We’re pleased to be working with the Kapor Center’s Women of Color in Computing Collaborative on research around how women** of color fund and resource their earlier-stage tech startups.
We’ll be conducting this research over the course of Q1 and Q2 2020 (see below for how you can help!).
June 2020 Update: We’ve experienced not one, but two exogenous events – COVID-19 (with the resulting economic downturn and work-from-home) and weeks-long protests around racial (in)justice in the US -that will likely impact the trajectory of this research and the entire startup landscape. This reinforces the important work involved in this research as we continue to gather results.
Description:
This research seeks to identify the ways in which women of color are successfully funding and resourcing their tech and VC-backed startups in the pre-Series B stages of company growth. To the extent possible, we aim to highlight the strategies that have proven most successful and least successful across the study group, as well as differences between women of color founders and the general population of women founders, and further single out any areas of opportunity that haven’t been fully utilized or realized.
Note: Based on current resources, portions of this research are focused specifically on Black women founders. We’re actively working to expand this to include all women of color (see #3 below).
** We encourage participation from women, women-identified, and non-binary founders. We also invite male founders to participate in our survey.
[All survey responses will remain anonymous unless you give us permission. All findings will be publicly and openly available. Women 2.0 and the Kapor Center do not profit from this research.]
How you can help:
There are three main ways our community can help us.
- Founders: We’ll be collecting data via survey from any founder of earlier-stage companies (pre-seed to pre-Series B). This includes founders from any background (yes, including men) – part of our research is comparative. We’ll also be conducting interviews with founders who are women of color for Phase II of our research.
- Community Leaders: If you aren’t a founder, but have access to founders – organizations, collaboratives, fund portfolios, accelerators, etc – and would be willing to provide us access, that’s incredibly valuable as well.
- Additional Research Support: We would like to expand parts of our research (especially the Phase II interview portion), and are seeking additional funds to do so.
To get involved, feel free to fill out the form below.