadership role to play, as the major university in Silicon Valley. A lot of people look to us for best practices, for how to do entrepreneurship education. We set an important example in that role. That said, I am actually a lot more optimistic about the HBCUs, and Latinx serving institutions, and the community colleges that MacKenzie Scott, formerly Bezos is funding right now. I have a friend, Hadiyah Mujhid from HBCUvc, who is basically saying, “All this stuff is perpetuated via networks. Those networks right now tend to be white male. We are just going to do a parallel thing to what Stanford has done for those rich white male students with HBCU universities, where we are not starting from such a low percentage of diversity in the first place.”

JL: Looking back at what you have done so far, and forward to what you want to do, can each of you share a best practice when it comes to teaching and increasing D&I in the classroom and bringing people in? What should every instructor and teacher do differently?

AM-K: This is a really critical question. One point that I wanted to make that Chuck was talking about: the change that you were mentioning that is needed is coming. You start to see it already, even with the Yale endowment, which sent out a letter to all of their managers asking for diversity numbers, driven by David Swensen, their CIO. He wanted those numbers. He has had those conversations with managers, and he is pushing them to make these hires. When a Yale endowment does that, because they are one of the leaders, you will see that actually reflected in the numbers. You will start to see more diversity.

CE: Bottom-up initiatives are always helpful, but the most important thing is people in leadership positions in the university have to talk about this, as a critical challenge and mission for the university to diversify in general, and diversified entrepreneurship programs in particular. If those university leaders, deans, and department chairs do not speak up about it and do not change the way that resources are allocated for new faculty hires or for adjunct lecturers or for funding students, then it is very difficult for those of us that are trying to do stuff from the bottom up to make a lot of progress. That is the most critical thing.

CE: Tactically, we have hired a couple of RA [research assistant] students. Not asking for free labor, especially on the part of the affected communities, is really important. We hired a couple of master’s students and they have helped us to make a ton of progress. They’ve helped with recruiting, such as running the MS&E [management science and engineering] department version of our SERGE graduate recruiting program. They’ve also been meeting with faculty to help diversify the syllabus readings and guest speakers. Recently, they’ve helped us to coordinate an undergraduate diversity in research program. Finally, they are helping with some literature reviews in this area of what works and what doesn’t.

JL: Chuck, a last question for you: what do you think is a concrete next step you want to take to make your bit of entrepreneurship education more diverse and inclusive? What are your plans for the coming two years?

CE: One concrete step is in hiring more diverse students as teaching assistants in our classes. In terms of plans for the coming two years, it’s really focused on recruiting more diverse students and faculty to apply to the department.

Jeff Harbach (Kauffmann Fellows)

Lisa Shu (formerly Newton Venture Program)

The default pattern-matching that skews the venture capital industry in favor of elite, white, male founders can as easily be ascribed to a lack of investor education, acumen, and skill as it can a lack of worthy pipeline or ability to source diverse deals. The apparent issue the industry has with the former is that it places the buck in the court of the LPs and GPs who are overlooking diverse talent, rather than on the diverse talent themselves, as has historically been the case. We were delighted to sit down with Jeff Harbach and Lisa Shu to learn how the Kauffman Fellows and Newton Venture Program plan to disrupt the venture capital ecosystem by training the next wave of GPs to be more inclusive than those who have gone before them.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): VCs happen to be mostly white men with Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford degrees. Is that something you want to change with your respective organizations?

Jeff Harbach (JH): At the Kauffman Foundation, the way that we think about diversity in venture is not about quotas. It’s important to remember why the organization came about: we have long believed that in order to best understand the world’s greatest challenges, the future of the VC industry must be diverse and more reflective of society as a whole. The Kauffman Fellows Program originated as an endeavor of the Kauffman Foundation, from which it was spun out in 2000. The Kauffman Foundation was started by Ewing Marion Kauffman, who cared a lot about two things: entrepreneurship and education. Since the early 1990s, the Kauffman Fellows have pushed to build a global fabric of smart, connected capital that will fuel entrepreneurs everywhere and support entrepreneurship as a catalyst for economic growth and social change.

