The best people to solve the diversity crisis in tech

We’ll know the stats, Black and Hispanics represent 30% of the population, but less than 3% of the invested venture capital. This number has actually decreased two years in a row. It's a national diversity crisis. This, in spite of the fact that today, we have more VCs and nonprofits dedicated to increasing Black and Hispanics representation in tech, than ever before. Since 2020, we’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars from banks (BofA, GS, Barclays) and corporations (Google, Square) dedicated to this cause, but it only seems like it's getting worse, not better. 

So how do we fix it?

The best way to solve the diversity crisis is to fund more ex-tech founders to work on solving this problem. Tech founders are experts at disrupting and changing big industries. Initiatives that take decades, tech founders do it in years. They get big results quickly. Unfortunately, almost none of the VCs and non-profits working on this diversity crisis, are ex-tech founders. Because these VCs and non-profits are not trained in disrupting big industries, it's really difficult, almost impossible for them to make a true change. No matter how much capital they have access to.

The best example of an ex-founder that's succeeding at solving the tech crisis is Michael Ellison - He’s the founder of Codepath, which is reprogramming higher education to create the most diverse generation of engineers and CTOs. It has 20,000 alumni from 500 colleges who are now working at 2,000 companies. Prior to this, Michael co-founded Segment, which was sold to Twillio for $3B. What we need is more Michaels tackling this problem.