Coming Out as an Entrepreneur

Five business leaders talk about how identifying as LGBTQ has influenced their careers

How does coming out as an entrepreneur affect your success in business? Second Home and David Pearson from KPMG brought together panelists Anthony Watson (CEO and president- Uphold), Harry Briggs (Partner- BGF Ventures), Carrie Bishop (Director- FutureGov) and Michelle Garrett (Developer ModeForMe, Node Girls and Prosecco.js) to talk openly about their experiences of coming out at work.

In addition to personal accounts, the conversation covered such topics as how to remain authentic in professional relationships and how to tap in to the LGBT network for professional success.

David Pearson: The theme of tonight’s whole discussion is around coming out as an entrepreneur. I would say that from an LGBT perspective, do we really want to hear another set of coming out stories, haven’t we been there and done that? Why should we be talking about coming out?

Harry Briggs: I certainly struggled with this a few times over my career. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, perhaps it would’ve been easier if I’d just been open all along, but I do think it’s a lot harder than people think, even now, to come out. I certainly found, when I was running my start-up, even though I was out to my business partner and my colleagues, there were certain customers that said slightly inappropriate things that you kind of think, ‘It’s best I don’t mention that’, and then you feel like you’re not quite being authentic.

Certainly when I was a VC for the first time at Balderton, I sort of assumed that people would just pick it up, but then they didn’t. Then lots of inappropriate things were said in those first few weeks that made me think, ‘Maybe it’s just best I don’t mention this because I’m feeling a bit insecure’ — in a new job you’re always thinking, ‘Oh shit, have they made a hiring error? If they knew what they know now I’m sure they wouldn’t have hired me’. The last thing you want is to add to that sense of not quite belonging.

So I just sort of kept it under my hat a bit and told a couple of people, asked for advice from a couple of people, and gradually over the years got a bit more confident about mentioning a boyfriend here and there. Even by the end of six years there I hadn’t really properly told several of my colleagues that I was gay.

It’s a very male world, tech start-ups, and in the VC world I should think it’s over 90% male, and of that [the] vast majority [are] straight. I’d say of the entrepreneurs we meet, they’re probably also 90% male, quite alpha male, so in that environment being openly gay can feel hard.

“The VC world is over 90% male, and of that the vast majority are straight. I’d say of the entrepreneurs we meet, they’re probably also 90% male, quite alpha male, so in that environment being openly gay can feel hard.” Harry Briggs

Michelle Garrett: I think that if you don’t come out it can manifest in a whole heap of micro-aggressions that get to you after a while, little comments and things. Coming out, I don’t think it’s a one-time thing, it’s sort of an ongoing process. It’s not like you, one time, make a declaration, it’s every time you meet someone new you have to subtly let them know you’re a lesbian [laughs]. I feel like it doesn’t really end.

[Fashion] is still in tech so it’s still a very male-dominated culture, especially as a developer I’m often in very male-dominated spaces, so I think I still experience a lot of the same issues. I guess there’s probably a higher proportion of queer people in fashion and design, and also a lot of queer developers, so I guess that helps. I actually didn’t always work as a developer, so I think it might’ve become a bit easier.

Anthony Watson: I think it’s incredibly important to be open and honest about who you are, what you do, how you do it, because while we live in a bubble like London, in the US you can still be fired in 29 states for being gay. So it’s almost like it’s patronising for us who live in a very cosmopolitan city to say, ‘You know what? It’s not that big a deal coming out’, it obviously is a big deal because it’s part of who we are regardless of what letter you are in the LGBTQI.

I’ve always led with my sexuality in terms of I’ve always been open about it, I’ve always been honest about it. That’s served me sometimes, but the majority of times it’s been a negative. We just closed our series B round at £125m valuation, and everyone I met had no issue with the fact I was gay except one VC firm. We went for dinner with this firm and this guy made a very derogatory comment. He obviously didn’t do his research and didn’t know I was gay. I just told him to go fuck himself and I left, basically.

