Diversity in our cap table

Some quick stats I pulled from our cap table:

  • 50% of our fund partners, 22% of our angels, & 33% of our total investors are women
  • 67% of our total investors, our fund partners and our angels are POC
  • 82% of our total investment value are associated to women partners, 92% are to POC

I’m proud of this breakdown given, only a meager 9% of women own the total value of equity (note: would be curious to find the POC stat!)

The special difference in our cap table from the norm could mean a couple things:

  1. Investors who I happened to talk to and committed early were women, who intro’ed me to their strong network of women & so on.
    • Anecdotally, I will also say that some of my THE most helpful investors in the fundraising process, who actually kept to their word and promptly helped out were women.
  2. Bias to fund like for like. Many combos at play:
    • Men are more likely to fund men (less women [of color]). A term I learned is called “homophily” via this article studying VC’s “Me Too” moment.
    • Women are more likely to fund women
    • Non-POC are less likely to fund non-POC
    • POC are more likely to fund POC. Etc…

      • (Btw if not clear, I identify as a woman and person of color.)

  3. Actively searching for women/POC investors. Eliminating this as I was not actively doing this for our fundraise.
  4. Talked to a higher proportion of women investors. Nope. The number is actually 15%. In general, there are many more (white) men who are investors and as with (3) I wasn’t actively searching for a certain persona so consequently a smaller pipeline %.
  5. Our space, product & hypotheses are women-oriented. Nope.

I can’t properly conclude that 1 or 2 or both or others are actual reasons. There’s only so much I can statistically test given such a small sample size.

But I also can’t deny there was implicit bias at play.

I can’t deny our experiences is likely only a small peak into the sorry state of bias & lack of diversity in tech as a whole.

I can’t deny the question: If I were a white male who pitched the exact same thing: Would I have gotten such a diverse, well distributed & fantastic cap table like we did?

Probably not. 😊