Sometimes we treat diversity as icing on a cake - a nice to have if the overall cake is ready.” Sarah Kunst of Cleo Capital points to the ways in which investors’ biases is in fact limiting their returns,“Diversity isn’t a side conversation in tech, it’s integral to growing value for founders, employees, customers and investors. “If it's a woman or a person of color, the investor is more likely to ask, ‘how could you possibly know anything about machine learning?’” says Terri Hanson Mead, angel investor and author of Piloting Your Life.

Unfortunately, investors have observed biases from their peers when it comes to diverse founders, especially if they are building a high-tech company. Vidya Dinamani, Co-Founder at Ad Astra Ventures Vidya Dinamaniĭinamani continues, “This way you can go into an investment meeting and say, ‘I'm building a diverse team because this is the team that's going to build the right product.’ - that’s the team that's going to take off.” The CEO is not a technologist but she has a deep understanding of AI - that is a trend I am seeing.”Īt the Women’s Venture Summit, Mah’s Ad Astra Co-founder, Vidya Dinamani, spoke to the specific value diverse founders bring to the emerging technology startup ecosystem. “I had a huge interest in Vivid Genomics because there is a robustness of an AI platform. Mah is an AI investor herself, one example investment being female-founded Vivid Genomics. The investors then heard a new set of entrepreneurs and both sides (entrepreneur and investor) said they actually asked different questions after recognizing their own bias.”ĭr. “After the first simulation with female entrepreneurs, we introduced our framework of nine ways to combat that unconscious bias as an investor. “Most of the investors at the event were women and even women ourselves have bias.” Mah and the Stella Labs team spoke to this issue of promotion versus prevention.

Audience at 2019 Women's Venture Summit Stella Labsĭuring the investor education segment of the summit, Dr.

Piloting Your Life by Terri Hanson Mead