VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality
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I found no mentions on reddit. On google there is a single review on Capterra, no other results.
The Canadian ios app has no reviews, can’t check US on my phone. The Google play version has 88 reviews, but all but 3-4 of them are from Jan 26-Feb 2, with only one since, in May.
So some evidence of traction, product market fit, growth, or the general idea behind the app (pitch deck) would help with the argument.
The author does highlight an issue of how to get funded if you don’t have an existing network though. Network based introductions seems to be the norm for VC from what I’ve heard. And to be clear, there may be racism involved: my point is it’s hard to tell without knowing more about the app’s and whether it seems plausibly a fit for VC. Once an app has been around for a year you need more evidence of traction.
Edit: I should mention that if the app is indeed somewhere between “can be bootstrapped” and “needs VC investment” then there are are new options like Tinyseed aimed at this middle ground of company. Another commented pointed out that a competing app has 1-10 employees, which is not VC scale.
Her husband sent the same info as her and got response. She got radio silence.
That's the point. Not whether or not the content was good.
(To be clear, I personally believe that race & gender do have an impact in the response from VCs, I just don't think her experience proves it.)
You can't say "well we're not going to fund you without a good track record, even though it's damn near impossible for you to build a track record because we won't fund or hire you. Good luck".
You can't say "we're going to fund more black founders, but only those who've already been proven a safe, reliable commodity."
Also, don't forget that it was the husband who had the LinkedIn connections to the pitch deck recipients. Race, gender and experience aside, you're obviously more likely to get a response from recipients who already know you (or are friends of friends) than from recipients who are total strangers to you.
If the author was also an ex-engineer of a highly respected software firm and had the same LinkedIn connections, then you would have a much stronger anecdotal case that racism or bias was the cause of being ignored.
In fact, she said she sent out the deck from her own e-mail and linked-in account. So, that means it was probably easy to get her husband's linked-in when he sent it out.
You could make the case that people claiming to want to help minorities, should at least spend time reading the deck, but that doesn't mean that anyone was racist/sexist in this particular instance. It seems like even after sending it out by the husband, nobody was very interested.
People aren’t happy with the status quo, where one of our most important and creative industries is nearly devoid of people who make up more than 1 in 10 Americans. In view of that, I don’t think it passes muster to say that “we don’t discriminate against black women, we just look for Founders in places that are nearly exclusively white/Asian.” Pipelines need to be reformed.
What is the evidence that there are hurdles for black women getting hired at Google?
For example, does their representation differ significantly from, say, the rate at which they graduate with CS degrees?
You seem irritated by a simple request to support a claim with evidence, which is strange.
There were no black people in my neighborhood. I don’t recall any in my elementary school classes. Thanks to housing segregation—the legacy of redlining—they were elsewhere, in neighborhoods where there were few if any people with Caltech and Stanford degrees. You don’t think that makes a difference?
While you're correct that it's a question of class — class is unfortunately downstream of racial policies the long term effects of which we've never quite fixed.
Why do I need to google and Wikipedia link for you?
Then we get VCs pledging to take deliberate steps to address the problem and they turn out to be vaporware.
However you didn't claim that no actor was being racist regardless, you claimed that the redliners were being racist, which is true. So go after them and their children, not Google.
Last I checked, age 18-24 college enrollment rates are 45% of white women, 41% of black women, 39% of white men, and 33% of black men. How much parental financial resources do these students need in order to sign up for Computer Science 101 -- which has basic high school algebra as a prerequisite -- and find out they like it?
Why do fewer black people graduate with CS degrees relative to the population than Indian or Asian people? That's a topic to understand better if you consider this a problem that you'd like to fix. Have you heard of the stereotype of "Asian parents", that drive their kids very hard to succeed academically? From many personal acquaintances, that effect is real, especially for immigrant parents. Meanwhile in some areas, in black culture, trying to succeed academically is "acting white" and is frowned upon.
It's a hard problem to solve and it may require changing the culture of populations gradually over time. You could start by looking what percent of families are single-parent grouped by race:
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
According to that data set, 65% of black families were single-parent in 2018, by far the grouping with the highest percentage in that data set, compared to 15% for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or 24% for non-hispanic whites. If you want to fix education and the success that comes after it, then you probably need to start by fixing the families in which children are raised.
It's difficult to succeed academically, and pay for and succeed in college, without two parents to support you.
Now why is that, the difference in single-parent families? I don't know the answer. We can keep popping the stack, looking for solutions in each layer like that, and finding problems at the next layer. Solutions won't be easy.
I've certainly seen intellectually rigorous studies of discrimination against Black people, mostly involving sending out resumes where there is no notable difference other than the implied ethnicity of the applicant. This post on the other hand claiming that discrimination in the mortgage industry in the 90s means that google must be practising racial discrimination today IS willful blindness in the place of intellectual rigor.
For some, equality may appear to be a fat baby banging on a highchair at times (when displeased usually).
If we had an unadulterated version of equality, do you think we would have found our natural stride by 2020 on the issue?
Racial neutral is a tough line to walk, but the talk on the other hand....
Just saying the training-wheels should come off instead of the gloves.
