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VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

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Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#31

Post by dhosek »

xibalba wrote: post #15

The author of this article cites as evidence of racism higher response to her husband's solicitations of VCs than her own. However, comparing their resumés, its pretty easy to see that this is unlikely to be attributable to racism. Husband has founded multiple start-ups that were acquired, is technical, and worked at Google and YouTube. Meanwhile, the author has personal trainer and gym owner as experience.

The VCs said that they want to fund more black-founded startups. But, if we assume you are correct about why they responded to the queries from the husband's e-mail, that means that they'll consider a proposal from someone with startup experience while rejecting that same proposal from someone without startup experience. Which, given that they've not been funding black people, means they're going to continue not funding black people, which means that their claim to want to fund more black-founded startups is just words and not actions.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#32

Post by hckr_news »

henriquez wrote: post #28

It seems like the author could search and replace “racism” with “sexism” and put out an otherwise similar article based on her experience having to use her husband’s LinkedIn rolodex to reach these people. 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…

> 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.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#33

Post by oh_sigh »

gnicholas wrote: post #19

Seems like the most compelling evidence of racially-disparate treatment is that she got no responses when reaching out via her own email address, but received some responses when reaching out via her husband's (he is an Asian-American man with a recognizably Asian name). Assuming the emails sent were identical, this would be pretty solid evidence of bias. One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a forme…

Her name is "Nerissa Zhang" - unless they are looking through for profile pictures of her or something, wouldn't they assume she is Asian as well? At least for me, "Nerissa" is a name of unknown origin, maybe Greek. Zhang is clearly Chinese. I would assume the person was Chinese or at least 50% Chinese if I was forced to guess about their race/ethnicity.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#34

Post by adam »

xibalba wrote: post #15

The author of this article cites as evidence of racism higher response to her husband's solicitations of VCs than her own. However, comparing their resumés, its pretty easy to see that this is unlikely to be attributable to racism. Husband has founded multiple start-ups that were acquired, is technical, and worked at Google and YouTube. Meanwhile, the author has personal trainer and gym owner as experience.

I think the larger point the author was trying to make was don't give lip service to specifically going out of your way to try and help Black founders if you're still going to use the exact same credentialing signals you always do: track record where someone has worked, name brand of their school, etc.

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.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#35

Post by oh_sigh »

An insidious effect of racism is that one can explain any negative interaction through that lens if one is inclined. Based on her post, I don't actually see racism, I see someone with a stronger background and more bona fides being more successful at pitching than someone with less of those things. In most other situations, HN commenters would be saying something like 'anecdotes are not data'. I think it's hard to draw large scale conclusions of a 'different reality' from this.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#36

Post by huffmsa »

graeme wrote: post #8

This post would be a lot more persuasive with the pitch deck, or some growth numbers, or something indicating the app is in fact on a success track and is the type of app that is potentially VC scale. 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 o…

Traction etc don't matter to the point she's making.

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.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#37

Post by huffmsa »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #25
phnofive wrote: post #21

I think the argument here is suffering as the business is questionable, though I wholeheartedly agree that pointing a founder to a blog post and pretending that counts as mentorship is bullshit. > 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…

As far as why VCs wouldn't respond to emails, from my brief time working at a VC firm I think the logic was either 1) We don't want to start a conversation and give them false hope and 2) Not replying makes it seem like we're too busy and important to respond to everyone (and also there was some thought process of we don't owe anyone anything in the same way the average person doesn't feel obligated to respond to spa…

But they responded to her husband, but not her.

Supposedly the same content, same info. Just the sender was different.

Unless of course you think she's not being entirely truthful.

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#38

Post by sib »

huffmsa wrote: post #36
graeme wrote: post #8

This post would be a lot more persuasive with the pitch deck, or some growth numbers, or something indicating the app is in fact on a success track and is the type of app that is potentially VC scale. 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 o…

Traction etc don't matter to the point she's making. 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.

Except that her experiment changed three variables: her husband is male and Asian and an ex-Google engineer, while she is none of those. So it's not possible to draw the conclusion that the difference in response comes only from race.

(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.)

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#39

Post by huffmsa »

gnicholas wrote: post #19

Seems like the most compelling evidence of racially-disparate treatment is that she got no responses when reaching out via her own email address, but received some responses when reaching out via her husband's (he is an Asian-American man with a recognizably Asian name). Assuming the emails sent were identical, this would be pretty solid evidence of bias. One potential confounding issue is that her husband is a forme…

So they're vetting out black women because they haven't had the necessary experience, because hiring and funding is biased against them, particularly because they haven't had the necessary experience.

See the problem here?

Re: VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality

#40

Post by glitcher »

henriquez wrote: post #28

It seems like the author could search and replace “racism” with “sexism” and put out an otherwise similar article based on her experience having to use her husband’s LinkedIn rolodex to reach these people. 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…

The author seems clear to me that she is considering both racism and sexism.

> 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?

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