Lisa Shu (LS): I have to echo Jeff in the notion that decisions made by VCs trickle down throughout society and who gets funding determines which of society’s problems get solved. In its current form, venture excludes too many, and it serves too few. Newton has the explicit mission to make the venture landscape fairer, more inclusive, more representative of the population it serves. While we all agree that no one group has the monopoly on talent, overwhelmingly one group does seem to have a monopoly on power in the venture ecosystem. We take a quantitative approach with the Newton Venture Program in terms of looking at the investment landscape.

Erika Brodnock (EB): How exactly are you tackling diversity, inclusion, and equity in your educational programs? Are you able to share a few of your best practices and initiatives?

LS: We set a very clear mission from the outset. Newton was incorporated in September 2020. Kaufman has 25 years of history ahead of us. Our vision is that by 2030, venture investors will be 50% people from currently underestimated and overlooked groups. Working backwards, what do we need to do to get there? In every cohort of Newton learners, we ensure that at least 50% of our learners are female, and at least 50% of our learners come from Black, minority ethnic, and other underrepresented backgrounds. We also focus at the top of the funnel to ensure we attract candidates who might not otherwise naturally see themselves as a venture investor. Most of us do not naturally see ourselves as a venture investor.

EB: Will the use of Applied extend to how venture capital investments are made via the fund?

LS: There has been some traction in that direction. I know the fund Blackbird VC (based in Sydney, Australia) selects founders to meet with based on this blind process. There are some indicators that more and more firms will use this blind selection process—either for their own hiring needs, the hiring needs of their portfolio companies, or deal sourcing.

JH: We have two things that we focus on with Kauffman Fellows, and we are developing more. The first is our core program. It does not necessarily focus on the top of the funnel, but it rather focuses on individuals that are in venture right now. The median fellow is a junior partner in their firm. Some are more senior partners, some will go down to maybe principal, but the average investing experience is five plus years. The average operating experience is more like ten plus.

JL: Let us address one specific area that is not talked about much in this space, which is class and social mobility. Supposedly, one even more so than the other is very expensive. Is that something that you think about, because it makes it harder for certain groups to participate?

LS: Our programs are at different price points, but they are expensive for some. It starts at £2,000 for the digital program and up to £20,000 for the on-campus at London Business School program. In creating these programs, we wanted to ensure that inability to pay does not pose a barrier to entry, because there are already too many barriers to entry into the venture ecosystem. We are very lucky to have partnered for our initial cohort with founding sponsors who have underwritten 30 of the 60 spots for our first cohort, and we have lined that up for the next ten cohorts. It does not matter what the amount is; we do not want to add to the barriers into the venture ecosystem. We are explicitly eliminating it by partnering with like-minded partners, and the beauty of partnering with multiple sponsors is that you form this collective action. We have many different parts of the ecosystem engaged from all different fields, whether it is law or finance or government. It is really wonderful to see the collective movement building within the venture ecosystem. The more inbound requests I receive to sponsor a spot, the happier I am. It is about the number of firms, organizations, and individuals that we can mobilize towards collective action—even more so than the actual number of scholarships that we can deliver.

JH: Venture Deals is a free course for anybody that wants to take it. The core program that we have, which is a two-year program that is measured by nine different experiences or events, is $80K. Number one, we do not want this to be cost-prohibitive for individuals, especially those that are launching their first-time funds. When you are a first-time manager, and you are launching a $10M–$15M fund, and you have your GP commitment that you have to do as part of launching your fund, you do not have management fees and other cash flow to be able to pay for an $80K program. We understand that. We are aggressive in the way that we focus on scholarships.

EB: Are there any plans to create an emerging fund manager program that is specifically catered towards combating the issues where people from overlooked backgrounds tend to fail to progress to partner stage?