That being said, over the course of ~50 on-site interviews I conducted there, only 2 were Black, and they were both from Africa, not the United States. The reality is, African Americans are woefully under represented in computer science well upstream of companies that would love to hire them. Even if you assume all corporations are evil, hiring more POCs would be in their best interest at this point just to avoid lawsuits and to have better optics.
Because it's an extremely hard problem, and it's easier to be abstractly mad and hope someone else solves it, than to come up with concrete practical effective solutions?
What worries me is that we have a coordination problem, and if you snipe at efforts to make employers retain more URMs, you're damaging the case for the pipeline to supply more URMs.
All we had to do was remove the barriers.
Software is harder. I see three places we are losing women. First is women who never even consider the field, the second is women who drop out of car in college, and the third is women who switch fields from cs.
We're losing the most women in the first step in the pipeline and I've tried to convince so many of my girl friends to join software because I work half as much and make twice as much as them. But despite this they all had absolutely no interest in joining. They mostly had two fears. One was they wouldn't be good at it, but overwhelmingly the fear was they wouldn't like it.
The second was women who switch in college. I only know 2 women who started off cs and switched. One switched because she didn't like it. The other switched because she felt intimidated because she was put in a class with people like myself who had years of coding experience in a classroom, summer camps, and as a hobby before our first class in CS.
For the third leak in the pipeline all the women I know who left, left because they didn't enjoy the work. Some because they wanted to feel more connected to their work and people, moving from software to roles like therapist and teacher.
I think it's incredibly important we try to get women into tech. Women those women who would enjoy it lives would be better, consumers would enjoy better software, and our industry would be healthier.
But I think to do that it's important we use identify the right root causes.
I one of which is treating devs like rockstars aka children with specialized skills that need to be managed instead of professionals similar to engineers.
But I don't think sexism plays a big part. It exists,and it should be eliminated, every female dev I've talked to has experienced it. But none of them mentioned it as a reason they were thinking of leaving software.(at the professional level, I think it's more impactful at the college level where you have a bunch of kids who have no idea how to talk to women, and peer groups are more influential). But all my friends who are doctors and lawyers also experienced sexism, and in most cases far worse than the devs.
Radical affirmative action. Not radical in the rioting / revolution understanding of the word, but in its application.
So, if the issue with systematic racism is such that it endangers the foundational core of American society, it's time to take a big risk: literally pull random people to sit on VC and companies boards, in skilled jobs, etc. (a bit like the Diversity Visa Lottery the US already does for immigration). And train them on the job.
Sure, there will be issues here and there, but it would definitely solve the issue once and for all. It wouldn't even have to be explicitly racial. If it's truly random, you would end up with an accurate representation of the population.
It would also desegregate schools and neighborhoods, too, because with such a disruption people would have to move to match their new jobs.
Now, an exception should be made of course for professions where an error would mean life or death (or injury): doctors, airline pilots, etc. But I suspect 95% of careers at least could be desegregated in this way.
And perhaps an exception for jobs that truly require special abilities: professor of physics, professional athlete, etc.
101 ratings with all but two being 5-stars. I hesitate to say that the positive reviews are largely fake, but it sure seems like it. Broken English and vague praise for the app characterize most of the reviews.
For example: "My friend recommended to me for experiencing this app. At the fist time, I didn't know this application could bring benefits to me. However, after all I use this app more frequently because its advantages. Very useful!"
What? Further, all 5-star reviews with the exception of one were written between 01/28/2020 and 01/30/2020. That leaves exactly three reviews of the 101 written outside this two-day window. Massive red flag.
My point was that you don't need to get into a more subjective, personal quip, as the arguments brought by others (eg. The CV) here are already strong enough to dismiss the racism claim.
Or maybe they only look up the senders of the emails before deciding to even open the pitch deck. Seems rather odd.
This:
https://reductress.com/post/the-best-haircuts-for-what-youve...
is very close to the person (Sonya) on get bright's testimonials.
https://getbright.app/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/testimonial...
It could be the same Sonya just doing other things (hair shots etc) of course so not certain they are fake testimonial photos but certainly weird.
This is even more unacceptable to say right now, but many of us white males get ignored by VCs and we know it isn't because of our race or gender. It's because VCs won't fund you if they don't think you'll make a 50-100x or more return for their LPs.
You might feel ignored, but statistically you'd be even more likely to be ignored if you were from an underrepresented group.
As a female founder (not black though), we went through a similarly congnitively dissonant process. A-List investors who would publicly talk about supporting female founders would behave the worst (esp. female investors, Hi Aileen!), investors whose entire brand was around supporting ethical startups (or insert any similar alternative movement) would be the least interested in that aspect (Hi Spero Ventures!) All of that, along with a healthy dose of rudeness.
In our experience, those at the very very top of the totem pole gave us the fairest chance, and those below them, were the very worst. In the end, it was hard no to feel that an investor's Twitter persona was a sham, in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler.
FWIW, I know my experience was not alone. There are tons of now well-funded female founders who will echo this sentiment. I just wish there was a way to have a public list of those who walk the talk and those who just tweet the walk..
EDIT: Adding something from thread below to focus more on solutions, and providing perspective on why what is happening is not enough.