“I’ve always led with my sexuality in terms of I’ve always been open about it. That’s served me sometimes, but the majority of times it’s been a negative. We went for dinner with this firm and this guy made a very derogatory comment. He obviously didn’t do his research and didn’t know I was gay. I told him to go fuck himself and I left.” Anthony Watson

So broadly speaking I think it’s important. It’s a constant thing, coming out. But I think those of us who are relatively high-profile have a responsibility to everybody else. There was a great quote I read on Twitter: ‘Those of us who are drinking the water have to acknowledge those who built the well’. So for me it’s a very important thing. Again, in the Western world we have a very easy life, relatively speaking, but our LGBT brothers and sisters around the world outside of Western Europe and North America have a very, very different experience than we do.

Being in the world of VC, are you equally open around issues of raising finance — are you equally open with investors and banks?

Anthony Watson: Absolutely, so people tend to [not] ride the wave, invest in the surfer. So when I talk to VC firms in particular, they want to know who I am, what motivates me, what drives me etc, and my management team. So it’s something that is always part of the dialogue. I’m very comfortable with the dialogue as well. Most VC firms, in my experience, and most investors don’t really care as long as you’re going to give them a decent return.

Carrie, a local government perspective on how coming out helps or otherwise?

Carrie Bishop: I think the public sector is generally less judgemental — it’s a generalisation but I think you can be out fairly comfortably in the public sector and lots of people are. It feels okay for me. I’ve always been out, for my whole career, so wherever I’ve worked I’ve always been out, because mostly I find that if you’re hiding something, people suss that something’s up and then they think you’re weird. Once they know you’re gay, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s all it is [laughs], I thought you were some kind of crazed murderer or something!’ [laughs]. They kind of imagine worse than it actually is and they’re kind of relieved that you’re gay. So I think it’s better to just not hide stuff because people think you’re shady and that’s bad for business in general.

“Once they know you’re gay, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s all! I thought you were some kind of crazed murderer or something!’ They kind of imagine worse than it actually is and they’re kind of relieved that you’re gay.” Carrie Bishop

Also, I think for women it’s actually harder to come out as a feminist. There’s kind of a bro code, which is like, ‘Oh you’re into women too, let’s objectify women together’ [laughs], and you’re like, ‘But I am also a woman so that’s weird for me’ [laughs]. So that’s actually the harder bit to break through — it’s a kind of like, ‘We’ll make assumptions about what you’re cool with because you’re gay’. So it’s a sort of nuance, but I think for women, especially in tech, it is quite important as an angle as well.

Harry, what’s your approach [to being open with funders, financiers, banks] and have you had negative experiences?

Harry Briggs: I’m usually [on] the other side of the table, but to be fair when I was running my business one of our angel investors really seemed to change his attitude to me when he discovered I was gay. I only really came out to myself whilst running this business — I’d been at corporate world McKinsey before and suddenly running a business you feel more able to express yourself. I know McKinsey’s changed now I’m sure, but it was different in 1999 — I’m quite old. So that was one example where [there was a] totally different relationship, and the only conclusion I could make was that he felt really uncomfortable with that.

Certainly on my side of the table now as a VC, the awkward things is that you’re trying to develop rapport with an entrepreneur, you’re trying to get to know each other, but at the same time your conversation’s going to be mostly about the business and why people are doing the business — you don’t necessarily want to bring up partners, sexuality, that sort of thing, straight away.

What I think happens — particularly with the slightly older generation — is the way of developing rapport is sort of saying, ‘The wife does this’, and, ‘The birds love this’, ‘We’re blokes together and we can objectify women’. Cutting that off by saying, ‘Actually I’m gay’, every time, probably is the right thing to do, but I’m not very good at doing it.

“With the older generation, the way of developing rapport is saying, ‘The birds love this’. Cutting that off by saying, ‘Actually I’m gay’, is probably the right thing to do, but I’m not very good at doing it.” Harry Briggs

How do we navigate this world of ‘tech bros’ and would one of you explain what we mean by this term?

Michelle Garrett: As some of you might know, tech is obviously very male-dominated, and they can be a gross culture of straight, white men being sleazy and bro-y with each other and objectifying women. That’s what the tech bro culture kind of refers to. I experience this a lot, interacting with people in tech.

How do you manage that?

