
Why do you think black female founders receive basically no VC funding? - bwent
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;13&#x2F;its-true-black-female-founders-receive-basically-zero-venture-capital&#x2F;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;its-embarrassing-how-few-black-female-founders-get-funded&#x2F;<p>As a black female founder I&#x27;m wondering if pursuing VC is worth the effort.<p>Do you think there are any easily identifiable reasons why the numbers are so low, or are these numbers actually proportional?
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Etheryte
I think the TechCrunch article is misleading at best, both in title and
content. The report they link to studied ~60.000 startups, of which 88
(~0.14%) were black women led. According to the article, 0.2% of all venture
deals from 2012 to 2014 went to black female founders. The numbers seem
proportionate to me, or am I missing something here? There simply aren't many
black female founders.

~~~
michaelflux
Came here to say exactly that. Not only is it proportional, but if anything is
a sliver above average. The argument that TC is trying to make is on par with
the people who advocate for workplace diversity and go on to say about how 50%
of the hires should be black - without recognising that the black population
makes up only about 13.5% in US, at which point what you're doing is
discriminating against everyone else just to fill arbitrary quotas not
grounded in real world statistics.

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blakdawg
Rather than thinking about things you can't realistically change (sex/race), I
would think about other things - e.g., is your company the sort of thing that
VC's want to fund? And, do you really want VC?

If your business is VC-friendly, and you want to go on the VC ride, then yes,
you should go for it. Even if you don't get funded, or even if funding doesn't
go the way you want it to, you will learn a lot of interesting stuff and make
a lot of good connections. I went through the VC cycle 2x in the first dot-com
boom and learned a tremendous amount from it. (Including a lot of skepticism
about whether or not VC is a good path for founders - it is absolutely _not_
the only good path.)

This article does a reasonable job of helping identify which companies might
be VC-compatible and which aren't:

[https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-rise-of-non-vc-
compat...](https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-rise-of-non-vc-compatible-
saas-companies-47054f1f3b29)

~~~
bwent
Thank you.

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michaelflux
I think the issue stems from how this is reported. Too much focus on race and
gender and not enough focus on the real world. These articles focus 100% on
the racial politics rather than on why a VC would invest in a company in the
first place.

Even saying "the typical startup, typically founded by a white male, that
typically fails." ... The reality is, upwards of 80% of all companies, not
just startups, fail within the first year of operation, it's not a black vs
white, male vs female issue. It's simply a combination of questions about the
quality of the founders, the quality of the product, the quality of their
marketing, the overall environment and a hundred other factors.

"... examined over 60,000 startups and identified just 88 led by black
women... " and then go on to complain about how little money was raised from
VCs without mentioning that 99.95% of all startups period, regardless of who
is in charge, gets no VC funding
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2013/07/22/why-99-95-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2013/07/22/why-99-95-of-
entrepreneurs-should-stop-wasting-time-seeking-venture-capital/)

So to answer your question, first replace the "as a black female founder" with
just "as a founder ...". Focus on your product 100%, focus on improving it,
focus on your users. That is the only thing you should be focusing on. And
only after you have a good product vision (or ideally an already built
product, even if just an MVP), only after you're seeing promising growth or at
least plenty of interest in your key demographics, can you start thinking
about VCs.

If I was to invest in any company, the only things I would look at is their
numbers, their vision, and their skillsets. Ultimately the race, gender,
orientation or any other such things, would never come into the equation.

I am curious, anything you could share about your business? Anything we could
read?

Cheers

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Torwald
It's very simple. There are not many black female founders. Hence, not many
black female founders get funding.

For example, compare it with the number of female polish founders who get
funding. It's even lower!

~~~
bwent
Are the numbers not relatively significant at all?

~~~
Torwald
If at all they mean that black women receive comparatively speaking a lot
funding - if we can trust the numbers in the TC article.

