Seeding Innovation

4Venture Capital's Biases

“People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

—Cynt Marshall, CEO, Dallas Mavericks

IT TAKES A lot of courage to drive change. It's a character trait that I admire deeply and why I was excited to learn about the work of the Fearless Fund.

According to the Fearless Fund website,

We know that companies with a female founder perform 63% better on average than all-male founding teams (according to First Round Capital, 2015). Despite a greater potential to produce higher returns, women are historically underfunded, particularly women of color.

In 2018, U.S. companies raised a total of $130 billion in venture capital funding, yet only 2.2% of that total went toward female-founded companies and less than % of total funding was allocated toward businesses founded by women of color (Girlboss, 2019). It's only gotten worse.

Fearless Fund was established to address the gap that exists in venture capital funding for women of color (WOC)-led businesses and to finally push the needle on the abysmal statistics that drive the current narrative for WOC-led businesses today.

For someone operating from an outdated paradigm, this may feel like a threat, a challenge to the rules that they know, the rules that worked for them. They're not going to recognize the paradigm blindness and market shifts happening here, and some will push back, which is exactly what is happening to the Fearless Fund as I write this.

According Alexandra Olson (2023 ...