Michelle Garrett: I guess it depends on how important the relationship is, because sometimes I prefer to tell them that what they said is offensive, but sometimes you just have to deal with it. This is why I really enjoy running things like Node Girls, just because it’s just a very safe environment outside of the weird sleaziness that you can get at a lot of tech events — especially at developer events.

Anthony, what about you with colleagues vs clients — how do you be out to clients?

Anthony Watson: A few years ago I was in Fortune’s 40 under 40, which is a global publication in New York, and it talked about my sexuality, so pretty much people are very aware of my sexuality. There were always derogatory comments. But I think the more senior you go in an organisation — I’ve worked for Barclays, Wells Fargo, Nike — when you’re at the senior level in an organisation it’s really easy to be out. It’s when you’re buried in the organisation [that’s] a very different conversation. My experience today is not reflective of most other people’s experience.

“When you’re at the senior level in an organisation it’s really easy to be out. It’s when you’re buried in the organisation [that’s] a very different conversation.” Anthony Watson

How big does the organisation need to be to have an LGBT+ employee network?

Carrie Bishop: We’re about 30 people, we have some in the UK in London and then an office in Australia. We’re super gay, disproportionately gay [laughs], so we’re maybe like a third gay, I think, at the last count and there’s question marks always as well. We have a Slack channel called Future Gays. Even though we’re very small, there’s a sense of we recognise each other, we make it okay for people to be their whole self at work. Not just gay, but whatever they’re into, for want of a better expression [laughs].

So it depends on how many LGBT people there are in the organisation?

Carrie Bishop: There is that, but I will say that the straight people feel excluded sometimes. So you have to watch the reverse of that, which is like, ‘You’re all having so much fun and we don’t get to come along and that’s not cool’. So you sort of have to make some decisions about that, some of which are tough because it’s like, ‘Well you get to do everything all the time, can we just have one thing for us?’. But it’s sometimes difficult to explain that because everybody in the company is very chilled with each other, so they’re like, ‘I know some straight people discriminate against gay people, but I don’t, so why are you excluding me from your party?’. It’s a tough question to answer sometimes.

Obviously having a wife and a stable family life isn’t a precursor to success. How should someone handle a recruiter talking to them as if it is?

Anthony Watson: That’s a very uncommon situation, certainly in my experience. If I was in that situation I’d be quite bullish against it because I think it’s just a bullshit comment — you can’t say to someone, ‘Only successful people are married with kids, look at Tim Cook as an example’. One of the most successful corporate leaders in the world — if you look at LGBT leaders globally, we tend to be, for lots of reasons, better than our straight peers, I would argue. Certainly more intuitive, certainly more emotionally aware, because certainly in my generation you had to be better because there was always an unconscious bias against you.

But for a recruiter to make a comment like that, if he’s promoting that type of context to his clients, he’s limiting those clients because the best companies and the most profitable companies are highly diverse — not just within LGBT, but also within men and women, in terms of ethnicity etc. So if you look at the most profitable companies in the world, they are highly diverse, not just through one lens or one aperture.

So that recruitment company probably won’t be around very long if they’re just hiring white males to populate these ridiculous companies. I would’ve been quite bullish against it, but that’s just my natural inclination.The way I look at it now is we’re an 87-person company, we’re going to double in size this year, if anyone came to me and said, ‘This is the profile of a person we want to hire for you’, I’d fire them. It’s just a ridiculous concept, why limit — it’s just nonsensical, it’s obviously a stupid individual, sorry.

Michelle Garrett: You don’t always have the energy to fight the battle every day. Sometimes you might be in the mood to fight back, but if it happens frequently or it’s just too much energy then I guess it might just not be worth it.

Harry Briggs: This is probably going to sound dumb, but I do think sometimes you can educate better from within than from outside. I’ve always been someone who — I don’t really try to define myself as gay — it’s probably quite low down the list of things I’d like to be defined by, I’m sure that’s true of lots of people in this room — and that means that in a way my experience with Balderton — the mental process I was going through — was, ‘I’m going to first prove I’m good at what I do, and then let it be known that I’m gay’.

