Brittany Davis on Becoming General Partner at Backstage Capital
Backstage Capital is excited to welcome Brittany Davis as General Partner alongside Christie Pitts and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton. Read about her journey to VC, work at Backstage, and how we can continue to increase investments for underrepresented founders.
Now more than ever we need diverse leadership in venture capital. I am excited to be promoted to General Partner at Backstage Capital, a team that has been a leader in investing in diverse founders for years.
My Path to VC
As a former founder, I personally experienced some of the challenges and systemic barriers that hold back underrepresented founders. This experience led me to a career in venture capital, with the goal of changing the status quo. I went to Harvard Business School to understand why there are not more successful entrepreneurs and tech leaders that look like me. But, I knew for a fact that there were plenty of women and people of color developing strong products and companies. I realized that if we continued with this status quo, we would go into the 2020s, 2030s, and beyond with the same disparity.
I ended up becoming an entrepreneur myself, and while I had some solid wins, I ultimately failed. I met so many fellow founders that struggled to access venture capital. Oftentimes, it was not because their business was lacking, but that they didn’t have access to the right person at the right fund to even get the opportunity to have a conversation about funding. Or even worse – it was clear that they didn’t fit the image of what a VC has decided is what will be successful. These investors were clearly pattern matching for the “Mark Zuckerberg” type, and looking for certain characteristics like their degrees, if they came from top schools or worked at top companies.
After experiencing this for too long, I realized that I had to change what was happening on the other side of the table. Having spent time in an incubator with my own startup and using my MBA network, I got to know a lot of founders and investors. So, I began connecting the dots for entrepreneurs, the friends and founders of color I knew. “Hey — here is a pitch competition you should go to…apply to this accelerator…here is an intro to a VC I know.” That put me on a path to working in VC, and I have been sourcing investments and supporting entrepreneurs ever since.
I began as an Associate at Techstars Boston, and then worked with Jamaica’s Minister of STEM and HBS VC Professor Josh Lerner to help build Startup Jamaica, a startup accelerator in Kingston, JA.
✨ And then I met Arlan in early 2016 at a roundtable event for Black women founders hosted by Carla Harris, and Stephanie Lampkin who started the group Visible Figures, a network for Black women in tech. I heard Arlan explain the fund she launched and I wasn’t sure how or when, but I knew I had to get involved in what she was building.
Following that event, I continued to build experience in early stage VC. I worked at Village Capital, as New Ventures Manager where I led the sourcing and evaluation of 2000+ seed-stage ventures in Fintech, Health, Energy, Education and Food/Agriculture. After that role, I had the opportunity to join #ANGELS, a group of some of the best women investors who invest as a collective. As a Principal at #ANGELS, I helped to source and analyze potential seed investment deals, and collaborated with the team on such initiatives as #theGapTable to address underrepresentation of women and minorities within tech startups and venture investing.
With all of these experiences, I learned how to find founders, make investments and build a solid process to do so.
Working at Backstage
In January 2018, Backstage Investment Partners Arlan and Christie reached out to me explaining that they were building a team to expand Backstage’s capacity to identify, evaluate and invest in underestimated entrepreneurs.
I thought — yes, how awesome! They explained that through an open application, Backstage was getting access to 1000s of high-potential deals (all led by women, POC and LGBTQ+ founders), confirming that the industry trope about a “pipeline problem” was completely false. The inbound was intense, but Arlan and Christie didn’t want to miss any great deals and felt strongly that all should be welcome to apply. They were recruiting someone to lead the team that would lead this deal flow, and they thought I might be a good fit. I thought so too, and decided to take on the challenge.
Backstage’s Deal Flow Team
I led this team to review our open applications and identify the last 5 investments to get us to 100 investments in the Backstage portfolio. Our team’s diversity is our competitive advantage, as I strongly believe that more diversity in decision making yields better future returns.
Backstage Accelerator
In 2019, I built out our Accelerator application, and led our investment process — resulting in 24 investments, with some of our team and founders shown here.
I am grateful for the opportunity at Backstage to be able to do things differently. Finding the founders is just one part of the equation for a great venture investment. How we assess opportunity is the other.
I put together our evaluation criteria and process to uncover opportunities that many other VCs and accelerators overlook. My goal is to find ways to better understand a company’s potential by looking at a broader set of characteristics beyond the traditional set. We did this by thinking carefully about questions we asked, the criteria we used to evaluate potential, to ensure that we were inclusive in our decision making throughout the process.
In making these investments, I led a process where each of us could source and review potential deals. If we were compelled, the team had the ability to forward with investing. I believe this dynamic, multi-perspective process helps us avoid the blind spots that many investors have. We test our biases, debate the validity of our judgement, and allow great insights to come from anywhere.
Taking Action Together
As a General Partner, I am so excited to continue to build on what I’ve learned at Backstage so far, and continue the work of getting more capital to underrepresented founders.
The opportunity to invest in more diverse founders is clear. But as we’ve seen, using the same old, narrow lens that the majority of VCs use to find and evaluate founders isn’t working when Black founders still only get 1%, and women get only 2% of venture dollars.
People of color, women, and LGBTQ+ founders are clearly underrepresented in venture — but don’t make the mistake of underestimating them.
After working at Backstage for the last 2.5 years, I can confirm that the investment opportunity here is strong.
I look forward to continuing to fund and support underestimated founders and collaborating with other investors and ecosystem leaders who believe in this opportunity as well. If you are an investor looking to diversify the founders you invest in, here are 3 steps you must take based on what I’ve learned and built so far in VC and at Backstage:
Open Access
Build deal flow channels that don’t require warm introductions to your team. Requiring founders to have a connection within your network can be a barrier to finding some of the best founders. Have clear ways for founders to reach you through an open application, office hours, and you will see your pipeline open up.
Diversify Your Team
You need to have a diverse investment team. There are plenty of qualified diverse venture investor candidates. Hire them. However, don’t hire a Black investor on your team in hopes that they’ll be the only one to find and back the Black deals.
Build an Inclusive Investment Process
The way your fund makes decisions is how founders get funded. You might need to re-think how your fund makes decisions and your evaluation criteria to check potential bias.
Also, we can help:
➡️ Join Backstage Capital’s investor network by filling out this form here.
➡️ We recently launched Backstage Crowd, a new syndicate led by Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital. Learn more and sign up here.
I am here to change the face of venture capital, and also how venture capital is done. For founders who have been historically underestimated — and for investors looking to back them — I truly believe that now is our time. 👊🏾
Follow Brittany Davis, GP at Backstage Capital at @iBrittDavis, @Backstage_Cap