>...What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
> Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.
What's your track record?
Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
> VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash.
> Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.
Who knew, thanks for enlightening me. Let's just say that I have VCs emailing me now.
And women even more so, not because of any inherent differences in anything but the selection process biases.
Women of color even more so, not because of any inherent differences in anything but selection bias.
Just watch the biases and the whole process even out to an actual chance for all the ideas floating around.
Doesn't have anything to do with teams or ROI when you're talking to a first time pitcher.
They might as well bring in a psychic to pick their investments. But they can't let their LPs know that. They've got to justify their fee and so they will do it the safest way possible which is to be copycats or at most choose the most defensible options.
She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.
That's why I asked to see the track record. You won't get anywhere in this business without a track record. Moreover, if you do have a track record being a woman is an advantage these days, not a disadvantage. There are a lot of VCs chomping at the bit to invest into women- and minority-led startups. But they won't give you money if they don't have some degree of certainty that you can do what you're promising to do.
It leaves them as a statistical someone with an objectively poor resume.
If you want more women founded companies, you need more women engineers. If you want more women engineers, you need more women cs majors. If you want more women cs majors, you need more women interested in and excelling at math in high school.
It may not be 'fair' that the statistical woman has a 'worse' resume, nor is it 'fair' that the statistical rich kid has a 'better' one, but its asinine to address fairness at the narrow end of the funnel.
There are a lot more meaningful and effective actions that can be implemented now, which would correct things in a shorter length of time. I do think that the 'pipeline' is the fundamental way to fix the issue -- but I think that the best way of creating that interest is to present those under-represented groups in our society now, rather than later.
Where is the evidence that she didn't get one? A fair chance is not a guarantee of funding.
It baffles me that people constantly make this low-effort "read the article" remark as if (A) it's not explicitly against the rules here, and (B) it's impossible for two people to read the same article and draw different conclusions from it.
But I digress. I can put myself in the shoes of a VC for a second and know that based on a quick glance at the app's website and app store page, I wouldn't invest in it either. It's unoriginal, unlikely to be profitable, and the reviews are suspicious at best. No need to download it to see that.
Not reading or responding isn't unfair. VCs get inundated with proposals like hers. I'm a white guy who used to do freelance work. I've sent out hundreds of personalized cold emails to businesses looking for work, and got responses to maybe 5 of them, all of which were negative or "we'll keep your information on file". Maybe my sales pitch sucks. Maybe my portfolio sucks. Or maybe they just weren't interested in what I was offering. Maybe that's the case for her, too. Where's the evidence that either of us were treated unfairly? I am not entitled to anyone's time or money and neither is she.
Have we reached the point where not responding to a cold email is an act of bigotry? I myself get inundated with messages from recruiters. I respond only to the tiny fraction that are actually interesting and relevant to my skillset. It never even occurred to me to respond or not based on the gender or race of the recruiter. Does that make me a bigot?
Ex-Google was a meaningful distinction 15 years ago. Today it does not remotely entitle you to being funded.
Many VCs today recognize that Google is an extremely bureaucratic place that does not resemble a startup and I know more than a few who view Google experience as a negative signal.
And that would be accurate, to a large extent. But it's also one of the few remaining _technically competent_ places that does not hire people who can't code.
That is why I qualified my statement by saying that the prospective founder would be _technically_ capable, not capable in general. If anything, they could be less organizationally capable, but that can be resolved with the right co-founder.
To put it into more concrete terms: say you had a million dollars and would want to allocate it towards a bet in order to potentially turn it into a lot more. Who would _you_ pick, someone with tech aptitude credentials (which a substantial stint at Google as an engineer all but guarantees), or someone with no discernible credentials?
Note that I'm not even mentioning race here. Race/gender/sexual orientation is 100% irrelevant in this calculation unless it actually confers an increased chance of turning $1M into $10M. E.g. as an investor I'd probably prefer a gay person to lead a gay dating service, just for the domain expertise. I'd still require that they have technical and/or business chops, however.
If that was her main point, fair. But she's out there naming names and strongly implying that they didn't help her due to their racism and/or sexism. That's a pretty nasty accusation to throw at someone. And the names she named were the people who bothered to reply to her at all - they just didn't spend an adequate amount of effort on her to not be called out like this. She called out the only people who would give her the time of day! I think any VC who sees this article will know what to do from now on...
I totally get your point that it's crappy for VCs to talk the talk and act like they want to help under-represented people, but then go back to business as usual. That sucks. And I completely believe that it is harder out there for woman and people of color. But I don't think that naming names based on anecdotes like this actually helps. I wish I had better ideas, but I really don't think this is it.
I wouldn't have responded to her because I don't think her startup is particularly interesting or likely to be profitable. It's a low-effort idea. Easy to replicate, easy to cut the middle man out of, and has been done multiple times before. "Naming names" of people who declined to waste their money on your bad idea isn't social justice, it's entitlement.
A man, woman, or rhinoceros with a stellar résumé like her husband's, who I may also know personally, considering that I was on their contact list? Maybe.
Let us please stop pretending that the glaring difference between these two people is their race or gender and not a vast gulf of experience and credibility.