Because my concern was, and maybe this was totally unfounded, if I’m defined as gay straight away and that makes me feel like a cultural anomaly in this place that’s very alpha-male and family-oriented, is that going to prejudice everyone’s judgement against me? Whereas I like to think that by kind of letting that be known a bit later once people had formed a view, perhaps people would be more open-minded. I don’t know if that’s fair or that’s just self-justification.

Is it harder to be transgender, gender-neutral, polyamorous etc, than being L, G or B?

Harry Briggs: I have friends my age who still are sort of not out, partly because they see defining yourself as gay as conforming to a bunch of stereotypes they don’t see themselves as part of, and particularly if they’re in industries they see as homophobic like the music industry for example. They don’t want to put themselves in a box. So if you’re not definitely one end of the spectrum, I think it is harder.

Carrie Bishop: I guess I would describe myself broadly as, like, gender-neutral is the closest thing, there’s not really a word for how I think of myself. That does cross my mind sometimes, I’m like, ‘Should I wear a tie to this meeting?’. Usually I end up [deciding] yes because I have an amazing tie collection [laughs]. But it crosses my mind more than it does should I discuss my partner at this meeting. I won’t just lob it into the conversation for the sake of it, but if it’s appropriate I won’t think twice about bringing up my partner. But if it’s to do with how I present then I feel a little more reluctant.

“I would describe myself broadly as gender-neutral is the closest thing, but there’s not really a word for how I think of myself. That does cross my mind sometimes, like, ‘Should I wear a tie to this meeting?’. Usually I end up deciding yes because I have an amazing tie collection!” Carrie Bishop

I completely agree with what you said earlier about acknowledging the people that built the world, because that’s one of the reasons I endeavour to always be my true self, is because I kind of think it’s a political act in some ways to be yourself, and also to acknowledge what others have done for us.

I think because of what others have done for us, there is now a vocabulary for people out there, so they know how to refer to gay people, but there’s only just emerging a language to talk about gender identity. People don’t really know what to say, what to call you, how to refer to you, and I can’t really think of a word that describes me — which I’m okay with, but it throws other people into total confusion.

I think to some extent it is harder, and we’re only just seeing beginnings of traction with gender identity.

Do you see anything in the world of design tech that makes it easier, for example, to express their gender differently?

Michelle Garrett: I think it has a lot to do with language and people not knowing what pronouns to use or what words to use for people. I guess that is probably the overarching issue, and I don’t think that’s really solved in a design/fashion community.

Anthony Watson: I’ve always been gay, I’ve never been with a woman, no interest in being with a woman, I’ve known from the age of 12 I was gay. So I’ve had a very easy ‘coming out’ in terms of being very focused and understanding of who I was at an early age, certainly when it came to my sexual orientation.

I’ve never struggled with gender identity, but I think the transgender community in particular has a very difficult time. I was reading an article today, a transgender lady was beaten up in Liverpool just walking down the street. The issues that transgender people face are very similar to the issues that the LGB community faced in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s.

I was at a fundraising event last weekend in LA with Caitlyn Jenner, and we were having this debate. Now, I don’t think Caitlyn Jenner should be a spokesperson for that community because she makes very bizarre statements around marriage equality etc because she’s a die-hard Republican. But in terms of how she cares about that community and the way she talks about it, and she goes around the south of the US meeting members of the community, it’s actually a very dangerous place for that community now. I think it’s beholden on all of us to support that community as best we can.

For those of you with a corporate background, how do your recent experiences as an entrepreneur give you insights into how corporates could help LGBTI staff? Are there practical things we can do to help make life easier?

Anthony Watson: I think the one thing corporates are being very good at, certainly in the last 10 years, is embracing all forms of diversity and realising there’s a value, and when people can come to work, bring their whole self to work… If you’re spending half your day trying to use different pronouns, you’re not focused on your job, and you’re not focused on doing the best you possibly can so you’re not as effective or efficient.