JH: Yes. We are always looking for what we should be doing to support our mission of helping the venture ecosystem look more like society as a whole. If you just have an emerging manager program, then you’re going to miss out on the important discussions that you get from having emerging managers, established managers, geographic diverse managers, and new managers all in the same room. We define diversity not just on the basis of gender and ethnicity, although those are two very important characteristics of diversity. We try to take a more inclusive position on diversity and view it through the lens of characteristics like gender, ethnicity, sector, stage, geography, and age to name a few. We want there to be an inclusive nature around all these discussions so that we are getting the value from seeing how different people are viewing this from different stages and different perspectives. I understand the purpose of an exclusive emerging manager program is to really make sure that we are focusing on the fact that oftentimes emerging managers or overlooked managers are not making it through that glass ceiling or making it to the partner level. We think that we are meeting that by seeing many of these new managers—especially over the last two, three years, and even at an accelerating rate over the last six months, based on what is going on in the US—becoming first-time managers, launching their own funds, getting to partner.

LS: I agree. I have been heartened to see programs such as VC Include develop a BIPOC fellowship, specifically to target these overlooked groups. As we build out Newton’s learning ecosystem, we have thought about what kind of custom programming we could develop for emerging fund managers. When you look at a cohort size of 60 individuals, and you look at the number of one-to-one relationships, that is 1,770 relationships. Take the perspective of a learner: who else is in the room with me? There’s 60 people but 1,770 relationships; 1770 is the real denominator, because venture is not done in a vacuum. Who raises from whom, who co-invests with whom, who sources from whom—all involve multiple parties; there is no individual contributor in VC. If our mission is inclusive representation, I do not think that we can limit it to just specific groups.

JL: What is your specific vision for the VC industry in five to ten years, and what do you think is the biggest challenge to get there?

LS: We have a very specific vision that by 2030, venture investors will be 50% people from currently overlooked and underestimated groups. The biggest challenge that I see right now is: we can create the best investor training programs that £2,000 or £20K or $80K can buy, we can provide the supply of the most talented diverse pipeline into the venture ecosystem, but what we cannot control is the demand for this talent. The rate at which firms hire is very slow. That is changing and there is an unprecedented amount of capital in both private and public markets. There is a macro shift from public equity into private equity.

JH: One of the major challenges that we face in venture is the reality that less than 5% of the industry ever cashes a carry check and that most venture managers are going to fail because most startups fail. Going from fund one to fund four and beyond is really hard. It does not matter what background or stage or anything else you come from. It is making sure all the energy that we have around wanting to see the venture ecosystem look more like society as a whole, sticks to signal and turns into a signal, and it stays. The staying power means we must help more of these emerging managers.

EB: I have this analogy that if there is a fish and the fish is sick, if you do not change the water, the fish continues to be sick. This is the venture partners or emerging fund managers that are setting up new funds that are going to invest in new businesses, if we do not ensure that those businesses have a way of being successful, by potentially ensuring things like supply chain practices are changing. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what is needed to ensure that some businesses can reach escape velocity because once they do, the founders can become the LPs and even the GPs that are creating that cycle. We need to create one full cycle to do that. How would you say we need to go about ensuring that other pieces of the puzzle are in place so that it does not result in the failure that you just described?

JH: I am not going to pretend like I have the answer to this. My initial reaction is that I get antsy around everybody thinking that venture is the most important piece of this puzzle. It is not the venture layer; it is a service layer. Let us just put things in perspective, venture managers come and go, the true heroes in our story are the entrepreneurs. They are the ones who are solving the world’s greatest problems. They are the ones that are creating economic independence for many and are going to help solve these things from the supply chain all the way up and down, where we need systemic change.

LS: I love the notion of the full-stack venture ecosystem. It brilliantly illustrates how so many pieces have to come together to enact systemic change. It starts with governments, with the tech transfer officers at universities, the R&D budgets that are invested into the innovation ecosystem. Then you have the LPs, the angels, accelerators, incubators, and the venture capitalists all working together. As the tide rises, all boats rise together. Every single piece of the stack needs to work together towards greater inclusion and belonging and representation in the ecosystem.

Tom Wehmeier (Atomico)

Gené Teare (Crunchbase)

Tom Wehmeier, partner and head of research at Atomico, and responsible for the annual State of European Tech report, and Gené Teare, Crunchbase senior data journalist, discuss the role of data in improving diversity in the tech and venture landscape. Taking the call for “more data” among many investors seriously, we go into the details of what we already know and how data can indeed drive change.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): What role do you think data plays in moving the needle on D&I in technology?

