Entrepreneurs: This Founder Built His Startup Focused on Hiring a Diverse Team
Yesterday’s Forbes chronicled a Silicon Valley startup founder story which could read like many other tales of success — big-time serial founder with a billion dollar exit is focused on an exciting new project — except for the fact that the secret sauce to this new venture is that the founding team was specifically chosen to be composed of underrepresented minorities and women. Adam Pisoni, of Yammer fame, has launched Abl, an ed-tech startup, and thought that hiring a diverse team from the onset was “ the right thing to do”.
Pisoni committed to building a diverse founding team for several reasons, many of which he explained in a January blog post on Medium. Yet his initial motivation was simple. “I just thought it was the right thing to do,” he says. Given corporate America’s expanding focus on diversity and inclusion, he also thinks it will save time and money. “Companies that haven’t done this early are paying a high internal cost,” he says. When they try to improve diversity years after they’ve launched, they must spend time and energy righting the ship.
He’s also acutely aware that you only have one chance to choose a founding team, and that team will set the company culture. “When people join an organization, they bring themselves, but also adopt the norms of that organization,” he says. And he has seen many examples of a founding team’s habits and values continuing to dominate a company’s culture for the decades that follow.
At Yammer, Pisoni had built a strong professional network, and the startup’s $1.2 billion exit in 2012 made many in Silicon Valley want to join him on his current project, Abl, which he founded in 2015. Abl is building software that facilitates a complex logistical problem — staffing and scheduling for schools — and aims to redesign the student experience. Having a surplus of interested candidates is never a bad thing, but given that Silicon Valley’s tech community isn’t particularly diverse, the candidates arriving in his inbox were mostly white and Asian males, or members of what Pisoni considers the “majority group” in tech.
So Pisoni made a drastic move — he chose to actively recruit only for underrepresented minorities, including women and people of color.
Forbes goes on to note that having the right “funnel” is important to obtain a diverse range of talent, explaining that Abl had to do a targeted search rather than rely on more general recruitment methods, and notes that having a diverse founding team will help to recruit other underrepresented groups. This is a philosophy we share at Jefes, and understand that part of the challenge towards more diversity in tech and beyond involves cultivating not just a strong pipeline, but making sure that early diversity at a firm is in place to help eliminate implicit bias ( like-hires-like) and attract a wide range of candidates. Check out Pisoni’s piece, it is an absolute must read.
