by Tiffany Chu and Dan Getelman, two of the co-founders of Remix

At Remix, we’re helping cities more effectively serve their residents. One of the most challenging things about public transit and local government is that it’s designed to serve everybody — you can’t pick and choose who you want to serve. Because of that, we believe it’s crucial that our team reflects the communities we serve. This only enhances the importance of building a diverse team.

After reading the recent diversity stats from large companies, we’ve been galvanized as a small team to start prioritizing this right now, rather than putting it off until later. We keep hearing from big players about how they can do better (e.g. Slack, Twitter, Facebook) — but we rarely hear from small companies, which is where much of the groundwork is laid. We’re writing this to share how we’ve done so far, what works, and what doesn’t work.

Where We Are Today

Right now, Remix is 10 people. We are six men and four women. Using categories identified by our team (as opposed to those set by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), here’s our race/ethnicity breakdown:

While our team as a whole might look more diverse than many other startups, it’s not enough. In particular, we’d love to have an even gender balance, and we need more diversity on the engineering team in every sense.

What’s Worked: The Foundation

Our founding team (Dan, Sam, Tiffany and Danny, from left to right)

Here’s what’s worked so far and why:

Diverse founding team: We met as fellows at Code for America, a nonprofit dedicated to helping local government innovate with better technology. Diversity is an enormous part of CfA’s culture, and we benefited hugely from it as fellows. Now, when we meet regularly as founders, diversity is one of the only topics that comes up every time on our agenda. It’s self-perpetuating: Having a diverse team (or not having a diverse team) is self-perpetuating. Research has shown that teams with senior female technical talent are much more likely to employ more women in technical positions later on, for example. Having a diverse founding team at least puts us at a more advantageous starting point. Diversity of networks: Nearly everyone we’ve hired so far have been referrals from team members, which is not uncommon for young companies. Our diverse foundation is reflected in our networks, and has allowed us to pull from a broader pool of potential candidates than we otherwise would.

What Hasn’t Worked: Hiring a Diverse Set of Engineers

It’s commonly accepted that hiring software engineers in the Bay Area is hard, particularly if you’re hiring senior talent. This echoes our experience. We’ve found it particularly challenging so far to hire a diverse set of engineers. We don’t have a clear solution to this yet, but wanted to share a few of the specific challenges we’ve seen:

Most of our hires have come from referrals. For our engineering roles, this has largely meant a pipeline of referrals that looks a lot like the engineering teams of most large tech companies. We want to do better than that. A second challenge specific to smaller teams is that we’re dealing with small sample sizes. As a small, relatively unknown company, we don’t always have the most robust pipeline, and this can lead to tough situations. We deeply need to prioritize diversity. But what’s the right way to do that when it’s difficult to find anyone for a role critical to our survival?

Going forward

Obviously, there’s no single, easy solution to building as diverse a team as we’d like. It’s hard work. We’ve seen it’s important to make sure you are doing concrete things, and not just thinking about it. That said, here’s 3 things we’re trying in the short-term:

Investing founder time and resources into outreach: mostly targeted towards under-represented groups in tech. We’re trying to figure out events and organizations that make sense attend, actively participate in, or support. Hiremorewomenintech.com and Meetup.com have been good places to start. Recruiting exercises with the entire team: We’ll block off an hour on the team’s calendar every couple of months for a “Recruiting Party” — designated time to look through everyone’s networks and keep hiring top-of-mind. We recently used StrongIntro with the whole team to try to build a bigger set of potential referrals. We’re hoping starting from a bigger set than just people who are top of mind will also lead to a more diverse set of people. Kicking the tires on a ton of recruiting tools: We’ve been trying to use a number of different recruiting tools to increase the number of potential candidates we see, including Hired, WhiteTruffle, AngelList, TripleByte, and StrongIntro. We’ve also used Textio to review our job descriptions for bias. We also found a great list of tools that can be used to help companies improve diversity, many of which we have not tried yet.

What should you do?

Are you a founder or early employee at a small startup? We’d encourage you to start thinking about diversity early — and acting on it. For example, if you don’t have a diverse founding team, come up with a concrete plan for how you’ll seek your first employees that will attract a diverse set of candidates. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it’s both the right thing to do, and will give you a strong foundation to build your great company on.

Love cities and want to make them better? We’re hiring across the board at http://getremix.com/jobs.

Thanks to Catherine Bracy, Vanessa Slavich, Tracy Chou, and Sam Hashemi for reading early drafts of this.