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Updated February 11, 2023My research on the ethics of venture capital (VC) began in the fall of 2017. I started interviewing venture capital investors, first in Europe and then all over the world between Silicon Valley, New York, London, Berlin, Nairobi, Lima, Tokyo, and Paris. Over the past five years, during my post-doctoral research at Cambridge, I’ve spoken to more than 300 partners in venture capital funds across stages, geographies, and asset classes. Before I began this research, VC was a place to earn some money on the side for me; I started as a “student temp worker” for a corporate VC fund when I moved to London. Over the years, I have supported and consulted a number of VC investors in areas as varied as reporting, fundraising, and as a deal-flow generating “venture partner.”
At first, my interest in VC was abstract: I wanted to use my contacts to shed some light on what venture capitalists do, who they are, and why it matters. It seemed to me not enough scrutiny has been on these “kingmakers” of big tech. By 2019 I had already spoken to almost 100 VCs, but it wasn’t until I arrived in Silicon Valley that summer that my eyes were opened to the issue at the core of this book: the absurd lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in VC and the related homogeneity across the tech industry.
During my first conversations in Silicon Valley, I always asked about what problems people thought the industry was facing at the time; the biggest issue people pointed out to me (apart from already skyrocketing valuations) was DEI. I went back to my own sample of interviews. I was stunned: out of my first 100 or so interviews, five were with female VCs, and even fewer were with people of color. I had also met most of the VCs through “elite networks,” as my university and industry contacts provided warm introductions (referrals or endorsements). That was the time when I started to explicitly reach out, first to female VCs, and increasingly to a wider set of investors who weren’t either male or white or elite-educated. It was also then when I first started writing about my findings.
When I arrived back in the UK later in 2019, I was curious to compare the European ecosystem to Silicon Valley. I reached out to and asked for introductions to DEI champions. That’s how I met some of the people featured in this book, like Maren Bannon of January Ventures; Sophia Bendz, who is now at Cherry Ventures, but at the time was the first female partner at Atomico; and Check Warner, founder of Diversity VC and GP at Ada Ventures. One interview I’d scheduled was with Erika Brodnock, the founder of a company called Kami (and before that Karisma Kidz), to learn from her about intersectionality and racial disparity in the UK tech ecosystem. We connected immediately over the issues, straight away got to write our first piece together for Sifted. I was absolutely taken by Erika’s experiences—having raised five children, started two companies, and just embarked on the complicated journey of a PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE)—and had found my match to start working on this book.
And it was an absolutely necessary match, obviously: I am a white, privileged man with ten years at one of the best universities in the world under my belt. Unlike in many other contexts where “expertise” comes with the privilege to speak, in this particular case you might think: why listen to me on questions of gender, racial, and all kinds of other social justice and equality? What do I know about diversity, equity, and inclusion? The good news is that you won’t have to listen to my voice for too much of this volume. Not only does my co-author Erika Brodnock have all the experiences I am missing (more on that next), this book is first and foremost a book of interviews, the collection of an almost two-year long journey through the worlds of venture capital and tech between the US and EU. My privilege helped us to go on this journey—to get into many rooms, to listen, to ask questions, and to distill what we heard. I hope the result helps you, the reader, gain valuable perspectives and participate in positive change.
My background is incredibly different from Johannes’s; some might say it’s the polar opposite. I am a Black female, born and raised in Streatham Vale, South London. I was educated in comprehensive schools and, despite being advanced a year in secondary school for being gifted and talented, I stopped education at A-Levels due to circumstances. I went to university for the first time in 2017 to study for an EMBA at the University of Surrey. Having graduated within the top percentile of my class, I wrote my PhD proposal for the development and deployment of algorithms that would enable an analysis of the allocation of capital by the UK’s venture capital ecosystem as pertaining to the perceived gender, ethnicity, and educational background of venture-backed founders. I was offered places at several leading universities and eventually decided to read at the LSE, where I was awarded a fully funded studentship and have been privileged to work with Professor Grace Lordan in the Inclusion Initiative, and am supported by leading figures who are committed to creating tangible change in the venture capital and private equity industries.
Over the last decade, I have been able to co-create two for-profit enterprises as well as two non-profit organizations—one of those is Extend Ventures, where I am co-founder and head of research, alongside the incredible co-founders Tom Adeyoola, Patricia Hamzahee, and Kekeli Anthony. Our research outputs, including the Diversity Beyond Gender report, have succeeded in illuminating many of the stark disparities in access to funding, in ways that have not previously been possible. As a result, we have been able to partner with Atomico, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, JP Morgan, and Innovate UK to support the global analysis of capital allocation to diverse founders. This research has been credited with being a catalyst for many new funds receiving funding that is specifically for diverse entrepreneurs.
Prior to Diversity Beyond Gender being released, I had not been able to raise capital for my entrepreneurial endeavors. Even in 2019 and early 2020, when my co-founders at Extend Ventures included an exited entrepreneur, an investment stalwart, and a Bain consultant with degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia, while I was at the LSE, as an all-Black team, we needed to bootstrap the first research piece to “de-risk” our proposition. Going back further to 2015 and 2016 when I sought Series A investment for my first company, Karisma Kidz, it was similarly impossible to raise money.