Diversity + Startups
The tech startup world has a problem. It’s diversity.
Walk into a startup accelerator and you can generally count on one hand the females or minorities in the room. Some of the most notable accelerators — Y Combinator and 500 Startups have identified the same problem. What is going on?
Breaking Down the Problem
This is a complex problem to breakdown. STEM education and downright discrimination are logical places to start. But perhaps, there is something subtler going on as well.
Hiring at startups is based on relationships. I personally met my co-founder, Maya Tobias, through grad school — a safe environment in which you build trust before you build a business.
Power of Trust
Trust is paramount in the startup world where the assets of a company are the few key employees and their synergistic output. To be sure, one bad early hire can sink a startup. So hiring (or trusting) someone from outside one’s network is risky business. Venture capitalists, the suppliers of capital to startups, take this logic to extremes — see here.
Bottom line: startup founders are more likely to hire people through their trusted networks. And their networks tend to be homogenous.
Reframing the Question
So let’s reframe the question: how can we make startup founders’ networks less homogenous? Or, how can we get startup founders to form relationships with diverse talent?
A preliminary answer: startup job fairs focused on diverse hiring.
Startup Job Fairs
On January 28th, Localwise is co-hosting the Berkeley Startup Job Fair to introduce high-growth startups to diverse talent. The event is hosted by NextSpace and put on in partnership with Berkeley’s Economic Development Office, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Women Who Code, #YesWeCode, and many other awesome non-profits.
Final Thoughts
Truth be told, the Berkeley Startup Job Fair is an experiment. Like any good experiment, we’ll track data and see if the event helped more diverse talent get hired by startups.
I am not claiming that one job fair (or even 1,000 job fairs) solves the diversity in tech problem. I am claiming that the Berkeley Startup Job Fair is a step in the right direction. A step that is anchored in action instead of talk.
We’ll leave the talking to the startup founders and diverse talent at the job fair.
If you’d like to participate, sign up!
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Ben is the Co-Founder & CEO of Localwise, a hyper-local online job community that has helped thousands of local businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area hire great local employees.
