Why I Won’t Sacrifice Diversity for Venture Capital

Thy name is Faust

As my company has started to pull down the pre-launch curtains, we have found ourselves confronted with a predicament that I never expected. People in Silicon Valley want to give you their money, and for a large percentage of them, I don’t want to take it.

I’m twenty-three years old, I’m white, I’m from a small town in New England, and I’m fortunate enough to be fairly well-educated. Right now, our team is 70% white and 17% female. It doesn’t take much to recognize that these numbers don’t reflect the demographic United States, let alone planet Earth.

If you’ve read anything from me before, you’ll know that I think companies operate a lot like countries. My goal isn’t to be a middling startup company, but to be like the UK, Singapore, Germany, the USA. Unsurprisingly, all of these have more or less an even 50–50 gender breakdown. To shed the metaphor, I want us to lead, to be a body of creatives, and to cultivate the most important of all things:

Diversity of Mind

In my view, there is only one way to create Organic Diversity of Mind:

Plant the seeds when growth is most rapid.

Herein lies the problem with some, but not all Venture Capital funds. It’s not that they reject Diversity of Mind, but that they ignore it. To ignore this integral variable is to limit the potential of organizational success — and that’s something I am not willing to compromise.

It might be beneficial here to think of Affirmative Action as “Artificial Diversity of Mind,” created in the later stage. Unfortunately, this has proven to be a far more difficult and complex endeavor. So, given the gift of hindsight, I want to build a company that doesn’t make this same mistake. Sure, it will make my life a bit tougher today, but if we start valuing thought diversity from the first dollar in, life will be a hell-of-a-lot better at the millionth.