FWD: 2017 Letter From Founder (Me🙋🏻)
Hey!
Here’s a little bit about how we got started, what we’re working on, and what’s next as of September 2017.
For Women & Diversity (FWD) Collective was founded in 2016. We started as VentureFWD with the goal of breaking down barriers in seeking investment capital for women, people of color, and underrepresented communities. As we turned the corner into 2017 we expanded nationally to San Francisco and connected our mission of professional inclusion across state lines.
A few incredible things that happened at our first two events:
- Desmond Clark (Former Chicago Bear) shared with us his ‘6 Principles of Winning’ and won himself by connecting with Manuel Amezcua at FWD. From there they began their journey of creating One Life Advisory.
- Genevieve Thiers met Ellie Bahrmasel and started the RISE Movement, now known as New Founders.
- Jotaka Eaddy of LendUp dove into the intersection of Tech & Politics on stage in SF. She resonated with our mission so much so that she has partnered with us to help expand the event, community, and mission to D.C. in 2018.
- We connected with over 1/2 million people digitally through our live broadcasts, interviews, and amazing partnership with Entrepreneur.
- Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon preached about the most underrated secret to success…effective communication and left us with our most tweeted quote while we were trending, “it’s ok to have a knock-off bag, but don’t be a knock-off person.”
- AND Shaherose Charania shared that within the company’s on Republic’s platform “80% of successfully funded founders are female.”
We started to see the bigger picture.
With those amazing nuggets and a few staggering statistics in mind:
- There are fewer Fortune 500 CEOs who are women (4.1%) than who are named David (4.5%) or John (5.3%)
- 41% of managers say they are “too busy” to implement diversity initiatives
- 83% of venture-backed founders have a racial composition that is entirely Caucasian
- Only 5% of all Fortune 500 companies have African American CEOs
We worked our way through 2017 and realized that although diversity and inclusion in the investment space are critical, we have a lot of work to do to in terms of overall professional inclusion first, and with that we expanded to the FWD Collective. FWD Collective is a community and platform dedicated to professional inclusion hosting summits internationally created by and for the ever-growing populations of diverse entrepreneurs. Our summits will continue to feature women, P.O.C., and underrepresented communities focusing on connecting emerging entrepreneurs with established executives and vice versa. Our discussions have expanded from a focus solely on venture capital to include business development, sharing your story, building teams, and beyond.
We know this is important for many reasons, but here are a few that continue to stand out:
- Ethnically diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones by 35%
- Teams where men and women are equal earn 41% more revenue
- Companies reporting highest levels of racial diversity in their organizations bring in nearly 15 times more sales revenue than those with lowest levels of racial diversity
We’d love for you to join us and be part of our community, conversation, and collective.
With gratitude,
Michael Donnelly
Founder, FWD Collective