“One thing corporates are very good at is embracing all forms of diversity and realising there’s a value when people can bring their whole self to work… If you’re spending half your day trying to use different pronouns, you’re not focused on your job or on doing the best you possibly can so you’re not as effective or efficient.” Anthony Watson

I think corporates worked that out, in my experience, in the early ’90s and said, ‘Okay, we need to tackle this’. They’ve done a pretty good job of it, certainly in the FTSE 100 or the Fortune 500, broadly speaking. I think from a business perspective though, certainly what we’re doing from a disruption perspective, there’s nothing we’re going to learn from a Barclays or a Citigroup etc.

For example, we’re a non-fractional bank, which means we don’t leverage our capital in any way, shape or form, but if you’re a Barclays you’ve got 9% tier 1 capital, you leverage at the yin yang, and you’ve got to pay the salaries of 140,000 people. So I can go head-to-head with a major corporate in a way that they just wouldn’t be able to compete with for lots of reasons.

So from my perspective I’ve nothing to gain, other than the experience I’ve got in banking, to help drive our business. But from a cultural awareness, from an engagement with all strands of diversity, there’s a lot to learn from there.

Harry Briggs: I don’t feel I’ve really experienced the sort of modern, corporate LGBT-open process. When I was comparing offers from Bain and McKinsey for example, and at the time Bain felt much more macho culture. I said this was an issue for me, I didn’t really know why, and there was someone wheeled out who was a less-macho person at Bain. But it does totally feel off-putting to the people you’re hiring, and I think it’s also particularly hard in those early days.

One thing that I tried to do when I was running Firefly was, on the first day of any new joiner, I would go for a coffee and at some point mention the fact that I was gay, and obviously in the process engender a conversation about it to make sure it wasn’t an elephant in the room and they didn’t accidentally say something awkward and feel bad about it etc.

I do think that in the start-up world generally, the chances are, once you’re at 20 people or potentially smaller, you’re likely to have a gay employee. But actually giving that opportunity very early on so that people don’t feel like they have to cover something up is really valuable and you don’t lose anything by doing it. But it can feel a bit awkward, because how do you bring it up? Everyone has slight qualms from it, but I think we could all benefit from doing it.

Carrie, from the public sector side, what learnings do you think there are that you bring into the tech world?

Carrie Bishop: I think the public sector’s really obsessed with process. I guess it’s maybe like all large organisations, but fairness is measured by tick-boxes and matrixes and these sort of process ways of trying to ensure fairness, but we kind of all know at heart that they’re all inherently biased by the people who are filling them in.

I’ve seen through entrepreneurship the power of role-modelling and strong, visible leadership, and that actually makes more of a difference to diversity than any number of kind of policies and check-boxes. I’m constantly in a fight with our COO about having an equalities policy, because I think our equalities policy should just be, ‘Respect people.’.

But there’s this kind of pressure to have a legally conforming worded thing, and the public sector’s obsessed with that stuff, thinking that it’s being fair. If entrepreneurships taught me anything it’s that that stuff counts much less than the leadership side of things.

What would you say are the cultural differences in terms of how [the US and the UK] view diversity in organisations?

Anthony Watson: The first thing I would say is the US is going through a different type of challenge, specifically if you look at when people talk about tech they really mean Silicon Valley, if you look at Silicon Valley it is generally quite male — there’s very few women in it, there’s very few LGBT people, but particularly there’s no diversity of ethnicity in Silicon Valley.

It’s very striking when you go to companies — like there was a Facebook meeting a few weeks ago and literally it was just four white faces. That’s a very specific challenge in the US, it’s slightly different here for various reasons in the UK because I think we’re far more progressive in our inclusion than the US. You can be fired for being gay in 29 states in the US, and if you look at the African-American population in particular, it’s 16% of the overall US population, but if you look at that population’s access to education for example, it’s not as widespread as a [45.24] white guy in the East Coast. It’s got very specific challenges that it needs to address from an ethnicity perspective.

The US scares me a lot in terms of I wouldn’t want to be black in the US for any money in the world because you can get shot in the head by a cop. In terms of how people are treated it’s a very, very different experience than how people are treated — certainly from an ethnicity/equality perspective — in Europe. So they’ve got very specific issues. In terms of how they’re tackling those issues — they don’t know what to do.