Gené Teare (GT): Crunchbase was one of the organizations that led on diversity data. From 2013 onwards, there was an active discussion around female representation on engineering teams. In early 2015, we recognized that with a global dataset of companies and founders in Crunchbase, we could provide analysis on funding to female founders, and how that has changed over time. In March 2015 we began to add gender to the data. We analyzed personal pronouns to help with data analysis, getting to a very comprehensive dataset within about two months, and wrote our first report. That first report showed a big shift over that time frame. We found that the percent of companies that had raised a first funding with at least one female founder had increased from around 9% in 2009 to 18% by 2014. Since then, we have continued to report how those numbers have shifted.

JL: How important do you think this tracking is? What do we get from it in a secondary and tertiary process, as the tracking in and of itself doesn’t change the needle, right?

GT: For those concerned about funding to female founders, without knowing exactly what the numbers are, you could over-project, under-project, or misunderstand the trends. The numbers themselves do not shift the needle, but understanding the numbers does anchor the discussion. It also can lead people to act because they say, “Okay, this is worse than I thought it was,” or “This isn’t moving quickly enough, we need to do more.” We have seen the data propel individuals to go out there and do something because they realize the numbers are not where they would like them to be.

Tom Wehmeier (TW): I agree. I think data assists in helping to understand the scope of the issue and the potential for solving it. If we are not familiar with the scope of the challenges that we face, we won’t understand what levers we need to pull in order to shift the needle in the right way. I think data in general, whether it’s around D&I or anything else, is such a vital component of telling stories and doing so in a way that is objective. In doing the work to source the data, then using that to drive a data-driven narrative is a really powerful mechanism to raise awareness to engage people and close those knowledge gaps. When measured over time, data enables us to track progress and hold different stakeholders accountable. The last piece is that it can be incredibly empowering. It becomes easier to speak up about when you have data to support and validate your experience. All of these things, when taken together, shape how data plays a role in helping various different individuals or organizations to try to move the needle in the right direction.

Erika Brodnock (EB): Tom, you oversee the State of European Tech report yearly, covering funding and developments in the industry, as well as a large survey of more subtle attitudes among VCs and founders—including many questions on DEI. Why is the State of European Tech report such an important piece of work at Atomico?

TW: I think it’s a small contribution to the discussion. I look back to the first report we delivered back in 2015, and I think a very limited amount of data was focused around gender and diversity at the founder and operator level. Over subsequent years, we’ve grown the level of focus in the report. In 2018, we really doubled down the level of data, specifically pulling out and creating a chapter around diversity and inclusion. We also used that as the lead narrative into all of the media briefings following publication.

JL: Gené, what do you think is the most important data that we can collect to change the landscape? Give some examples of things that you have already found and dive into some of the results.

GT: At Crunchbase, we track companies as soon as they first raise funding, and then they start showing up on our reports. What is critical is that Crunchbase is an open platform that founders can access, to add themselves and their early funding rounds and become a visible part of the ecosystem.

EB: I work with Extend Ventures, and we have published similar reporting for the UK. We are really interested in looking at the numbers across Europe. Do you have plans for that?

GT: Yes, we would like to explore expanding our diversity data to Europe. For Diversity Spotlight we tag companies, not individuals, with “founded” or “led” based on race or ethnicity. By “led,” we are focused on the CEO role at a company.

EB: Tom, how has Atomico used the research findings to enhance its thesis? What are the particular programs and investments that you’re making now?

TW: Atomico’s founding thesis back in 2006 was, “Great companies can come from anywhere.” And that is what we have learned. We have spent more time understanding the industry issues around D&I, that “anywhere” really means “by anyone in any location.” The more we have spent time understanding this, the more it has reinforced and strengthened our conviction in that initial thesis, specifically, our resolve to back underrepresented talent in tech. It has been really influential in helping rethink every aspect of what we do, in terms of how we invest, also how we think about building our team as a fund.

EB: Tom, how are you selecting the angels? If the angels are selected from a warm introduction style network, surely that kind of perpetuates the problem, so is it open?