It seems that what happened is they didn't so much as glance at the pitch deck when "Nerissa Zhang" sent it to them. But then did when "James Zhang" sent them the same deck.
Because if they had looked at the deck when Nerissa sent it to them, they would have recognized James and also saw his impressive resume.
So if they are publicly proclaiming that they want to invest more in underrepresented groups, I don't think only reading emails from people with names like "James" in their contact list is going to make much progress towards that.
You're right, that's exactly what they did, because many of them knew him. They were from his contact list. I respond to basically every email from people I know, even if I think it's stupid. Emails from random people have to pass a much higher bar to get a response, and low-effort ideas with fraudulent reviews aren't going to clear that bar.
I used to be a freelancer. People would constantly ask me to build "the next Google" or "Facebook for X" that would assuredly make us both billionaires. I learned not to give them the time of day. If a friend or successful colleague did the same, I would respond out of courtesy if nothing else. If I really respected them I'd even entertain the possibility that I was wrong about their idea and hear them out.
There are some very obvious innocent explanations for this situation, but you seem to want it to be an instance of bigotry. In my experience this is a mindset that cannot be argued with, so I think I'm done here. Have a good night.
It sucks for the founders but that's really just the nature of being a "salesperson" in any field - constant rejection and little insight.
If they were black or women they might have assumed it was a matter of VCs being racist or sexist. But this is probably wrong.
Because of these three attributes, one is not like the others.
"I’m a Black woman, mom of three, and I don’t have an Ivy League degree."
Because, regardless of their own race or gender, VCs are highly connected members of the Ivy League.
VCs don't like poor people for the same reason most rich people don't for thousands of years. They believe that poor people are losers. And why would an investor want to bet on a loser?
Believe me, it is much worse when after every negative interaction, you have to check if it was because you are female, or black or X. White male founders will not have to worry about that additional male tax.
She's receiving equal treatment.
But she's expecting and explicitly asking for preferential treatment based on the her belief that VCs have promised it.
It could be that these VCs were never intending to offer preferential treatment. Or that they meant that they would offer preferential treatment to black members of the Ivy League. Neither of these answers would be surprising.
Oh, but it can. That's kinda one of the points.
> Or that they meant that they would offer preferential treatment to black members of the Ivy League. Neither of these answers would be surprising.
Not surprising but inconsistent with the talk.
Regular racism and sexism is when the reason you're not given a chance is because of direct racial or gender-based bias. Systemic racism and sexism can additionally include scenarios where the systems in place (such as the private Ivy League club) might not necessarily be intentionally racist or sexist, but rather just incidentally racist or sexist.
From the article, when a venture fund hides their email or contact information, that's not directly racist or sexist. However, if it prevents people outside of your existing network from contacting you, and your existing network happens to be underrepresented on the basis of color or gender, then it's certainly going to help perpetuate the already-existing under-representation in your network, regardless of whatever the root cause of it may be.
What portion of non-rich people make up the VC network? It's definitely lower than the percentage of women or black people. No one is more "underrepresented" than non-rich people.
VCs are the 1%. Their target of exclusion is the 99%. Most don't care about race or gender. They will overlook almost any attribute if they see dollar signs, race, gender, and even someone's poor background. Because their primary concern is money.
And since VCs hate poor people. And they know this about each other. Even those VCs that don't hate poor people will be more reluctant to fund poor people because they know other VCs are assholes. If other VCs will discriminate then the company may have trouble raising money and is more likely to fail. This is one of the major the systemic problem.
It breaks my heart that the first reaction by our community isn't to integrate her lived experience, but to question it. It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these spaces.
Few have asked what they can do to help. Fewer have offered to help. Instead, commentators have noted her track record. Their comments seem to approach her as if she was the sole founder. She's not. They're equal partners. Why is one given a courteous reply and the other shown the door? Is it not a good signal that she was able to find and work with a highly qualified co-founder? And build the seed of a good team? Isn't it a famous industry maxim to invest in teams?
More disappointing are the comments questioning her accomplishments based on her marriage. They're negating her lived experience and drive based on whom she married. And they're saying that perhaps she owes all of her success - including the gyms - to him. In this very forum, she has been reduced to but an extension of him. And that's heartbreaking.
There's a lot of work to be done in the industry. And I hope that this is a moment of personal growth and reflection for most involved.
There will be a day when these replies will be looked as antiquated. I look forward with hope to that day.
Her story is a bit inconsistent here. She says that she e-mailed pitch decks from her e-mail and then sent the same message from her husband's account. Of the two responses she mentions one asked for her pitch deck and the other only responded after a Linked In message. So it doesn't seem like she was sending the same message and/or she was sending messages to people that her husband had a prior relationship with.
I downloaded the app and it's nothing special. It also looks like they bought a bunch of fake 5 star reviews at the end of January. There's nothing exciting there and nothing about her background that would lead anyone to believe that she would be a successful founder. Her pitch deserves to be binned and the only reason that it wouldn't would be because of some personal connection her husband had.
I took a look and yeah it's pretty obvious this is what happened. There are 88 reviews total, and all but three of them occurred in the 7-day period between 26-Jan and 02-Feb, of which all were 5-star reviews.