But there are also a lot of factors left out. For example, geographic factors,
how many startups receive funding in Poland?

~~~
gamechangr
I agree - Torwald. Well done! Few people actually even compare percentages -
they prefer the absolute number (88).

I'm good at math, not everybody is.

If you looked at it mathematically, this subset (black female co founders) are
actually very well funded.

It's funny that a high funding rate is paired with an article that is trying
to use the percentage value for exactly the opposite position. Who ever writes
this junk needs to take a statistics class ASAP.

Question: "As a black female founder I'm wondering if pursuing VC is worth the
effort."

Answer: Absolutely. The numbers don't appear on first glance, but they are
actually on your side!!

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19eightyfour
I think sexism and racism play a part. I'm a white man and I wouldn't wish to
swap that with any other race or sex because my experience tells me that other
races and sexes face more obstacles, are taken less seriously. Which means
they have to put on more work to get the same results.

I don't think that means I owe anybody anything because of who I am, nor that
I need to feel guilty anyway. But I would try to get beyond my own
internalized biases when interacting with people.

From what I can sense about being other race or sex, if I were, I wouldn't
want to apply for funding since I'd assume the game was rigged, mostly. I'd
just try to go my own way. But that just me.

After applying to YC and funding a few times and failing, that's pretty much
what I'm doing anyway.

If anyone is having trouble sensing the barriers of race and sex, you could
try asking yourself, would I want to be another race and sex from what I am,
to asses your own biases, and perceptions. That's what I did to realize I
wouldn't want to swap it.

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wayn3
Assuming that black founders have less of a shot at raising money and women
have less of a shot at making money, then it would be obvious that black women
have even less of a shot at raising money. Mathematically speaking.

I'm not sure whether that bias actually exists, but lets assume that it does.

What this means is really just that you can't be Juicero. Do you want to be
Juicero? Being biased against by VC only works against you if you want to be
part of the VC lunacy. If you build a real company with actual value, your
race won't matter. Maybe a little bit. Maybe even a lot. Maybe you don't get
the inflated price some companies get, but raising money is not a competition.
You just want to raise the money that you need, not top the Series A olympics.

If you don't view raising money as a competition, you will be fine. You are
not a statistic. People make the mistake of viewing themselves as the outcome
of a statistic. Statistics don't work that way. If one of those articles says
that "only .4% of funded companies have black female founders", that does not
imply that "of all the black female founders who apply, only .4% get funded".
It just means that there are not many black female founders with VC funding.
Could have any number of reasons.

Maybe one of those reasons is that black women have a hard time even getting
into a position in life where they would consider trying to raise money. That
is a big political and socioeconomic problem, but it is not YOUR problem. Just
because there are not many of X, doesn't mean its hard for you to be X. Could
be really easy. Do not get discouraged by statistics.

If you build a company that is worth investing in, someone will see it.

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csa
A few comments:

\- To answer your question directly, if the numbers in the article are
accurate, black women were disproportionately more funded per black female
founder. The overall numbers are very low (i.e., relatively few black female
founders overall), so I personally wouldn't draw any conclusions from this
data since it is too easy to skew.

\- Getting funding in general is hard. If a black female founder doesn't get
funding, it probably has more to do with their idea or team than with anything
else. Said another way, the same idea with founders of different race/sex will
only very rarely change the outcome.

\- Is it with the effort to pursue VC funding period (irrespective of being a
black female)? Most ideas that people have simply don't scale to levels that
will be interesting to VCs. Additionally, even if the idea has the potential
to scale, it has to scale in the right way (i.e., on a VC timeline).

\- I'm curious about why you believe anything in TC or Wired. They are in the
business of selling clicks, and most businesses like this are quick and dirty
with numbers and/or conclusions. I would weight these about zero in my
decision about whether to pursue VC funding or not.

\- Social capital goes a long way in VC funding. While there are certainly
some people who will exclude because of a founder's blackness or womanness,
there are many others who won't. I suggest getting close to some VC-funded
founders somehow (social hack this). Private conversations with these folks
will get you much more valuable and actionable information than a TC article
or a post on HN.

\- HN's (and Stripe's) own patio11 makes a point of being willing to meet
young entrepreneurs to talk about these types of matters. This guy has well-
informed opinions. Even if you disagree with some of his conclusions, you will
at least have some great information to act on. Searching for patio11 and
kalzumeus will point to a way to reach him.

\- I suggest reading all of Paul Graham's essays. Short summary for founders:
talk to your customers and iterate your product.

\- I also suggest you read Michael O'Church's essays about VC culture on the
way back machine. Sometimes they come off as being a bit shrill, but those
essays provide a lot of valuable (and imho often accurate) insights about the
dysfunction of certain parts of VC culture.

I hope this helps.

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auganov
Don't give up. The general rule is that traction trumps everything. Even if
there's vicious discrimination at the pre-traction stage, you can still
totally make it.

