5 Actions We Took to Increase the Diversity of our 2021 Accelerator Class
The startup ecosystem is dominated by White cisgender men. Our 2021 Start.coop class is anything but.
There was a tweet a few months ago that really got me thinking. It was so emblematic of the moment: organizations quickly scrambling to up their (largely performative) efforts to build a culture of gender and race equity and then sharing resulting stats meant to impress:
The tweet was from a TechCrunch reporter, Natasha Mascarenhas, who was reporting on the stats behind Y Combinator’s latest class. Now as most of you probably know. Y Combinator is often viewed as the holy grail in the world of accelerators because it has helped launch so many unicorns. At Start.coop, when we are talking to people about our work, we often hear “oh, you are the Y Combinator for cooperatives!”. So when I saw Natasha’s tweet about Y Combinator’s stats, I was quick to respond, a little tongue in cheek, contrasting our Start.coop stats with YC’s.
Sure, it’s important to share our stats publicly to hold ourselves accountable, but at the end of the day it’s about a lot more than stats. Everywhere you look organizations are touting new and improved diversity numbers. Yet we don’t often have the chance to peek under the hood to get the real story. It is even less often that organizations talk publicly about how they are changing their practices and policies to create organizations that represent the diversity of this country and actually celebrate and welcome BIPOC, womxn and non-binary people. And in response to my Tweet I was asked why I think our stats are so different from Y Combinator’s so I wanted to take the time to share the actions we have taken that have likely contributed to the progress we have made.
From a parent-owned platform that enables caregivers to share child care, to a consumer-owned e-commerce platform for everyday products exclusively from Black-owned brands, the seven businesses in Start’ 21 are working on addressing some of the most pressing challenges that burst to the forefront in 2020. And the entrepreneurs behind these startups are a racially and gender diverse group. There’s no one action we took that we can point to, but rather it’s a combination of actions we have taken since early 2019 when I joined Start.coop and which we ramped up significantly in 2020.
The 5 Actions We Took to Increase the Race and Gender Diversity of our 2021 Class
1.We changed where and how we do outreach
Word of mouth is the strongest driver of applications to our accelerator. So we took a hard look at our own networks and the organizations that we partner with to recruit entrepreneurs for our accelerator. Surprise, surprise, since our leadership and Board are majority White, so too are our networks. We reached out and built partnerships with new organizations and focused heavily on our relationships with BIPOC and womxn business leaders to make sure that Start.coop and the opportunity our accelerator represents was on more people’s radar.
The result: of the applicants who heard about our accelerator via word of mouth, 66% had at least one BIPOC founder and 75% had at least one one womxn, non-binary, or transgender founder.
2.We offered pre-accelerator interactions and coaching
We know that even with a more diverse pipeline the opportunities to build business acumen and experience and submit a strong application are limited for groups that have been historically excluded and marginalized from opportunity, particularly in the startup ecosystem. So we made additional support available to entrepreneurs to help them learn more about the accelerator, feel comfortable and build trust with us, and put together a strong application.
The result: Our applicants were diverse, both by race and gender, reflecting the demographics of the U.S. *not* the traditional demographics of the entrepreneurship and startup world. 52% of applications had at least one BIPOC founder and 54% of applications had at least one womxn, non-binary, or transgender founder.
3.We convened a more diverse application evaluation panel
In our accelerator, startups that pass an initial screen are reviewed by a panel of external evaluators. Each application is scored by at least 3 (although usually 4) evaluators and then the quantitative and qualitative feedback is used to select the top 12+ applicants for interviews. So in late 2020 when we opened applications for our 2021 class, we intentionally sought out the expertise and partnership of a much more diverse group of qualified evaluators. Many have been members of our community for some time but for others this was their second or third touchpoint with Start.coop. We were overwhelmed by their enthusiasm and engagement: 100% of those asked to join the panel of evaluators stepped up and did so.
The result: 68% of our evaluators in 2020 were BIPOC (41% Black), and 45% were womxn.
4.We recruited new BIPOC faculty
We want our BIPOC and womxn founders to feel welcome in our program and see themselves represented among our faculty. Furthermore, we know that BIPOC and womxn are an untapped source of business wisdom and brilliance and that a majority White, male faculty was doing our entrepreneurs a disservice. So we launched a nomination process for new instructors with a specific focus on BIPOC and womxn and we started offering a modest but important honorarium to our instructors. As a drastically underfunded and understaffed organization finding new funds for this was a challenge, but we made the voice to prioritize it over other expenses knowing how important it is to compensate those who support our program, particularly those who are so often asked for unpaid labor. We’re not where we want to be in terms of faculty diversity, but we are confident we are on the right track.
The result: 31% of our instructors are BIPOC (23% Black), and 46% are womxn.
5.We embedded DEIJ into our programming
We took major steps to create space for conversations about gender and race in our program this year and talk about the intersection of gender and race in the subject matter of our workshops. We are focused on building a culture of and community in our cohort that honors and uplifts diverse perspectives and fosters a sense of belonging. We are creating space for tough conversations and giving our entrepreneurs the time and space they need when racial injustice wreaks havoc (e.g. when we heard the Derek Chauvin verdict was going to be announced during one of our sessions we cut a session short so that entrepreneurs could have time for self care ). We scrambled to find funds to pay a small stipend to an entrepreneur who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to participate in our program because quitting your job to start a business is a privilege not afforded to most, especially BIPOC, and we want to make sure that the most qualified entrepreneurs can participate in our accelerator, regardless of their economic status.
The result: TBD. We’re waiting to get both quantitative and qualitative feedback from the BIPOC and female entrepreneurs in this year’s accelerator when they graduate.
One last fundamental element of our efforts to increase the racial and gender diversity of our accelerator: we measure our progress and report on it. We believe that if we don’t take the time to critically evaluate our actions and if we aren’t transparent with our community about the results, then we aren’t fully committing ourselves to doing the hard work and making real change. So we are tracking each of the actions outlined above (and more!) and reporting out to our community both informally on our social media and in our newsletters, as well as more formally in our Board and funder reports and on our website. And when we get the final promoter scores we use to evaluate the accelerator at the end of each cohort, we’ll break down the data by gender and race to see if there are any notable differences in satisfaction and perceived value across these groups.
We are far from perfect. Our Board is still very white (although more diverse now than previously). We have yet to build a truly diverse investor network. And we are working on attracting a more BIPOC and womxn mentors for our entrepreneurs. But we are committed to doing the work and being transparent about it.
In reality, this post isn’t really about comparing our stats to Y Combinators’. We are a three year-old organization that has accelerated the growth of 18 startups; YC is a 16-year-old organization that has accelerated the growth of more than 2,500. You’d be right to say we are comparing apples to oranges. The real point of this post is to share publicly the actions we have taken to advance race and gender equity in our accelerator and to hold ourselves accountable to our values and to the commitments we have made, particularly around race equity.
We know that the kind of cooperative future we hope for will only become a reality if we uplift BIPOC and womxn entrepreneurs and provide them with the opportunity to thrive in an ecosystem that is biased against their success.
If you have questions about our approach or have implemented other strategies that could help us all improve, I’d love to talk. You can find me on Twitter, @jessxdesign.