It seems like this sorry if thing should be easy for Google to flag?
Everybody has a "lived experience" and we don't integrate the "lived experience" of others without scepticism because that would make us easy to con.
>It is to question her being and (implicitly) her right to be in these spaces.
I'll question her right explicitly to be in those spaces. Nothing she has made impresses me and I wouldn't give her money in the VC's shoes.
>There's a lot of work to be done in the industry. And I hope that this is a moment of personal growth and reflection for most involved. There will be a day when these replies will be looked as antiquated. I look forward with hope to that day.
Your blind belief in peoples lived experiences led you to seemingly get hoodwinked by somebody who develops mediocre products backed by seemingly fraudulent reviews. You're so caught up in your own superiority that you fail to reflect on the ideological blind spot that makes you easy to con.
Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR.
If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel after panel after tweet after TechCrunch interview.
What is frustrating about these investors (and YC) is that it all is very surface level. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but all of their assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed by those biases. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
Let's put in place processes, time allocations, smaller programs. And let's put all of this in place first for those raising their first rounds - the angel or the mythical pre-seed.
We can make a simple law:
If a VC has to operate in US, they must reserve X amount for the minorities.
If VCs think it's unfair and that minorities are not good investment then VCs can figure out how to "uplift" the minorities by creating much needed programs and network for them.
One might argue that without the special consideration these VC's rushed to say they would give, how would someone like the author ever have an established track record of starting/selling their businesses in the first place?
I'm frankly still expecting VC's to make decisions on what they think is going to be most profitable for them, full-stop. But plenty of other firms like large consulting firms, do set aside people and resources to work with non-profits for example. Why couldn't VC's do the same to try and level the playing field and eliminate some of these inherent advantages the well connected/well credentialed have? A "no" is potentially fine, but how you deliver that "no" can make all the difference.
I think that's the mistake all these companies are making. They need to make it clear if it's their intent to help black founders, provided, all other things are equal / held constant.
That is if two people have the same or similar background and qualifications but they just happened to be different race then to not always pick the white guy cause, hey, we look alike or belonged to the same frat.
It should leave no room for interpretation as: "hey, you're black, let me throw some money at you cause you happen to be black."
That's what she called out very specifically.
The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other reasons that her husbands email would get responses but hers wouldn't.
We do know, however, that African Americans are greatly under represented in tech, in startups and in VC. There are many interlocking reasons for this, and its not unreasonable to expect that racism, whether conscious or unconscious, is one of them. (Why should tech, uniquely in American society, be immune from racism?). Because there are so many interlocking reasons, it's easy for each individual link in the chain of tech to deflect blame to the other links (business can blame the pipeline, colleges can blame the high schools, high schools can blame the financial structures etc etc etc).
So, is it reasonable to expect individual VCs to make a stand against racism instead of doing what comes naturally to them? (trying desperately to make money). Not really!
However, I do think it's reasonable to expect, that VC's who make big pronouncements about what their firm is going to do to combat racism should be expected to follow through with it! And guess what, given all the interlocking problems that prevent black people from founding companies, VC's probably aren't going to be able to follow through on that mission by relying on business as usual of warm intros only, five minute pitch reviews, blow off emails.
Just level with us. We are all adults. Just say, I'm not actually that interested in explicitly helping black founders, I just want to keep trying to make money the way I've been doing it. Conversely, if you do give juicy quotes to the press, then be prepared to walk the walk.
But I completely agree with you about the hypocrisy of asking for emails from black founders and then ignoring them.
And also agree that requiring a warm intro as the only way to reach a VC is a real barrier. It may be a good test (“Can you hustle enough to reach me”), but is objectively harder if you’re not in a certain set.
There can obviously be bias issues at the accelerator level too, so I'm not saying it's a solution, but you can be sure that someone will at least take a look at your application.
The reality is that the chance a VC responds to a cold outbound email is already near 0. I get these in my LinkedIn inbox almost all the time and they are very rarely good because the founders with great companies are not going out of their way to cold email people. I doubt that most of the VCs she's talking about spent enough time to even realize it was a WoC.
> none of the VCs I contacted even tried downloading my app (I use Intercom daily to see all the new users trying our app). They dismissed its worth without even giving it a shot.
Fair, but I just had a look at the app store - this had two reviews since late January (when about ninety-five 5* reviews were posted over a few days), and neither were positive.
Additionally, a cursory search for personal trainer apps will turn up dozens of well-rated alternatives. Putting myself in the mind of a VC, I would be hard-pressed to invest or advise the founder of such a company.
Would love to learn more about why the VCs wouldn’t respond to her emails, though - seems like another failure to meet the commitment.
Supposedly the same content, same info. Just the sender was different.
Unless of course you think she's not being entirely truthful.
When it comes to early-stage investment and company building, the sender is a huge part of the contents of the message.
I think it’s shameful that VCs make empty promises to support black founders - but it’s also not surprising. Most of the people paying lip service to racial equity now didn’t give a shit six weeks ago before it was fashionable to do so. But empty promises are par for the course as they’ve been for decades. My experience living in Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered is that the same people suddenly promising to fix the problem are the ones who created it.
