Marlon C. Nichols First this is a great article and I believe very deeply in the mission that you and Troy are spear-heading. Change has to be at every level of the process, from the LPs, VCs, the Entrepreneurs and the talent. Your involvement is pivotal to this success.
My only thought/feedback is when you say “In order for this program to be successful, the candidates must have stellar accomplishments”. How we define ‘stellar’ plays a huge role in creating diversity and inclusion.
Myself as an example, I taught myself C++(a programming language) when I was 12 years, in college I worked at IBM and decided I hated big companies and loved the flexibility and mobility of start-ups. With my technical skills, I’ve not only built out enterprise solutions on my own, I’ve pushed my capabilities into sales and marketing pushing one of my previous start-ups into 70k in users and 200+ clients single handily. A successful programmer, sales and marketer in one but because my preferences, on paper I’m not considered stellar.
My point is that there are many individuals out there who have stellar abilities and done amazing things, but we are overlooked because we may not have any desire to go to Stanford nor work at Google, we have no privilege, and sometimes we are actively blocked from opportunities & resources.
My questions to the start-up ecosystem are:
- How do you define pedigree to be more inclusive and take into account different backgrounds and biases?
- How do you create a pipeline to find these individuals?
- How can these individuals be supported with resources to succeed, both with and without capital?
