I’ve made over 100 investments in my career and nearly half of those went into diverse teams.
I’ll be the first to back up the notion that diverse founders have just as much ambition, drive, intellectual horsepower, creativity—you name it—than anyone else. In fact, you could make the argument that, because of their lack of advantages in other areas, the ones who make it to a venture pitch actually have more of these raw ingredients because they’ve had to in order to make it to the same destination as their straight white male counterparts.
There is, however, an advantage that some founders have over others that I hate to admit exists—but one that I would very much like to solve for.