Likes & Launch

At USV, we often get our portfolio companies together to discuss topics of interest, as well as challenges and lessons learned. In 2014, we held 42 such portfolio get-togethers. In December, we hosted our first Diversity Summit. The focus of the discussion was to increase organizational diversity to gain competitive advantage.

At the event, we had 28 attendees from 13 different companies with a range of job functions: Engineering, People, Community, Sales, Business Development, Legal and Product. Everyone had the same goal: to increase diversity in their organization.

I wanted to share the insights we learned and what we found helpful to take action.  

Why is diversity important?

To prepare for our event, I connected with Lisa Lee, Pandora’s Head of Diversity. She shared the importance of setting context around the topic in a professional setting, especially since conversations can easily drift into discussions on social justice, privilege and entitlement. Those topics are worthy to inspect, but they detract from the organizational conversation of increasing diversity for business success.

To set context, she advised addressing two key questions early in our discussion:

1. Do you want your company to increase your company’s competitive advantage? Extensive research has proven that more diverse perspectives leads to more innovative ideas and better financial returns.
2. Do you want your company to one day serve millions of people? It helps if you know how different people in the population think. If companies want to last, they need to think about this early.

Grounding the discussion in these questions early on will help ensure a productive conversation about diversity in your organization, both in strategy and in practice. The topic is vast, but you don’t need to be an expert to start making changes. If you want to learn more, go find experts willing to help.

To help get up to speed quickly, here are the most cited research studies around the benefits of organizational Diversity. The research can be summarized into the following:

• If you want to create the most innovative ideas, you will benefit from diversity of perspectives within your workforce.
• If you want to increase the financial returns of your business, encourage gender diversity on your executive team and board.
• If you want to build a massive company that serves a global population, consider the diversity of your workforce in order to best serve those customers. 
• Having diversity of perspectives can create more innovative ideas, but will likely expand discussions and debate.

Because diversity is such an important topic, it must be prioritized early in a company’s life.  As Lisa put it, “I’m a believer that you have to start thinking about diversity early, otherwise it just becomes really, really difficult the bigger that you grow. What you want is to grow your company where diversity is one of your core principles and core values, because trying to inject it later on is inorganic and it’s off putting to people.” Start today.

Challenges of making change

One of the biggest challenges of successful diversity initiatives is simply opening the discussion.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Intel and HP shared their workforce diversity numbers publicly after Tracy Chou, a Pinterest engineer, called for more transparency about their diversity efforts. Even though these companies are making progress, the media and social media reactions are largely negative. There is media finger pointing at what isn’t achieved yet, not focus on what is being done.

Diversity challenges are across the tech sector, from startups to venture capital. At USV, we know we’re far from diverse. Fortunately, we have learned a lot and we want to continue to encourage progress internally, within our portfolio, and the broader tech community.

Diversity initiatives are currently happening behind closed doors. Best practices are siloed and we’re not learning from each other.

An open diversity conversation lifts all boats. It’s what the tech community embraces: transparency, failing out loud, sharing strategies, cheering on those who are making changes, and using post-mortems to learn from things that didn’t pan out.

Diversity at work

Even within the walls of a single organization, it can be difficult to raise the topic of diversity. When asked amongst our summit attendees, the challenges raised were: discussing and defining diversity, creating a plan, and prioritizing initiatives to move forward.

To address these challenges, our group came away with a number of different approaches that I’ll expand on in more detail in this blog series. These include:

• Getting Started: having the discussion, language, and online tools
• Company Culture: embracing diversity, inclusive mission vision values, and performance
• Recruiting: tactics, expectations, interviews, job postings, resources, and external organizations
• Constant Evolution: Feedback, measuring success, training, and materials

Diversity is an urgent and important issue; the best time to start is now. Let’s open the door on this topic.

Diversity is never done

To wrap up our day, we had Maximo Patiño, Associate Director of Admissions and Diversity Strategist, join us from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, bringing 14+ years of diversity leadership and advocacy. He answered the questions left open from our discussions and affirmed we were heading in the right direction. His most profound advice, however, was this: “diversity is never done”.

Just as innovation is not something you “achieve” it’s something you constantly strive for and try to inspire, diversity is never done. Both a relief and an inspiration, diversity is an initiative that will constantly be part of your company. The goal then is not to “fix” or “solve” diversity, it’s to encourage it.

Something to share?

If you or your team have something to add, please share in the comments or on Twitter.

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For the full list of Diversity Resources, including the research mentioned above, you can view the list here. 

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