TW: We start by going through our network to find candidates to go to our shortlist. We then leverage the network of the angels already on the program to make recommendations too. Though I would say that they are sought-out recommendations from our network, we are thoughtful in who we go and ask to supply those introductions to ensure that that field of people is diverse. There is also then the opportunity to openly apply. We have also been proactive in a data-driven way, to identify a potential diverse pool of candidates that we have reached out to ourselves, because we thought that they might represent interesting candidates for the program.

JL: Where do you think we need more data for the future? Crunchbase started collecting data on women eight years ago, and on ethnicity relatively recently. What do we not yet know enough about, and what is another frontier that we can help push with data?

GT: I spoke with BBG Ventures founders Susan Lyne and Nisha Dua, who focus on investing in consumer technology companies with a female founder. One of their findings is that their incoming deal flow in 2020 during COVID-19 for female founders increased. We spoke with other funds focused on female founders and confirmed this finding. That contrasts with our most recent report, demonstrating funding in 2020 to female-only founded companies was down, tracking closer to 2% than the previous year’s 3%. That is concerning. We also cite a McKinsey report, which mentions 30% of working mothers may leave the workforce due to COVID-19. The concern at this point is: are we going to see stagnation or a step backwards for women in the workplace?

TW: I agree. The things that would be most impactful is just building a more comprehensive coverage of some of the research and initiatives that we are already undertaking, whether that is building out coverage across regions, for gender or ethnicity. Also, being able to comprehensively map and understand the full lifecycle of a company. Not just in terms of their investments, but also be able to comprehensively look at things like exits and returns and IPO pathways. I think we need to be able to connect all of those different dots through the lens of gender or through the lens of ethnicity, and to start putting even more data on the table around the relative performance and returns from different founder groups. We are probably still at a point where we will still find amazing datasets that emerge from this level of research, but often, it’s snapshots in time. I would love to have continuous longitudinal time series data across some of these areas that offers deeper coverage—then we would be in a really powerful position to tell the real story of what is happening.

Amy Lewin (Sifted)

Steve O’Hear (Zapp, formerly TechCrunch)

Media and journalism have always played an important role in agitating and facilitating the narratives, conversations, and movements that lead to change. Where DEI is concerned, we need to create systemic change at a variety of levels. This will only be achievable with sustained storytelling. Smart, sophisticated, strategic communication skills are essential for presenting a narrative in which systems are seen as open to change, controllable, and redesignable. We chatted with the tech journalists Amy Lewin (Sifted) and Steve O’Hear (formerly TechCrunch) to learn more broadly about diversity in journalism, as well as the perceived responsibilities of journalism in creating greater levels of diversity in the venture capital industry.

Erika Brodnock (EB): Tell us about your world, tech journalism, and the issues around discrimination, equity, and diversity that you perceive to be there.

Amy Lewin (AL): The journalism industry as a whole is not very diverse. Look at the number of editors of big publications that are women or people of color. Historically, tech journalism has been male dominated, especially on the gadget and big tech company side of things. I am very proud of the fact that at Sifted, we are nine women and six men on our editorial team—and these are regular editorial contributors. It boils down to access to the opportunities you need to have to get into the industry in the first place. People need to have done an internship or several to get into journalism. Most media publications are based in London, if we are talking about the UK. It is not cheap to do an internship in London, as many of them are unpaid. The standard problems with diversity that you find across many industries are also present in journalism, which is partly the reason why we have the status quo as it is.

Steve O’Hear (SO): When I first entered the industry, I was taken aback. It was very stereotypical, with male journalists going to press events hosted by female PRs. I’m not sure that much has changed in gadget and consumer tech journalism. In the world of tech business journalism, however, the gender balance has slowly improved over the last decade. I am not sure it is so bad now in terms of regular reporters, but it gets worse as you go up the hierarchy, as is the case in many industries. Journalism is still heavily private-educated, Oxbridge, middle- to upper-class dominated to this day. That is strange, because in digital media, the proof is in the writing. I always tell other young journalists, if you want to be a journalist, just start writing.

EB: Given how few people at Oxbridge are diverse in terms of ethnicity, social status, or socioeconomic class, what are your thoughts on diversity of that nature in journalism? Is there anything that could be done around tech journalism to open doors so that new people come to the fore?

