The Missing Piece: How Investors & Entrepreneurs Can Work Together To Improve Diversity

In 2016, only 4.94% of all VC deals involved women led companies. Only 1% of all VC backed founders are black. This is a fact and a starting place for a frank discussion around diversity.

If you took an exam that you knew you only had a five percent chance of passing, would that impact your performance? Would you try to find alternate ways to ace the class? Would you reframe your answers to help score more points? Would you be more nervous about the exam? Would you be more or less confident in your ability to study? Would you even take the exam?

For the entrepreneurs, who embark on this challenge, the experience can be unnerving. As an entrepreneur, I avoided raising venture capital. A large part of my aversion was my own perception that as a female founder, I judged and held to higher and murky standards. As a result, my confidence was off, and I know my own anxieties played a role in my decisions. Here are a few of the tips I wish I had known at the time.

Tips For Entrepreneurs

1. Avoid the percentage trap at all costs. If you feel pre-judged while raising venture money, it’s going to be harder to raise. That is unfortunate and terrible, but true. You need to have an extraordinary level of confidence, humility and insanity to be a successful entrepreneur. You need the ability to ignore the odds.
2. Form broad and diverse networks. I have learned different skill sets through interaction with different groups of entrepreneurs. All are valid and useful, and I would lose if I only learned from one group or the other.
3. Learn about your investors before you meet them. Very often, investors share what metrics and ideas they care about through blogging. Knowing what those may be upfront will prevent you from walking into a meeting and being blindsided or rattled by questions.

On the investor side, if you are committed to a diverse founder group, and struggle with seeing skewed metrics, these are useful tactics to employ. We all wince when we see it: a founder who has everything under control, with great metrics, downplaying or sidestepping accomplishments, exhibiting nervous tics and projecting a palpable level of uncertainity about the process. The uncertainty is contagious; it throws off the most well intentioned investors who read entreprenuers to gague confidence, clarity of vision and passion.

For investors, it is incredibly difficult to isolate the energy an entreprenuer has from the company metrics and vision. There is often very little in the numbers, particularly at an early stage, that can shed light on the company’s success. It is frequently a bet on the team, and there is little that can ever change that as the only constant in early stage venture investing.

Tips For Investors

1. Take the time to have more than one interaction with an entrepreneur if it’s difficult to gauge right away. This allows for the early anxiety and nerves to wear off, and more importantly, for the entrepreneur to gain trust that they are being judged fairly.
2. Avoid raising the diversity topic in a prescriptive way with founders. Nearly fifty percent of all investors I spoke to would openly and specifically recommend I reach out to female VCs and angels. While it may come from a genuinely helpful place, the suggestion that a common background is necessary for funding only serves to reinforce the feeling that the goal posts are different.
3. Think through feedback and feedback delivery carefully, and compare your feedback across companies in a given day. For feedback to be sticky, meaningful and useful to entrepreneurs, they need to feel it is coming from a place of fair and thoughtful diligence.

There is a collaborative approach to improving the diversity in Silicon Valley. It starts with recognizing that much of the problem is systemic and perception driven, rather than the confluence of individual biases or ill intent.