EforAll is a community organization that helps under-represented individuals successfully start and grow their businesses through business training, mentorship, and an extensive support network. If you’ve read my book, The New Builders, you likely know quite a bit about them (and my fondness for what they’re doing). Our systems to support diverse entrepreneurs are lagging, which is why EforAll plays such a critical role in helping foster the next generation of entrepreneurs in our community – taking both a broad view of entrepreneurship and long view for creating impact. They’ve worked with hundreds of companies across the US and continue to expand their reach and the markets in which they are working. I’m both grateful for the work they do…
Category
Diversity
Bolster’s Board Benchmark Study | Shout-out to Execs Looking for Independent Director Roles
As we’ve recognized the need to diversify our networks to better diversify our companies and company boards, Foundry has been working with a number of firms such as HimforHer, Valence, ReadySet, and others. We’re also partnering with Bolster – a company that, although we’re not direct investors, we have strong ties to through several of our partner funds who are investors as well as through our long, long time relationships with Bolster’s CEO, Matt Blumberg (who was CEO of Return Path in the Foundry portfolio) and Micah Mador (former Foundry Network and Community Catalyst and now Partnerships Manager at Bolster). Today, Bolster released their Board Benchmarking survey analyzing the diversity, composition, and compensation of 250 private company boards (including over 50 Foundry portfolio…
Board Diversity / Network Diversity
Fred Wilson’s recent post on diversity was thought-provoking on several levels and got me thinking not just about board composition but more broadly about the question of networks and how relying too heavily on existing networks can limit the diversity of those networks. There are many things that we (meaning the tech and venture industries, but I’m also shining this light on myself here) need to do to better promote and support equity and diversity in our work. To some extent at the core of this challenge is that many of us have limited diversity in our own personal and professional networks (see this interesting take from Rick Klau of Google on this topic). Fred’s post helped clarify one of…