It feels to me that people are running around with their hair on fire, not knowing what to do, just don’t want to be called out by somebody. Certainly we hire — and I’ve always hired — broad diversity of thought, but that’s not just based on sexual orientation, gender or ethnicity, it’s based on experience and background. Because again in my experience the companies that are most profitable are very diverse. If you’re focused on building a successful organisation, you want to have the best and broadest people. That doesn’t mean having a bunch of white guys in a room.

“Hiring staff should not be based on sexual orientation, gender or ethnicity, but experience and background. The companies that are most profitable are very diverse. If you’re focused on building a successful organisation, you want to have the best and broadest people.” Anthony Watson

Carrie Bishop: In a week and a half I’m going to a conference called Lesbians Who Tech, which does what it says on the tin. For all that, there is this corporate thing that you speak of, there’s also a really strong history in America of community organising and grass-roots activism as a way of mobilising politically. We don’t really have that so much in this country.

In some ways there are organisations like 18 Million Rising who kind of represent Asian-Americans, and there are these huge, grass-roots organisations which I think are really interesting. But no one’s quite making the connection yet between the power of those groups and then plugging them into industry as a whole.

Imagine you had a deal on the table and it was worth quite a bit to you, and then you were confronted by someone who was homophobic, bigoted, transphobic, whatever. Would you at any cost call that out, or would you let it ride even if it made you feel a bit dirty because there was money on the table?

Michelle Garrett: It depends on whether the decision is solely up to me, because if it was I wouldn’t want to work with anyone like that even at those great stakes. If that deal was on the behalf of a company or if there were other stakeholders then I guess it would be up to them as well. Personally, I wouldn’t want to.

Anthony Watson: Isn’t the business, tech, corporate world, kind of a reflection of culture and society at the moment? What do we, a room full of LGBTs, do to make sure that the companies that are in the businesses that we accept are up to scratch? If it was up to me, we would never accept any business from any bigoted asshole ever. What can we walk away with tonight that we can apply moving forward?

Harry Briggs: The trouble is that there is a sort of cultural evolution that needs to happen. The tech world is totally weird. When I turned up for that first day at Balderton and we had 10 male investors, not a single female, and eight female receptionists and assistants, PAs, and every single business that came in to pitch that week was an all-male founding team. I was like, ‘Have I gone into some kind of alternate universe?’, I was totally freaked out by it and felt really strange. The business I ran; we were more than 50% female.

The weird thing is that I sort of begun to get used to it because it is the reality however hard you try. We did actually bring in a female investor at last about two years into my Balderton time, but then she only lasted a year for whatever reason. It is now still an all-male team.

If you look at Sequoia Capital, the most successful VC fund in the US, they’re an all-male investment team. All of the major VCs, apart from a couple that set out to specialise in female businesses, are ridiculously male-dominated. Why is that? It’s not just that they tend to start with a group of three or four bros who know each other really well and they recruit people like themselves, but there’s also a societal issue which is that you talk to the average 11-year-old female and she will say, ‘Yes, I want to be a fashion designer’, she won’t say, ‘I want to code’.

Okay, the average male might not [either], but a far greater number will. Until we have the role models in society, and until we have the teachers and parents that are encouraging women to pursue careers that aren’t their stereotype, this problem’s going to persist.

We’re hiring at the moment and we’re being very gender-biased about it, discriminating pro-women, because I will not work in an all-male investment team again. I think having diverse views around the table gives you so much richness in terms of perception on the entrepreneurs and the teams, and also makes female founders and female teams feel more open about coming to you. What could be more intimidating than one woman in a room of 10 men, feeling like you’re the only female entrepreneur they’ve ever seen? It’s crazy.

[Do we] need to do something in schools to make a difference later on down the line?

Harry Briggs: Definitely. I know Martha Lane Fox is really pushing this, because as she pointed out recently, tech is an ever-growing share of the economy, it’s now 1.6 million jobs in the UK, and tech jobs are, at the moment, 92% male. So effectively we are sort of going back 50 years at the moment, because tech is going to take an ever-growing share of the economy, and women need to play a stronger role in it.

