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Hundreds of Start-Ups Tell Investors: Diversify, or Keep Your Money

The Founders for Change coalition includes, from left, Howie Liu of Airtable, Andre Haddad of Turo, Todd Berman of Loom, Sarah Leary of Nextdoor, Jason Brown of Tally, Sarah Nahm of Lever, Eddie Medina of BetterUp, Amit Sharma of Narvar and Rosanna Myers of Carbon Robotics.


When Trevor McFedries set out last year to raise money for Brud, his robotics and artificial intelligence start-up, he found himself in many meetings with “a ton of white guy” venture capitalists.

So Mr. McFedries, who is black, and his co-founder, Sara DeCou, a Latino woman, added a condition for investors: The pair would accept money only from venture firms that had a woman or a person of color in a position to write them a check.

“It was counterintuitive for us to raise money from a bunch of white guys who want to extract all the value from the world,” said Mr. McFedries, who eventually collected several million dollars from firms that met the condition. “We’re interested in reshaping the way that tech looks.”

www.nytimes.com
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26 March 2018


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