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The post Building diverse product teams: Why it matters and how to achieve it appeared first on Mind the Product.
Threading the needle: 5 questions with investor Lauren Maillian
For the past five years, Lauren Maillian was tasked with asking hard questions. Questions like: How much venture funding goes to Black women and Latina founders?
As CEO of the non-profit Digitalundivided, she oversaw the organization’s biannual reports known as ProjectDianne, which tracked the progress of underrepresented women founders in the startup ecosystem.
She led teams that examined biases in decision-making, studied economic inequality, and the manifold ways in which sociology interacts with venture capital. Having such data has been monumental, as it provided hard facts to show the discrimination that such founders face.
In her role, she struck partnerships with JPMorgan, AMEX, AWS and Nasdaq while quadrupling the non-profit’s revenue, finding ways to make more money to conduct more research.
“We were able to leverage the power of data and drive change and advocacy in a unique way,” she told TechCrunch+, adding that she believes Black women and Latina founders are the future of innovation and technology.
“I’ve been the Black woman founder, I’ve been underestimated. I’ve been second-guessed. I’ve been to all those places. I know what it’s like to be doubted, and I know what it’s like to feel as though you really need a third-party data point to point to that’s not just yourself.”
Before Digitalundivided, Maillian was a founder and one of the first Black women to start an early-stage venture firm. As an angel investor today, she has backed Partake Foods, the online community Diem, and the rug company Ruggable. For nearly two decades, her career has been intertwined with culture and innovation.
She says she was into investing before it was a “buzzword.”
“I’ve always loved to study and invest in brands,” she says. “I’ve looked up and amassed a $5 billion market cap with my personal investment portfolio.”
This January, Maillian stepped down from her role at Digitalundivided and decided to invest in herself. She says she has never taken a break in her long career, not even as she dealt with being a single mother. But even in the midst of this breather, Maillian is mapping out what’s next.
I caught up with Maillian recently to talk about power in the industry, the changing landscape for Black women and Latinas, and what her next act will be.
(This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.)
TC: After five years at Digitalundivided and 20 years in the industry, when did you know it was time to finally move on and start your own thing?
Lauren Maillian: I was working 70-plus hours a week and I knew that I needed to take a step back. I accomplished more than I ever thought I would in this role. I didn’t know exactly what I was coming into and I wanted to see if my approach to social impact, social change, investing, economic development, and narrative change was possible.
Looking back, I think I exceeded my expectations and I’m proud of what I see in the ecosystem happening for all the founders I served while I was there. But I also know that there are so many other ways for me to continue serving and collaborating with the ecosystem.
Threading the needle: 5 questions with investor Lauren Maillian by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
SUNDAY REWIND: The F words of highly successful product organisations by Saielle DaSilva
In this #mtpcon London 2022 keynote, Saielle DaSilva, Global VP of Design at StepStone and former Director of User Experience at Cazoo, explains through five f-words how we can add value, achieve alignment and make better decisions while creating a more inclusive and caring culture. Feelings Product managers deal with people every day. The mistake they Read more »
The post SUNDAY REWIND: The F words of highly successful product organisations by Saielle DaSilva appeared first on Mind the Product.
For female VCs bias is a branding issue
Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist, likes that her venture firm, Graham & Walker, sounds like an old, stodgy law firm. But apart from the name, there’s nothing really stodgy about it: Her fund exclusively invests in female- and nonbinary-founded startups.
It’s a relatively new name for her firm, which was originally called Female Founders Alliance. Feinzaig rebranded in 2021 in an effort to attract a more diverse set of founders and check-writers into her portfolio.
“The number one risk that we fall into is inadvertently stamping our own portfolio with a diversity signal,” she said. “And I mean that in the negative context of the word: We want our founders to stand on their own for being amazing founders. So what do we need to do? We need to become a super, high-signal VC.” In her view, that meant departing from a name that made her firm sound like it was making “diversity investments” and finding a name that didn’t include gender as a brand.
Now, she said, when she enters a room, “It’s very different to be Leslie, the CEO of Female Founder Alliance, than Leslie, managing director of Graham & Walker. Nobody questions it; it sounds like it belongs.”
That said, the investor still found a way to insert the mission into the name: Katharine Graham was the first female Fortune 500 CEO, and Madam C. J. Walker was the first female self-made millionaire.
The goal of being a VC is to generate returns for limited partners, and there’s an understanding that a diverse startup ecosystem will lead to better outcomes for all. Balancing those two, for female VCs, has often manifested in different, often frustrating ways.
