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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

#151

Post by PeterisP »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #54
hckr_news wrote: post #30

VCs shouldn’t be the gatekeepers to capital. The game is rigged. Who gets funding is decided by arbitrary metrics, inherent biases, and already established networks. Personally I’m planning on bootstrapping my own business and don’t plan on asking a VC for a hand.

If it's their private capital, why shouldn't they be their own gatekeepers?

It's not their private capital - most VCs are investing the funds of 'limited partners' such as pension funds, university endowments, etc. So in essence VCs are gatekeepers which make decisions regarding startups who will or wil not get access to someone else's money.

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

#152

Post by perseusmandate »

dlivingston wrote: post #48
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…

The US reviews are very peculiar: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bright-app/id1471800945?ls... 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 appli…

I was a customer at one of their gyms and the app was garbage. It frequently crashed and there were huge bugs with basic stuff like the dates I'd be billed for renewal being wrong. I didn't realize I was still subscribed and they charged me ~$250 for a month where I didn't even go in.

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

#153

Post by anticonformist »

anotherfounder wrote: post #120
anticonformist wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many white male founders have had the exact same story with VCs. 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 Iv…

This is where intersectionality comes in. Her experience is especially worse because she is Black woman AND because she doesn't have an Ivy league degree AND she doesn't have a FAANG experience. 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.

Her experience is the same. Zero funding is zero funding. Your experience cannot be worse than "received no money" when it comes to raising money. It is a binary outcome.

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.

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

#154

Post by rob2312 »

thereisnospork wrote: post #139
avilay wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder? 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.

> And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder? 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 e…

So, just leaving the issue unsolved for probably around 20 years or so and letting under-represented groups play catch-up.

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.

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

#155

Post by AMerePotato »

I'm not sure why this article is so controversial. Whether her app deserved funding or not wasn't what the main point of the article was. No one is saying they are obligated to fund a startup because a person is black.

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.

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

#156

Post by perseusmandate »

sonofaplum wrote: post #43

The nature of VC being what it is, it's extremely difficult to prove racism at the level of proof that most HN readers seem to need. 99.99% of all startup ideas are bad, 99.99% of all apps are terrible, so how can we know if she was rejected for being black, or for just being another supplicant denied by the VC gods? The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other…

I'm in VC and there are many reasons why I and my peers are not interested in yet another software product selling to gyms. They are extremely fragmented, hard to access, low ACV customers who are already well served by products like MindBody. I've seen a ton of marketplaces for personal trainers as well.

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.

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

#157

Post by BobbyJo »

rayiner wrote: post #104
BobbyJo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Google, and if racism is present in the hiring process, it's to the benefit of minorities. Google would (at least during my time there) jump through a lot of hoops give POCs and women on-site interviews, and the review process was scrubbed of racial information. Many employees took it upon themselves to avoid using gendered language in their reviews as well, to avoid that possibly playing a role. That bei…

So VCs pass the buck to Google, and Google passes the buck to universities. And universities presumably pass the buck to K-12 education, and the whole thing circles back to an abstract debate about “fixing the educational system” (which we have been trying to do for decades with zero results). Do you see why people are mad?

If you want to label 'not having much power or responsibility' as 'passing the buck' that's your prerogative, but poo colored glasses hide reality just as well as the rose colored kind. If they're striving to create equal opportunity for their employees, then Google is doing everything they have a responsibility to do in my book.

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

#158

Post by pluto9 »

anotherfounder wrote: post #105
nyczomg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"in the end they would invest only in the hottest SAAS startup by an ex-Googler." 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 h…

I can see that naming those who didn't even respond could be more appropriate. My takeaway is that you feel let down the most by those who have the most talk, hence higher expectations, which, it seems to me is the gist of the article.

Both strategies are inappropriate because they assume that anything less than funding her startup is an act of bigotry.

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.

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

#159

Post by perseusmandate »

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 reality is that VCs are genuinely inclined to fund black founders since their funds are overwhelmingly old white men.

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.

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

#160

Post by treis »

areoform wrote: post #106
anotherfounder wrote: post #75

I'm so glad she wrote this, and that she named names! 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…

I feel heartbroken seeing the responses to you and her. I'm a woman, but not a minority. I alter my writing style and my authorial voice every day to be less femme and more "neutral." And these exchanges confirm what I'd feared. 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…

>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?

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.

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