STARTUP FOUNDERS PITCH THEIR IDEAS TO … THE PRESIDENT
IN MANY WAYS, it was just like any other demo day, with founder after founder, alternately dressed in t-shirts or suits, giving their standard spiels about their startups’ accomplishments and hyping the long-term business opportunities they’re pursuing. They talked about their degrees from MIT, where they got seed funding, and the personal journeys that brought them to their businesses.
It was the standard fare, except that these founders weren’t pitching angel investors and venture capitalists. They were pitching President Obama. In the White House.
So yeah, Demo Day at the White House—the first in its history—was a little different than demo day at, say, Y Combinator. But, then again, it was supposed to be. The goal of this event, which kicked off on Tuesday and convened 90 entrepreneurs from across the country, wasn’t to raise funding. It was to raise awareness—awareness about the glaring absence of women and minorities in the tech sector and the toll that takes on the U.S. economy.
“There’s never been a better time to launch an idea and bring it to scale right here in the United States right now,” President Obama said to a room full of entrepreneurs and industry leaders. “But we’ve got to make sure we take advantage of this moment by tapping all the talent America has to offer no matter who they are or where they set up shop.”
Not Good for Business
Standing behind the President as he delivered his address were more than a dozen business owners. They included Christopher Ategeka, the Ugandan-born founder of Privail, which makes rapid response HIV tests, as well as Privahini Bradoo, founder of BlueOak Resources, an e-waste recycling company that WIRED covered last year. The majority of the founders were either women, minorities, or both, and that was no accident. All of them were hand-picked and summoned to the White House to serve as examples of the valuable talent the tech community too often leaves behind. As President Obama noted, only around 3 percent of venture-backed companies today are led by women; just 1 percent of them are founded by African-Americans.
In his speech, the president laid out the gravity of the problem in no uncertain terms. “It’s always hard to get in front of the right people,” the President said. “But sometimes it’s harder if you’re a woman or underrepresented minority, who all too often have to fight just to get a seat at the table.”
And yet, evidence also shows time and again that diverse teams outperform their more homogenous counterparts. The most recent evidence of this phenomenon came in a study released by First Round Capital, which showed that over the last decade, First Round’s investments in companies that had at least one female founder performed 63 percent better than its investments in all-male teams.
“That lack of participation from everybody isn’t good for business,” President Obama said, noting that “the next Steve jobs might be named Stephanie or Esteban.”
The Talent We Need
These statistics won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the growing movement to diversify tech over the last few years. They likely didn’t come as a surprise to any of the tech leaders gathered at the White House today, either, including former Googler and United States chief technology officer Megan Smith, AOL founder Steve Case, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, and others. And yet, the fact that the White House has taken up the issue itself illustrates just how much power the tech industry now holds in determining the economic future not just of the country, but of its citizens.
Which is why, earlier this year, the Obama administration put out a call to the industry to take specific steps to close this gap, and, as WIRED reported earlier today, the industry answered accordingly. As part of the Demo Day activities, the White House announced a slew of unprecedented commitments from tech leaders, including a pledge from 40 venture capital firms to take part in an annual diversity survey, as well as promises from companies including Box, Amazon, Pinterest, and more to consider more diverse candidates in the hiring process.
Meanwhile, the White House announced the expansion of several tech-focused government programs, including the TechHire initiative, which aims to train unemployed Americans for careers in tech through coding bootcamps and partnerships with tech companies. The administration also scored commitments from 100 engineering school deans to increase its recruiting and retention efforts among female and minority students.
“This is something we’re seeing again and again and again: We are not producing all the technical talent, and all the engineers that we need,” the President said, adding that that’s often because people from underrepresented groups in tech often don’t feel supported and leave the field before they’ve really begun. In not providing those support systems early, President Obama said, “We deprive ourselves of the talent we need.”
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