The Defiant Ones: Navigating VC and Culture
I recently watched the HBO documentary The Defiant Ones. It told a very true and relevant story that paralleled my life during the Hip Hop era of the late 90s and early 2000s. Hip hop is a trillion dollar economy that was born out of struggle, grit, creativity, determination, and innovation. The formative years I spent working in music and music publishing shaped the way I would later frame my life’s work around the tech and innovation space. Back then, I never thought it was possible that I would end up working with underrepresented startup communities in the U.S. and Africa. I now realize that my perspective has always been through the lens of innovation and supporting meaningful change.
Hip-Hop, and my father, inspired me to take the leap and build The Robinson Plus Consulting Group to champion women and people of color-founded startups globally, in order to create more access to investment, insights, programs and business development support. Since moving into early stage startup investment and advocacy work in 2010, I have been experiencing and processing what’s been happening as it relates to abuses in power, investments, and the evolution of industries dominated by men, especially now, in the tech world. I discovered that my early days in music, and my current role in “startup-land”, had strong parallels; much of it speaks to the deep pain and dysfunction of executives in music, media and technology as a whole. I keep trying to solve for, how can I inspire change in these systems from within?
Hip Hop and International Relations
As a teenager and young adult, I lived in the West Village, the main hub for the 90s Hip Hop generation, and worked for various urban magazines, record labels and artist management companies in NYC and LA from the mid 90s into the mid 2000’s. In my mid 20s, I decided to pivot from the Hip Hop music industry, mostly because of the misogyny, violence and unethical behavior that I saw and experienced on a daily basis (what Allen Hughes and Dr. Dre depicted in The Defiant Ones was real). At one point I thought to myself, if I continue to work in this environment, it will change me in destructive ways, and that would be a sad and unwise plan. I had to decide at that time who I wanted to be in my adulthood, what my values and non-negotiables would be, and how I would follow an uncharted path to attain my life goals.
So in 2005, I left a management position in the media and entertainment space in LA and moved back to NYC, where I accepted a full time position at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I had a degree in International Relations and thought I would become a diplomat- I was still curious as to how institutions built and retained power over generations. The philanthropic and political lifescycle was similar to that of the music industry, and now the tech industry- there was a wave of ideation, creation, hard work, and then the innovators and creatives who rose out of the main group went on to build static empires that remain a challenge to bypass. I saw another similarity in the politcal sphere- there were mechanisms put in place to exclude some of the most promising ideas and systems that would promote equitable community building. I thought it was really odd that groups would plan for limiting the success of others…conceptually and practically, it just didn’t make sense to me.
Dad + Pivoting to Startups
Right around that time, the iPhone landed on our doorsteps in 2007, and it caused me to pause. I felt a deep, tectonic shift was happening, and I saw the wave in the distance that was gaining momentum around the globe. As an entrepreneur, it became clear to me that my life’s purpose was to support tech entreperenuers and innovators in building profitable companies, and to connect them to resources, both financial and non-financial.
As background, I had an innate love for entrepreneurship and technology at an early age, because of my father. Dr. Bennett Robinson, a first generation college graduate, who received his PhD in Physics from Stanford University the year I was born — he built a test lab at Stanford, and later at IBM, to create environments for superconductivity in computers at very low temperatures. Dad was orphaned at 7 in Harlem, and later figured out how to get himself from New York City to California and eventually into Stanford in the 70s as one of the first black physicists. He was smart and determined, and he knew that education was his ticket out of poverty. He was a man that knew how to “play the game” — for him, it was Palo Alto, California, which would be his gateway to the world he wanted to create.
With my father’s encouragement, I went to a middle school called Computech in California, where I learned early programming. I moved back to NYC with my father in the early 90s, as he was getting ready to leave his position at IBM to start a technology company in Southeast Asia. Both my father and I were mesmerized with the potential of technology. He was obsessed.
The African Startup Landscape- Then and Now
Once I began focusing on entrepreneurial ecosystems in 2009, I started consulting for major foundations on tech and innovation engagement strategies, and engaged networks of thousands of tech entreprenuers for Ashoka’s digital platform, Changemakers. Then, in 2012, I was offered a position to run a technology lab and early stage venture fund with the State Department and The World Bank to drive new tech and innovation initiatives throughout East, West and Southern Africa. It felt like a dream come true.