AL: Many internships are not being paid and most people need to come to London to do them. There is a great organization called PressPad, which got some money from Harry and Megan (the Duke and Duchess of Sussex) this week [in 2021]. They help people find accommodation while they are doing internships so that they can get the experience they need to break into the industry. We need media publications to be paying interns the London living wage, at the very minimum. We also need more examples of best practice around internship schemes. I run our internship program and every single time, I want the people who apply to it, and the people who are interviewed, and the people we select to be as diverse in all these different areas as possible. I still am clearly not spreading the word in the right places to get as diverse a pipeline of candidates as I would like, although we are getting a good mix. I would love to be able to speak to other people who run these schemes, who can say, you need to share it in these places or connect with this community. I do a lot of that legwork, but I know there is so much more to do. The answer is not easy to find. There is not a long list that says, “Contact these people, share it in these places.”

EB: There is also a disconnect from people to communities that have historically been overlooked where they do not know who to reach out to. There is this gulf in the middle that needs to be filled.

SO: There is a pipeline problem, and it is hard to reach parts of society that you do not reach through your existing network. Journalism is terrible because there is an even worse hypocrisy. Journalists increasingly write about diversity and are supposed to be bastions of objectivity. Yet journalism is not made up of the people it serves, so how can it report on the important stories and/or in a representative way? How can it find the hard-to-reach stories if it cannot even find the hard-to-reach aspiring journalists?

EB: Is there pushback on the fact that there is a pipeline problem? Are we suggesting that there are not enough good journalists graduating, or are they not graduating from Oxbridge and therefore not given the opportunity?

AL: You do not need a degree from a red brick university to be a journalist. That is not a problem. A lot of journalists are very lazy when they are recruiting, and they will just email City University, which is the gold standard of journalism. They will say, “Anyone on your courses want our internship?” This is not the answer. You do not need a degree; you just need a passion for writing and to be really nosy.

Johannes Lenhard (JL): Let us shift our views slightly away from journalism as an industry that has its own problems towards what tech journalism can do with diversity more generally in the venture world and in the technology startup world. Do you think there is a certain responsibility that journalists have with the DEI agenda, and a responsibility to advance this? What can you do as a journalist? Do you see that space for you?

SO: One of the main reasons for journalism is to hold power to account. In any inequitable society, that means the power is concentrated with the privileged and not with the many. Tech journalism has a responsibility to hold diversity of companies and investors to account. I don’t say this out of some sense of doing good. It is basic 101 journalism. At TechCrunch, we had a reporter that focused almost exclusively on diversity and inclusion. At the same time, we also had an editorial direction, which is that for any news story, we will consider the D&I angle. It is not just a separate topic.

AL: I see this as my responsibility and Sifted’s responsibility. I was the first employee at Sifted. Right from the start, I have tried to ensure that we focus on this and we do what we can to represent the startup ecosystem that we would like to see in our reporting. There is still a long way to go with that. It partly comes down to the criteria for inclusion that publications have. If your number one criterion is how much money has this company raised, then inevitably, you will not be featuring a very diverse set of founders. You have to change your criteria for inclusion. We focus a lot on what we call startup life, including hiring or organizational processes. Everyone has those kinds of jobs, and there is a much broader pool of people you could speak to, if you are writing about mental health at startups or about hiring and firing challenges. That is one practical method other publications can use if they realize that they are struggling to speak to diverse voices. You need to think about the reasons that you are not speaking to them in the first place, and do those barriers need to be there. There are other things you can do for events, such as making sure at the very least you have a “no manel” policy, meaning you must have a panelist who is a woman. If you want to go even further, include somebody who is underrepresented in another way on the panel. If you feel that you are struggling to find a woman for your panel, then your publication has issues, and you need to widen your network and range of sources. As Steve said earlier, you are not doing a very good job of reporting on what is out there if your network is in that state.

EB: You both have done a huge amount of work with your writing and raising awareness around important topics, some of them with the D&I steer. Are you content with the impacts that you have? What, if anything, is missing to make you feel as though you are making a difference?