Michelle Garrett: I really believe in education creating education being one particularly awesome way of increasing diversity in tech and coders. I don’t have any experience of working with schools, but I learned to code at a free, not-for-profit coding school called Founders & Coders, which was awesome. Now we’re running Node Girls, trying to teach JavaScript to women for free. There are just so many cool initiatives going on like that and I think we need more of them.

Are people aware of these kinds of initiatives?

Carrie Bishop: I’m going to disagree with the education thing, as I did not listen to anything in school, and no one could tell me anything when I was in school. I think when we’re grown-ups we forget that. The obvious solution is go into the schools — I think it’s great that there’s stuff that is, if you’re interested in something, there’s an opportunity to explore it, but I think that’ll happen outside of school if you’re really into it, or in later life when you suddenly work out who you really are, which doesn’t necessarily happen that young. That’s when the opportunities are needed and the freedom to explore different things.

I think that some of the conversation has been quite binary, like, ‘Do you call something out and tell the person to go fuck themselves?’ — which, by the way, I completely support — vs, ‘Do you just suck it up and not say anything?’. I think there are middle grounds there that you can explore.

I’m obsessed with this guy, Saul Alinsky, he wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, which is like how to bring about societal change using these quite specific tactics, and one of them is humour. I’ve been in plenty of situations where someone’s been like, ‘Dude, that’s so gay’, and I’m like, ‘Did you really just say that?’ — kind of call it out but kind of make a joke out of it — ‘I’m not mortally offended here, but I’m going to take the piss out of you for being so behind the times’. So it’s just, I think, a kinder way of saying, ‘You’re a dick’ [laughs].

Anthony Watson: I am a strong believer, though, that evil prevails when good men do nothing. I think you have to stand up — especially those of us in position of privilege. It’s incumbent on those of us who are CEOs or on boards of companies etc to make a very clear declarative statement around what’s acceptable and what’s not. You’re not going to change hearts and minds by humour alone.

“Evil prevails when good men do nothing. It’s incumbent on those of us who are CEOs or on boards of companies etc to make a very clear declarative statement around what’s acceptable and what’s not. You’re not going to change hearts and minds by humour alone.” Anthony Watson

I think it’s an incumbent on all of us, particularly in the UK where especially outside of London kids don’t have any concept of what a gay kid looks like, or if they do, it’s, ‘I’m going to be an air steward’, or, ‘I’m going to be a hairdresser’, because they have no concept of anything else.

I think it’s important just to be a role model. ‘This what I do, this is why do it, and, oh, by the way, I happen to be gay’, so some kid somewhere can say, ‘I just thought gay people were hairdressers or like Graham Norton on TV’, or whatever, so I think it’s very important.

For example, very recently there was a very large deal — we just signed a $48bn with Antwerp Diamonds in Belgium, one of two companies supporting that deal. There was another deal on the table that we had the choice to take, and it was a significant revenue deal, and we walked away from it because we didn’t believe the cultural values of that company reflected our values.

The world has changed a lot — it’s not just about making money, it’s making sure you make money in the right way as well, especially in finance. Those of us in positions of privilege have the opportunity to have those hard conversations than [if] you’re an engineer in the middle of the country etc.

THE PANELISTS

Moderator: David Pearson, the associate director at KPMG in corporate finance.

Carrie Bishop runs a company called FutureGov, a digital and design agency for the public sector. She works specifically with local authorities and central government, redesigning government services using digital services.

Michelle Garrett is a devloper working mostly in fashion technology for a company called WonderLuk, which does 3D-printed jewellery. She also runs a start-up called ModeForMe, which is a crowd-funding platform for emerging fashion designers. On top of that she co-organises Node Girls, a free coding boot camps for women.

Harry Briggs recently helped set up BGF Ventures, a £200m venture fund investing in early-stage UK tech companies. Until last summer he was a venture capitalist (VC) with Balderton Capital, one of the biggest European funds. ]

Anthony Watson is the CEO of Uphold, one of the world’s largest money platforms. He also sits on the board of DGS Plc and is a member of the board of GLAAD, which is the world’s largest LGBT media advocacy organisation.

This talk took place on February 16th 2016. Find out who’s coming to Second Home next: https://secondhome.io/whats-on