VCs only want to make money. The author raised insufficient evidence that she was a victim of racism. If any unfair discrimination occurred it’s more likely sexism. But the simplest explanation is also the most likely: the VCs just weren’t interested in her pitch.
Why not? Not even 5-10 minutes of their day? I guess all the noise coming out of VCs the last few weeks is all just virtue signaling and hot air.
> Curiously, when I used my husband’s email to send our pitch, that’s when I started getting some responses. Do VCs only read pitches submitted by men? Do they prefer to hear from someone who is Asian rather than Black?
I’ve seen numerous other founders here on HN handle rejection with more humility and constructive resolve. I don’t think the author is doing herself - or her husband - any favors with this kind of response.
This is an industry that cares a lot about not generating controversy. VCs got hit hard by Me Too- Lightspeed, Kleiner, Binary, Sherpa, 500 Startups, and others all imploded or let people go due to allegations of sexism.
It's a Partner based business where, in general, they rarely hire a new senior Partner and cut them in on the carry. Investing in black founders and hiring minority junior VCs ends up being the easiest way to brand themselves as racially equitable.
- Talking to investors is a waste of time in the beginning. It's much better to focus on getting into an accelerator first.
- Never talk to one investor at a time. That gives them all the leverage. It's better to schedule many meetings with many different investors all in a one or two week period.
- Timing is everything. Don't talk to investors before you're ready to even if they say it's "just a casual coffee". They are looking for reasons to rule you out. Try to only talk to investors at inflection points where a graph of some important metric is going steeply up and to the right.
- Move on quickly. Unless an investor is obviously enthusiastic by the end of the first pitch, they are highly, highly unlikely to invest. Don't waste time answering their questions or getting their "feedback" or giving them additional meetings if they seem skeptical. Just move on to the next one.
- Don't ask for introductions from investors who turned you down. These are actually anti-endorsements that significantly decrease your chances with the investors you get introduced to this way.
One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a former Google engineer, and she doesn't mention having any similar experience. It wouldn't be surprising if a VC's vetting process involved checking linkedin to see what experience the person had, and giving points to former FAANG engineers (note: I am not in this category).
Regardless, it's still pretty lousy that VCs that claim to want to help certain types of founders don't even respond to inbound inquiries.
You’re absolutely correct that if her email shows up as Zhang, that makes her email bias claim much weaker.
See the problem here?
Companies can't be doing plenty if they say 'we will help this imbalance' and then don't.
- Her linkedin doesn't show what her major was as an undergrad.
- After 4 years of working she was a powerlifting coach.
- Then boom, in 2017/2018 she is an owner of two gyms and in 2019 she is trying to get benchmark to invest in her app.
Her Husband:
Google Engineer
Masters in CS from Berkeley / Undergrad in CS
Started companies and managed employees.
15 years experience - 40 apps developed. Top 10 apps
Multiple successful exists (to zynga then another one to google).
Talking about being successful as a gym owner etc she says folks can assume its because black folks were helped out.
"They assume it’s because they’re somehow lucky or exceptional or that they gained success because of help from white people. This—of course—isn’t true, but it’s an idea that continues to spread, sending the message that Black professionals require help from white people to build their careers."
"We need to put an end to the lie that Black people are still in need of white folks’ help,” she continues. “What we need is the freedom to live, work, and act without white people and white institutions disproportionately targeting us and stopping us from building the success we are already capable of building on our own."
So it's a bit of a confusing set of messages.
Got it. Someone else needs to actually "venture" and take a risk. You'll just sit back and tweet about how you'd love to help, but your LPs say it's too risky.
VCs arguably are taking less risk. Now sometimes it stuff like capital domination (I think super stupid)
They like seeing what you've done yourself. You've built x / y / z - delivered this and that - great. This can be big if you don't have an exit yet.
Or proof in pudding - good traction already, good pitch deck etc.
etc.
It's not clear what she's done herself. Even her gym ownership success is complicated by potential involvement of her husband even though she goes to some lengths to say it's racist to assume the ownership was result of some help.
And her philosophy is that she doesn't want help from white folks, just for them to get out of the way. Then she's applying to benchmark vs Harlem capital? Its confusing.
Would like to give this guy some truth serum and see what his honest opinion of the app was and if it should have been funded.
I raised a $2M seed for Smartcar. I had no college degree as I had dropped out. I had no prior work experience. I had no team. The product was still an early prototype.
MANY of the founders I know who've also raised similar sized rounds from top VCs have stories quite like mine.
It is frustrating that happens all over the place. Even YC - if I had a penny for every male founder that got into YC without an idea or just a new idea and then if that penny was taken away for every female founder who had a product that was doing well, well, I would be in real debt!
As someone who also took time off (and built apps) from college, the fact that I'd built some apps (that got write-ups) was a big positive for my early career, even if just prototypes. But I was at a top education org before taking time off so I'd already proven I could get into a reasonable place.
No need to disclose, but your and my story tends to work if you (and or others on team) got into a place like an Ivy or a UC or top liberal arts, majoring in CS or engineering, then dropped out (aka were into the entrepreneurial space)
I think it works a lot less well with an undisclosed and possibly non-tech background.