A new generation of female venture capitalists is ditching institutional firms to start their own or steadily rising through leadership ranks. According to a survey analyzed by TC+, the share of women represented in director and principal positions has significantly increased over the past two years, while the percentage of women in higher-level positions, such as managing general partner or senior managing director, stands below 25% and has for the past two years. The ranks are diversifying. Slowly.
To put it simply: More women in venture means that bias and strategic branding are increasingly relevant for a larger fraction of check-writers.
For female VCs bias is a branding issue by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch
VCs and founders are finding life easy in the Big Easy
The good times are starting to roll in the New Orleans startup ecosystem.
TechCrunch spoke to local founders and investors for a vibe check: How is the city emerging as a tech hub? A flood of both founders and capital is entering the market; that, coupled with tax and business incentives to keep them there, makes NOLA an attractive place to start a business.
The city minted its first unicorn in 2021 when software company Lucid sold for $1.1 billion to Swedish tech firm Cint Group. That same year, Shutterstock acquired the animation studio TurboSquid for $75 million, and Procore Technologies acquired NOLA-based software construction company Levelset for $500 million.
Of course, there are a few issues NOLA must overcome for it to be a true tech hub, founders and VCs told TechCrunch: There’s a lack of technical talent, making it hard to find local people to hire. And although money has been flowing in, the city needs more capital to keep up.
VCs and founders are finding life easy in the Big Easy by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Who’s afraid of diversity quotas?
Fashion: a sector known for influencing trends, creatives and perhaps the future of equity for Black entrepreneurs.
Last week was the second Fifteen Percent Pledge gala, hosted by the nonprofit of the same name, to honor Black entrepreneurship and the organization’s efforts to increase equity in the fashion industry.
The nonprofit stems from a callout that designer Aurora James posted in 2020, urging retailers to stock at least 15% of their shelves with items from Black-owned businesses. (This number isn’t arbitrary; Black people make up about 15% of the U.S. population.) That callout turned into a pledge, then into a nonprofit working with 29 retailers — including Yelp, Rent the Runway, Sephora and Nordstrom — that claims to have shifted over $10 billion worth of opportunities to the Black community since its launch three years ago.
The pledge has boosted opportunities for Black entrepreneurs. The foundation itself launched a Google-sponsored marketplace. At the gala, it gave out more than $250,000 worth of grants to Black businesses, a life-changing sum for many. The average Black business begins with around $35,000, compared to around $100,000 for the average white founder. Their efforts in venture capital are equally as harrowing, and most of their businesses do not survive the startup stage.
“I’m also a descendant of people who were enslaved in this country. A program like that might be the closest thing I’ll see to reparations in my lifetime.” Mec Zilla, founder
Who’s afraid of diversity quotas? by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Women-founded AI startups see a boost in VC funding
Funding to U.S.-based AI companies with at least one woman founder has steadily increased over the past few years, according to Crunchbase data.
Last year, such companies raised $3.61 billion out of the $23.5 billion allocated in total to U.S. AI startups, or around 15.38%. That is a steady year-over-year increase. In 2021, for example, AI companies with at least one woman founder raised 13.2% of all capital raised in the sector. In 2020, that was 11.6%, and 11.5% in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. This is exciting.
Usually, in times of a venture pullback, women and people of color are negatively affected as investors retreat to the traditional networks they deem safe. Keep in mind that it’s possible that this data is slightly inflated because it counts all companies with at least one woman founder; usually, all-women teams raise much, much less than mixed-gender teams, giving way to the narrative that the presence of a man always adds — or, in this case, sustains — the value of a woman.
Women-founded AI startups see a boost in VC funding by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
AI is the next frontier — but for whom?
A few weeks ago, a founder told me it took three hours of endless clicking to find an AI-generated portrait of a Black woman. It reminded me, in some ways, of a speech I saw three years ago when Yasmin Green, the then-director of research and development for Jigsaw, spoke about how human bias seeps into the programming of AI. Her talk and this founder, miles away and years apart, are two pieces of the same puzzle.
Discussions about diversity are more important than ever as AI enters a new golden era. Every new technology that appears seems to be accompanied by some harrowing consequence. So far, AI has contributed to racist job recruiting tactics and slower home approval rates for Black people. Self-driving cars have trouble detecting dark skin, making Black people more likely to be hit by them; in one instance, robots identified Black men as being criminals 9% more than they did white men, which would be put under a new light if judicial systems ever begin adopting AI.