While running Appfrica, we surveyed over 100 incubators and accelerators, which now serve as the backbone of the tech and innovation space across the African continent. There are now over 300 incubators and accelerators across Sub-Saharn Africa — and the ones we launched and/or partnered with, including Hive Colab, iHub, and CC Hub, are still the most active and influential. We also co-founded the DemoAfrica conference in 2012, which was the first tech conference on the continent focused on startups and investment. As the Managing Director of the Appfrica fund and ED of Appfrica labs until 2015, I was responsible for catalyzing access to investment and networks across Africa. We were sector agnostic and invested in everything from agriculture, e-commerce, and enterprise software to health tech platforms. Many of those early investments are still thriving today. As much as the African startup community is a core focus of our business from an ecosystem and investment perspective, I know that there’s still a lot of work to do in the West in order to create a fair and balanced environment where capital and knowledge can flow from the continent back to the U.S. and the rest of the world.
What’s come to light in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem in the last year around unethical VCs, predatory behavior around female founders and women of color, the Google Memo, and the push back against diversity and inclusion has served as a wake up call to many of us in the tech and innovation space. It’s also served as a market signal to savvy investors that things are shifting and that the old models no longer work. Pretty much every woman I know has received unwanted and unsolicited sexual advances. I also know honest, dedicated men that are willing to take a stand for what’s right and champion women and underrepresented groups. Cohorts of allies are forming. We are not alone.
Data: U.S. Female Founders + Female Founders of Color
From a data perspective, there’s a lot of information showing that female founders of all colors receive somewhere between 2–4% of VC funding in the U.S.; INC.’s Editor-at-Large, Kimberly Weisul speaks to 2.7% to be exact, and shares some of the ways women are supporting female startups to grow. FORTUNE’s Valentina Zarya outlines how venture capitalists invested $58.2 billion in companies with all-male founders in 2016, while, women received just $1.46 billion in VC money last year.
When we drill down even more, women of color receive a fraction of this small investment into women- black female founders have received approximately .2% of ALL Venture Capital since 2016. Wired’s article, appropriately titled It’s Embarrassing How Few Black Female Founders Get Funded, shares insights from Project DIANE, founded by Kathryn Finney, articulating that there are less than 20 African-American female founders that have raised more than $1 million dollars. The average amount raised is $36,000….in all of the United States of America.
Accountability
So where do we go from here? I think we have everything we need to make change. I believe that social media will continue to root out and expose those in the ecosystem that are engaging in unacceptable and predatory behavior. It’s not enough to simply complain about any of this. Lasting change will require a mix of innovation, determination, and agitation from within and without. It’s now a trend that perverts and aggressors will be put on display, shamed and humiliated, publicly. And that needs to continue as a clear consequence of unethical actions.
Studies have shown that some of this bad behaviour is passed down through generations through DNA markers (epigenetics), and it requires deep healing. It’s no longer enough to say “I don’t know” — we can all find support if we seek it. We owe it to ourselves, our families, and our “ecosystem” to think about our behaviors and how they may impact others. The next generation requires us to be more thoughtful if they are to have a chance at a fulfilling life in this digital age.
My father taught me how to look for the ways to navigate tight corners, and as a result, I have a knack making complex problems look easier. After years of supporting entreprenuers and technologists, I decided it was time to transition to CEO and start a women-led consulting company that focuses on building and connecting ecosystems of excellence across technology, media and the arts through innovation, investments and knowledge. I founded the Robinson (+) Consulting Group because I decided it was time to make larger impact on innovation and investment ecosystems globally, starting with Africa and the U.S., because we’re at such a critical stage in terms of work, ethical practices, and inclusion, globally. We need to pivot quickly.
Building New Models
If we talk strategy and what change could look like, companies and investors that want to be on the leading edge of high growth investment opportunities can easily allocate 20–40% of their investment capital to supporting women and women of color over the next 5–7 years. Simple. Our team has over 10 years of experience in this space — we know the strategies and proven ideas to help investor develop a more inclusive pipeline. Large tech companies partner with firms like ours to showcase female founders and founders of color, as well as integrating diversity and inclusion training and insights into their culture, community and products. This is what creates a vibrant community of developers, founders and managers globally, and ultimately drives growth.
We need to be brave and lead with a growth mindset, versus a fixed one. It’s in our collective best interest to support more women, respectfully. We need to invest more into the largest under-leveraged global markets- women, Africa, the African Diaspora. We can build deep trust by investing, hiring, and enabling high value, under-resourced startups, grow. There’s enough for all. And we all deserve the support.
If you don’t invest now, naturally, groups outside of the American ‘boy’s clubs’ will find ways to capture the value and circumnavigate the current systems of exclusion. That means the ones that try to ride the wave later will have much higher costs to pay. We’d much rather work together, now. Either way, the tides are turning.
Women are now the Defiant Ones of startups. We catalyze growth, and we’re getting smarter and less afraid by the minute. Align with us, and we all win.