If you had a path like hers then I am very impressed, your deck or prototype must have been compelling. But very often there are some other proof points (top school acceptance / cs majors etc). That is almost silicon valley cliche at this point.
An awesome scenario would be if someone focused on black led businesses in terms of VC and made a killing.
This is what Tim O'Reilly was talking about funding:
2. If the dynamic she describes existed her whole life wouldn’t it make sense that she has had a harder time building the LinkedIn profile and credentials her husband did? Not to take away from his accomplishment, he clearly worked hard and is talented, but one can’t take advantage of opportunities if they are not available by systematic design whether implicit or intentional.
Yup. She isn't wrong, but her argument is poorly framed.
The author is rightfully frustrated. But instead of focussing on lack of interest in their app, maybe there's a bigger opportunity here.
Backstage Capital (https://backstagecapital.com/)
1. You’re focussing on a much smaller subset of the market. It may be hard to find enough investments
2. It is probably illegal.
3. You may not get the best VC’s. The best VC’s will focus on total return and probably fund from a wide pool to find rare outliers that may grow huge. So founders may have worse VC experiences. VC includes mentorship, network etc, so this could hamper startup success.
4. You may also not get the best African American startups. The very best will be able to get attention from the top VC firms. So, there will be an adverse selection problem for any VC specializing in African American startups
#2 is probably the main reason no one has tried. But #3 and #4 in combination are also deadly.
But, if discrimination is a factor in startup funding, there would certainly be a market opportunity for VC’s to focus more attention on underserved groups.
Edit: Another poster points out backstage capital is doing this. So, maybe it doesn’t violate any laws? I’ll be very interested to see how their returns are over time. They fund women and people of color. They may well have hit on a market opportunity.
Found this article when I searched Backstage capital on HN. They’re a startup too it seems: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/founders-arent-giving-up-on...
In addition to diversity, he also selected different types of businesses. More medium size, not the rocketships.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/26/tim-oreilly-makes-a-persua...
Can anyone confirm this? When I follow the links, I get to this source:
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
That bar chart doesn't say anything to me about inter-demographic data. It looks confined to each demographic; i.e. women earn more degrees than men within each demographic, but that doesn't say anything about Black women vs. White men vs. Hispanic men vs. White women
e.g. we see that for academic year 2015-2016, whites earned 65% of bachelor's degrees and blacks earned 11%. The estimate of the US population for 2019 [note, 2019 is not 2015] currently visible in Wikipedia says that whites are 60.4% of the population and blacks are 13.4%.
Throwing in another assumption, we'll just say that of whites and blacks, each group is exactly half male and half female.
Thus, in our population of 60400 whites and 13400 blacks, with 20,000 degrees earned between them:
- The whites earned 17,105 degrees.
- The blacks earned 2,895 degrees.
- Of the black degrees, 1,853 went to black women, and 1,042 went to black men.
- Of the white degrees, 9,579 went to white women, and 7,526 went to white men.
- There are 30200 white men, 30200 white women, 6700 black men, and 6700 black women.
- The rate of earning a bachelor's degree is 31.7% [note: we made this number up. It is useful only for comparing to the other three groups] for white women, 24.9% for white men, 27.7% for black women, and 15.6% for black men. White women are noticeably more educated than black women are.
The original claim lumped in associate degrees along with bachelor's degrees. This might make that claim true. However, it would be hard to blame someone for viewing an associate degree as a negative rather than a positive signal.
(Final note: population share of the United States is not the same thing as population share of those of college age in the United States.)
In the context of wrong stage/check size, Alfred's response was reasonable.
She needs to understand how VCs are evaluating her business, what metrics and data she needs to show, and what types of businesses are even a match for the VC model.
Ha's post covers much of that. And having been in VC, the fact Ha even spent time giving advice is more than 90% of cold reachouts to VC can expect with a Google resume or not.
VCs write these 101 posts because they want founders to know when it's time to come to them and how to present the info. That's very much what she makes it seem she needed.
There is a hidden asterisk: *as long as you are ex-FAANG doing a SAAS startup, in a competitive round. SWM? Hidden bonus bingo!
I think it is more interesting to discuss how all of the investor assumptions, ideas, pipelines, and teams, all are informed. And there isn't enough being done to deconstruct that. For example, what does it mean to say 'too early' to an under-represented founder? who is the comparison to? How many of your last X investments or team members came from Stanford or ex-FAANG?
Maybe YC can take the lead here? @mwseibel?
* Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access.
* Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick.
If VCs want to claim to put effort into supporting black founders, then they should follow through on that with their actions. They had committed to meeting and helping black founders. Ignoring emails and generic responses is in no way helping. They could have still said no and been more accommodating as they claimed they would do.
It may make sense for the activists to apply pressure on the limited partners (many of these being institutions with some social / public angle, such as pension funds, university endowments or sovereign and municipal funds) to demand higher diversity of founders from the venture funds they invest in.
Some large-scale investors have a history of adopting a social or environmental based elements in their investment strategy (for example, Norway's SWF divesting from coal and oil companies) - probably similar moves (but aimed at equal opportunities for all backgrounds) can be demanded from major US based asset management institutions - I don't see why, just to take an example, Harvard's board of trustees can't agree to that - even if that change is not directly aimed at generating the highest return on investment, it may be the right move from the longer term societal development perspective and for the university's brand value.