“As AI pervades society, it is critical for developers and corporations to be good stewards of this technology but also hold fellow technologists accountable for these unethical use cases.” Isoken Igbinedion, co-founder, Parfait
AI ethics is often a separate conversation from AI building, but they should be one and the same. Bias is dangerous, especially as AI continues to spread into everyday life. For centuries, doctors once judged Black people on criteria now deemed racist, with one prevalent belief being that such people experienced less pain. Today, algorithms discriminate against Black people; one study from 2019 found that an algorithm used by U.S. hospitals “was less likely to refer Black people than white people who were equally sick to programs that aim to improve care for patients with complex medical needs.”
Right now, bias appears in various AI subsectors, ranging from investment to hiring to data and product execution, and each instance of bias props up others. Eghosa Omoigui, the founder of EchoVC Partners, told TechCrunch that though AI can be “incredibly powerful,” society is still far from “flawless” artificial intelligence.
“This means that the likelihood of AI bias in outcomes remains high because of the excessive dependencies on the sources, weights and biases of training data,” he said. “Diverse teams will prioritize the exquisite understanding and sensitivity necessary to deliver global impact.”
Omoigui’s brother, Nosa, the founder of ESG compliance regulator Weave.AI, reiterated that point. Many of these models are black boxes, and creators have no particular insights into the inner workings of how a prediction or recommendation is achieved, he said. Compared to Wall Street, AI is practically unregulated, and as the level of governance fails to match its growth, it risks going rogue. The EU proposed steps to reduce and account for bias in AI-powered products, with some pushback, though the proposition itself puts it slightly ahead of where the U.S. is now.
In fact, Eghosa said many investors don’t care or think about diversity at all within AI and that there is a groupthink mentality when it comes to machine-led capabilities. He recalled the reactions investors gave him when he helped lead an investment round for the software company KOSA AI, which monitors AI for bias and risks.
“Quite a few investors that we spoke to about the opportunity felt very strongly that AI bias wasn’t a thing or that a ‘woke product’ wouldn’t have product-market fit, which is surprising, to say the least,” Eghosa said.
AI is the next frontier — but for whom? by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch
Product profile: Talking about women in STEM with Ketaki Vaidya
As the new year begins, it’s a time for self-reflection and improvement both in your career and personal life. In this Product Profile, we speak with Ketaki Vaidya, Product Manager, at technology platform Oracle to discuss working in tech as a woman, and initiatives are being introduced to address inequality. [...] Read more »
The post Product profile: Talking about women in STEM with Ketaki Vaidya appeared first on Mind the Product.
All Raise CEO steps down again
Less than a year after assuming the role, All Raise CEO Mandela SH Dixon has stepped down from her position at the nonprofit. The entrepreneur, who previously ran Founder Gym, an online training center for underrepresented founders, said in a blog post that the decision was made after she realized “being in the field working directly with entrepreneurs everyday” is her passion. Dixon said that she will be exploring new opportunities in alignment with that.
Her resignation is effective starting February 1st, 2023. She will remain an advisor to the Bay Area-based nonprofit.
This is the second chief executive to leave All Raise since it was first founded in 2017. In 2021, Pam Kostka resigned as the helm of the nonprofit to rejoin the startup world as well; Kostka is now an operator in residence and limited partner at Operator Collective, according to her LinkedIn. With Dixon gone, Paige Hendrix Buckner, who joined the outfit as chief of staff nine months ago, will step in as interim CEO. In the same blog post, Buckner wrote that “Mandela leaves All Raise in a strong position, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to continue the hard work of diversifying the VC backed ecosystem.”
Dixon did not immediately respond to comment on the record. It is unclear if All Raise is immediately kicking off a permanent CEO search.
The nonprofit has historically defined its goals in two ways: first, it wants to increase the amount of seed funding that goes to female founders from 11% to 23% by 2030, and, second, it wants to double the percentage of female decision-makers at U.S. firms by 2028.
In previous interviews, Dixon said that the company will work on creating explicit goals around what impact it wants to have for historically overlooked individuals. The data underscores the challenge ahead. Black and LatinX women receive disproportionately less venture capital money than white women; non-binary founders can also face higher hurdles when seeking funding, as All Raise board member Aileen Lee noted in the blog post. The nonprofit has created specific programs for Black and Latinx founders but has not disclosed a specific goal for the cohort yet. These disconnects can be lost if not tracked. All Raise’s last impact report was published in 2020 and they’re working on bringing that analysis back, Lee tells TechCrunch in an interview.
“All Raise is in great hands with Paige as interim leader and we’ve got a lot of exciting things that we’re shaping and scaling,” Lee said. “We have to all continue to link arms to try and continue to make improvements for our industry…we’ve made good progress that we can’t let up.”
Since launch, the nonprofit has raised $11 million in funding, and opened regional chapters in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC and, soon, Miami.
All Raise CEO steps down again by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch