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In the Venture Capital World, a Helping Hand for Women and Minorities

THE chief executive of the Center for Venture Education offers a dismal assessment when it comes to the organization’s track record for developing and training minorities and women as venture capitalists.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Susan Mason, left, board chairwoman of the Kauffman Fellows Program, and its chief executive, Patrick Von Bargen.

“Our numbers are awful,” the center’s chief executive, Patrick Von Bargen, said. “But they’re better than in the industry” as a whole.

While technology investors tend to see themselves as fair-minded and socially liberal, they have done a poor job of integrating African-Americans, Hispanics and particularly minority women into their ranks.

Definitive numbers are hard to come by, but people in the industry, which includes some 9,300 investors, say the number of African-American and Hispanic women working as venture capitalists is a few dozen.

The figures seem at odds with the culture of venture capital, its emphasis on merit and performance and its relatively laid-back version of the Wall Street ethos.

But most venture capitalists share some of the characteristics of less progressive-minded cultures. The industry is a classic good ol’ boy’s network that tends to draw its ranks from a homogenous pool — particularly Harvard- and Stanford-trained M.B.A.’s and engineers. When a job opens up, there are lines of bright, ambitious candidates who are well-connected — they know someone or are related to someone or know someone who is related to someone.

Enter the Center for Venture Education in Palo Alto, Calif., which operates the Kauffman Fellows Program, a two-year course of study aimed at fostering venture capitalists. Part of its mission is to help diversify the business by helping to bring along African-Americans, Hispanics and women.

The program recruits aspiring investors — people typically mid-career — places them in venture firms and gives them supplementary training to speed their development. The fellowship includes some budding venture capitalists who have already found firms but want to push ahead in their training.

The accelerated training includes quarterly seminars, mandated mentor training and peer mentoring. The venture firms that participate pay $55,000 in tuition to the Kauffman Fellows Program and pay the salary of the fellow.

Since the program started in 1995, 162 fellows have graduated or are currently matriculating. Of those, 20 percent are women, 7 percent African-American and 1 percent Hispanic, Mr. Von Bargen said, noting the percentages are “much higher” than the industry as a whole.

Thomas E. Darden, managing director of Reliant Equity Investors, a buyout firm in Chicago, got his start in venture capital in the mid-1990s and gives Kauffman much of the credit. He now sits on the program’s board.

Without Kauffman, “I do not believe my résumé in 1995 would have seen the light of day in any venture capital firm in this country,” said Mr. Darden, 48, who is African-American. Despite being an engineer at VC-backed firms, he said he was not part of the networks from which the investors typically draw their partners. Kauffman helped place him at Advent International, and then he went to Wind Point Partners, where he worked on telecommunications service deals.

“Without access to these networks,” he said. “I would not be in this industry. Period.”

The pools from which venture capitalists are often drawn are themselves diversifying. Women represent around 40 percent of the graduates from the Harvard Business School this spring. Yet venture firms tend not to be especially equipped to emphasize diversity or to recruit. They like people who are like them, said Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

“If you ask any VC what it takes to be successful, you’ll get a description that sounds a lot like himself,” Mr. Jurvetson said. “There’s a preference for self-similar individuals.”

And, he said, there is not a lot of time or infrastructure to devote to combing through the piles of résumés that would come in if the application process was more formal.

“It’s a logistics issue,” he said. “People can’t deal with having 10 times more résumés than they do.”

Mr. Jurvetson said his firm has made a concerted effort to diversify, and one way is by finding proxies, like Kauffman, to help screen candidates. He said there are clear reasons to diversify, including the fact that the industry is globalizing, that it brings different perspectives into a discussion and that it offers access to different networks of entrepreneurs.

“Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men,” said Trish Costello, chief executive emeritus for the Center for Venture Education. “If you don’t have women in your partnership or on your advisory board, you are not going to be within those networks.”

The issue is not just relegated to Menlo Park, Calif., and Sand Hill Road, where many top venture firms are based. There’s an effort by Kauffman to diversify venture capital geographically. Witness Kim Sanchez Rael, 41, who is a fellow and a general partner at Flywheel Ventures in Albuquerque.

Ms. Sanchez Rael, 41, invests in material science, energy and product-based technology companies, like TruTouch Technologies, which has developed a non-invasive way to measure blood-alcohol levels.

Ms. Sanchez Rael, who earned an M.B.A. from Stanford and previously worked at Intel and then co-founded a power cell company, said that the Kauffman program has speeded up her development through its mentoring and training. She was particularly pleased by a seminar that the center arranged with Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.

That said, she added that she doesn’t necessarily want to emulate the typical venture capitalist — the pace of life or the hypercompetitive environment; just the returns and financial success.

“Could I be a chameleon and play that game?” she said. “Sure. But at what price? I want to be in this industry and write my own script.”

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/business/15venture.html?_r=1&ref=smallbusiness&oref=slogin

In the Venture Capital World, a Helping Hand for Women and Minorities