On this thread, a female founder made the top comment with a personal experience relating to the article, only to get inundated by comments telling her she was wrong (from one commenter in particular). Similar reactions were found to the article itself. Yet someone's lived experience is just that; it's their perspective on their own, true personal experience. Calling perspective "untrue" right off the bat is like a form of internet gaslighting; it stifles open dialogue.
If we want have good conversations online--something that's incredibly hard to do, yes--we need to give space to the people who share their experiences. I'm disheartened because I look to Hacker News for open commentary on issues and problems in the tech industry, and it's sad to see that dialogue overrun with people who just want to tell others they're wrong. If it takes locking a thread to improve the overall conversation, and get back a sense of "psychological safety" needed for those good conversations--so be it.
On a related note, as an Indian, I'm envious of what China is doing today - they realized pretty early that the Western world order would never have a place for China as equals. Hence, they began to develop viable alternatives to Western technology and institutions. Those efforts are beginning to bear fruit today. The borderline insanity and paranoia that the West has developed [3] about China is justification enough for those efforts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiE(https://en.wikipedia.org/w... [2] [https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Top VCs reject thousands of pitches every year, you are one. Black or white does not matter, deal with it.
What has mattered has also shifted. Uber's ride hailing solution was a revolution, of sorts, but it was an incrementalist one. The breakthrough that led to the production of synthetic insulin was a transformative one. Uber isn't a sustainable business. Genentech is still alive and kicking.
The personality types that are chosen for to create a business where the only metric of "innovation" is growth and genentech are different. In one, Steve Woz is a viable co-founder. In the other, he simply isn't, and is filtered out actively and implicitly.
There is discrimination in Venture Capital, that much is clear. But this issue makes it far worse. As it creates an ineffable bar that is vague and entirely defined in the VC's head. It is easier to answer the question if someone is a genius. Because genius is genius no matter the gender identity or race. A scientific or technological breakthrough is a breakthrough. No matter the origin. But the ability to "blitzkrieg" a business? Who knows.
When the only metric for success is rapid growth, and the only way for rapid growth to be predicted is for it to happen, it creates a murky set of rubrics and metrics where the number of bad companies by white/asian, cis-male founders who went to Stanford outnumber the number of great ones by people who don't qualify for those checkmarks.
The new system delivers sub-par returns and it is obvious that an alternative is needed. Despite great work being done by people like 1517 fund, Sam Altman's new firm, YC, Founder's Fund, Lux Capital etc, the industry isn't actively seeking out people with potential breakthroughs. It is creating artificial barriers to their success. Personally, the most significant sign that something is wrong with the ecosystem is that a potential breakthrough in phenotypic screening of pharmaceutical molecules wasn't sought out https://www.daphnia-labs.com , but the "Uber for X" by Template Stanford Founder Y will be.
It is also apparent that an alternate financing system is needed for companies that aren't technologically innovative, such as Nerissa's but aren't quite small businesses either. Companies that do fall under the "high-growth potential" label, while lacking the other qualities.
The blurring between VC, traditional PE, and small business banking have led to sub-par outcomes for all involved.
Parent assumes "we should do what is best for the common good"
Your reply assumes "we should do whatever best protects individual liberties"
But anyway, it does not change the fact that it’s not public money, it’s money belonging to someone and that someone trusted VC to make decisions be motivated by capital gain not by social justice and fairness.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I never realized these racism studies were done using such different resumes. This is a bit shocking if so.
You have a multi-exit google engineer vs a trainer?
She doesn't share her deck?
A quick look - did she buy reviews (the block of 5 star reviews)?
I have a lot more to say but HN doesn't really welcome my point of view, so...
You're certainly not a pariah on HN. But would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebaity comments? You've done it a lot, and those comments usually get downvoted, which is a correct use of downvotes. Your point of view is as welcome as anyone else's, if you'd express it more substantively.
Could you please share more details on sites getting banned? I did a quick glance of the site in question, doesn't see much to get banned.
Thanks
In this case it's hard to say because 2013 was a long time ago. It might have been because someone was oversubmitting or trying to promote the site on HN. That's another reason why we might ban a site.
This site looks like an online magazine focused on the SF Bay Area. When I look at the submissions I see a penchant for sensational titles and a lot of articles that aren't on topic for HN, but also a few articles that would make good HN submissions, except possibly for the titles. Two examples of good ones:
https://thebolditalic.com/the-remarkable-story-of-the-golden...
https://thebolditalic.com/how-tech-is-deciding-who-gets-to-g... (good article, bad title)
For that category of site, we generally don't ban the domain, but rather downweight it to countervail the sensationalism. I'll switch this one over.
If the system were more meritocratic, the demographics of people being funded would more closely match the demographics of the world. But it's actually a game of personal connections, theater, and psychological manipulation that has little relation to competence in most business domains.
I think VC (and financial) culture in general is totally broken and far from meritocratic, unless you feel that getting good at the wealthy-capitalist-image-of-success-signaling metagame is a measure of some kind of merit.