SO: Do I make a difference? I don’t spend too much time thinking about that, as it is hard to quantify. I get lots of lovely feedback, which can just boost someone’s ego. Where journalists need to double down on making a difference is in two areas. There is a creep towards sort D&I washing, similar to greenwashing, whereby people exaggerate the company’s D&I efforts or progress, because you get an incredible amount of PR. I find that at times disingenuous, and slightly creepy. For example, I am not sure that the first thing I want to read in a press release about a potentially amazing company is the D&I credentials of the team. I am going to judge the company on their product or the market they are attacking. That is what I do every day. PRs will come in where they have almost weaponized D&I, which I think is something to watch out for. The second thing that I struggle to grapple with is that the D&I agenda as a whole has fallen into a trap of importing US identity politics, which is quite easily hijacked by people that want to fight a culture war. I do not see coverage of D&I that starts with, why is it important to have a diverse and representative workforce? I would suggest that in a more traditional British progressive politics context, it is about social mobility as much as anything, which is making use of all the talent in society. It is about removing barriers so that talent can come through.

AL: Sifted is a place where people know they can find stories on D&I. However, we have not figured out how to make people care about diversity who do not already care about diversity. Often, I feel that we are sharing information with the people who already know it. I do not know how much we are changing hearts and minds or getting information to people who really need to think about this topic. More generally, we need more data. So often, you are writing a piece and you want to go and find stats on what is the percentage of founders who are x or what is the percentage of investment that went here. It is there for gender and it is coming for ethnicity in the UK, but not in Europe. As Steve said, then when you get to socioeconomic background, there is nothing. It is almost completely homogeneous—so many people who have been to private school, Oxbridge, and worked at an investment bank or consultancy. It is utterly ridiculous that a sector that only requires you to have a laptop to get started is full of people who have had such privileged upbringings. It does not need to be this way.

SO: The debate has largely been framed around identity politics, so it is not really surprising that socioeconomic status was not mentioned until about two years ago. If you start from a progressive position of wanting to advance social mobility, you would not miss that at all.

JL: Social mobility is still not talked about very much. We made a specific point of having a conversation about socioeconomic class with an LP and GP, and the Americans do not recognize class in the same way Europeans do. There is still a distinct focus on gender and not much else in VC and LP conversations. In France, we cannot actually ask about ethnicity. In America, they do not think about social mobility.

EB: At Extend Ventures, we showed that you are able to capture demographic information. One of the things that we found was that 42% of the money that is invested at seed stage goes to graduates of Oxbridge, Harvard, and Stanford. There is a flywheel that has been created. The thing that is overlooked is intersectionality and what it means to be four of the traits, such as if you are Black, trans, female-presenting, and working class. What could be done in terms of bringing that intersectionality to the fore, as well as raising the issue of social mobility and class?

SO: VCs, especially in Silicon Valley, used to talk a lot about this notion of pattern matching. When you think about pattern matching on a personal level, that is almost confirmation bias meets unconscious bias, and within VC is promoted as a feature not a bug. I do not know how you deal with intersectionality in the context of pattern matching! Within journalism, you should also be making sure that you work hard to reach out to people that are not always featured. You should also focus on not just what you write but also the images that you publish, and other ways of making sure you do not miss the opportunity to represent the ecosystem fully.

AL: I do not have a good answer on intersectionality, either, but a lot of this comes down to journalists working harder. We need to ask more nuanced questions. If an investor says their team is 40% women, ask, is that the investment team? What percentage of your team are university educated? What percentage of your team have previously worked at a consultancy or an investment bank? Every time someone presents you with a stat, dig into that a little bit more. Continue to widen your network. Go to events, join Slack communities for people of color or women in tech. Use Twitter. There are many ways you can find different voices. When you are in a more senior position, be the person at your company who champions this, taking it upon yourself to educate other people or to share resources with other people so that they can get a better grasp of these issues. Make that part of the culture of your whole organization.

SO: It is really important to explain why it matters, not just that it does matter and how it is not happening. If the technology industry is not made more accessible to every part of society, then we are missing out on so much talent. We will all lose. It is not just about saying, “We need more diversity.” It is going back to basics and saying why. As journalists, if we are not covering enough underrepresented groups, we are not giving them the same access to amplifying their mission or message, and we all lose out.