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Lessons from a Diverse Venture Capital Portfolio

Submitted by admin on Mon, 2019/02/18 - 12:54pm

Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the pre-seed and seed stage VC fund I run in NYC, has invested in 64 companies in the last six and a half years.

Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder.

Fifteen had co-founders over 40.

Five have LGBTQ+ founders.

Three teams have African-American founders.

Three of the founding teams are married couples.

All were backed based on the sole criteria that they had the potential to make my limited partners a lot of money. The diversity is the direct result of our mission—to build the most accessible venture capital fund in NY. I don’t require warm intros. I will back a wide variety of types of companies—everything from The Wing to Imagen.

Surrounding yourself with diverse teams means being exposed to a lot of different perspectives and creates learning opportunities not possible when everyone you deal with professionally looks and acts like you do.

Here are just a few things I’ve been exposed to that I think if you’re not surrounding yourself with diversity in your professional world, that you’re missing out on:

  1. There is a difference between intention and effect—and if I care about others, effect is what should count. Just because you didn’t intend for something to get taken a certain way doesn’t mean the conversation stops there. People are different—and your conversational and language norms, particularly when you are in a privileged group, aren’t the “norm”. Anyone who doesn’t want to hear how their words and actions were received lacks empathy.

  2. My individual interactions are part of a series of lived experiences for others. I was reminded of this from one of my founders of non-white descent. He mentioned what it felt like to have someone ask you where you were from. The person asking experiences it once, but when it happens everyday across multiple people, it’s a pattern making the receiver feel like an outsider and an other. This happens in lots of other situations. It brought to mind industry interactions that lacked clarity in their intent. I know I had previously given very little thought to the emotional drain it causes when conversations turn social all the time for women in the industry—when one-off asks or comments form a constant stream of experiences to be on guard against. When you back women and you’re trying to encourage the expansion of their network and the building of their personal brand, you cannot help but review all of your own actions after listening to the compounding emotional effects of their professional experiences.

  3. Different groups communicate differently—and it’s important to find objective common ground around language, goals, and risks. If everyone gets measured based on one set of shared norms around pitching, professional reviews, and updates—the language of straight white men—you’re going to wind up with a lot of mismeasurement of what’s actually happening and likely to happen in these companies. Groups that lack privilege tend to be more measured in their commentary—because they are subject to more scrutiny. When you conflate hyperbole for ambition and realism for lack of aggressiveness, you will ultimately wind up shutting out a lot of groups from the game of risk seeking capital and opportunity.

  4. Trust is the first thing you have to establish in every professional relationship for it to be successful. When groups are homogeneous, trust is often assumed. When you look, talk and act alike, you can assume others are on the same page. You feel like these people will have your back—and this is a form of privilege when the group dominates your industry. As an investor, it’s easy to come into a board meeting asking probing questions, demanding information, and sharing your opinion without first having built up a base of trust. That comes from a shared understanding of why you’re there, your goals and objectives, and understanding how a founder thinks you can be most helpful to their company.

  5. There is strength and support in numbers. When you can introduce diverse founders to a diverse network of professionals, it makes their professional experience orders of magnitude better. Everyone needs peers, mentors, and champions and it’s helpful when those people come from a shared perspective. Creating this community doesn’t only mean backing diverse founders, but also surrounding yourself with a community of other diverse professionals to help your portfolio.

I feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by a diverse community of founders, in the most diverse tech and startup city in the world. It allows me to learn more, be better, and checks my comfort level and privilege in unexpected, but positive ways.

Read Complete Article Monday, February 18, 2019