welcome back to people The capital in which we break down the latest workforce, as well as diversity and incorporation into technology. This week, we’ll look at launching the Diversity Riders initiative in venture capital and how it can go further, Instacart’s workforce practices and some alternative, more inclusive approaches to starting a startup. Michael Combib, CEO of Y Combinator, also recently shared a compelling anecdote about his experience as a black founder by raising money back in 2016.
Justice for Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor.
Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel on raising finance as a black founder
At All Raise’s second annual Black Women Founders Event, when the founder met Funder, Planet FWD CEO Julia Collins interviewed YC CEO Michael Seibel about his experience in technology and tips for founders.
“When I started doing startups, it was 2006, and there weren’t a lot of people doing startups that looked like none of us,” he told the audience. “I think what you expected was overt discrimination, but I really got something else that wasn’t feedback.”
He went on to say that people were afraid to be critical of him, fearing that they would be experienced in a certain way.
“People were afraid to be critical with me,” he said.
That is why Seibel says he is the kind of person who tells the founders what everyone thinks.
Technology cooperatives can reverse wealth inequality
We started the study earlier in the year cooperative startups, where employees and users have the opportunity to gain effective ownership and control of the company and where the profits generated are returned to members or reinvested in the company.
The way many technology companies are built today doesn’t have to be that way. Start.coop, the cooperative’s technical accelerator, is trying to help build this new future. This week, Start.coop received a $ 150,000 commitment to help fund two new startup classes a year. Start.coop will invest $ 15,000 in each startup and all graduates will become shareholders of Start.coop. It is the cooperative itself that divides its holdings among employees, investors, advisors and startups going through the accelerator.
Greg Brodsky, founder of Start.coop, told me earlier:
Technology has disrupted almost every part of the economy. It has disrupted the gig economy, gaming, shopping and hotel reservations. But one thing the technology sector has been reluctant to address is ownership itself. In other words, who will get rich and who will benefit from the growth of these companies. It really hasn’t changed. The technology sector only reproduces in a certain way wealth inequality in all other parts of the economy.
Exit is more than listings and acquisitions
In the meantime, the people behind leaving the community are preparing release zine outlines startup paths for results other than IPOs and acquisitions. E2C is a viable project that explores ways to help startups move into investor-owned community ownership, which can include users, customers, employees, or all stakeholders.
“The purpose of the Zine program is to provide a preliminary roadmap for all the discussion-related issues that need to happen so we can save the founders the pain of misidentifying and validating the wrong things and working together to make what works right,” Zebras Unite founder and zine writer Mara Zepeda told TechCrunch. “It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not like this is another perfect thing everyone has to do. I describe it as an explosion of Cambrian experiments to find out what this future is. It’s not just one thing. That’s why what we do is really different. Sometimes these narrow products or movements emerge and say, “this is the answer. There is no single answer to this moment.”
