Highlights from our 7th Cohort (During Quarantine)

GoingVC is excited to announce it’s 7th Cohort as well as our all new VC Talent Platform, giving VC firms direct access to search and hire from our talent database. The new talent database includes Cohort 7’s sixty-two new members who are currently getting educated, trained, and hired through our education, investor, and career services programs.

This December, members will share their investment theses and graduate from the program. Topics include fintech, edtech, and many others, including a team focusing on healthcare, COVID-19, and societal changes. Using our enhanced and expanded recruitment, admissions, diversity, and VC career services strategies and operations, we are proud to celebrate our largest and most diverse cohort to date with at least 52% of the cohort identifying as an underrepresented minority (URM), which GoingVC tracks URM members identifying as Black, Latinx, and/or women.

Program Recruitment & Admissions

Despite much of 2020’s tumultuous times, GoingVC Cohort 7 members found the program a valuable investment to make in efforts to bolster up their VC careers during quarantine. Not only did the team see double the increase in applications, but this boost was attributed to the representation of more Black, Latinx, and women. ~52% of the cohort identifies as URM.

These outcomes confirmed and proved the phase two methods of GoingVC’s diversity strategy, including prioritizing program recruitment from non-traditional pathways and from Black, Latinx, and female-focused communities. The new admits come with professional experience from data analytics, consulting, venture capital, accelerators, foundations, investment banking, product management, biotech, their own startups, and more; opening up industry access to those outside of the nation’s top business schools and investment banks.

Cohort members also span from the US to Mexico, Europe, Canada, and Australia; bringing in insights from international markets. Cohort 7 is a group that showcases the potential the industry can reach, if all are successfully hired. Typically at GoingVC, 41.5% of our graduates join VC within their first year of completing the program.

Program Diversity

Figure 2: Funding to Black- and Latinx-Founded US Companies

Creating access to the industry for women and most especially women of color has beneficial ripple effects to teams and their portfolios. The October 2020 Women in Venture Capital report on The Untapped Potential of Women-led Funds states that “female funders are 2X more likely to invest in startups with one female founder, and more than 3X more likely to invest in a female CEO.

That means any investment in women-led funds stands to have a significantly amplified impact on female founders downstream.” The women represented in this cohort are a reflection of the likelihood that there is a pipeline of women who have the potential to break into VC and can further invest in female founders while possibly launching and leading new women-led funds that initiate the multiplier effect.

This logic also applies to Black and Latinx VCs where similar industry barriers are faced. In Crunchbase’s Funding to Black and Latinx Founders report, BLCK VC states that “81 percent of all VC firms don’t have a single Black investor. In a sample of 160 firms with more than two people, only five have at least two Black investors.” Investments made in Black and Latinx founders remain significantly low, as seen in Figure 2, including in 2020 where Black and Latinx founders have raised ~$2.3 billion, but only represent ~2.6% of the total funds raised this year.

In a time when the world believes that Black Lives Matter after the attacks against Geroge Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Christian Cooper and the many others negatively affected; VC can be a vehicle that could bring many closer to justice through equitable hiring and investments in Black and Latinx VCs as well as founders.

Opening up the doors to VC allows for more job creation by portfolio companies, opportunities to build more inclusive products, and ways to reduce the wealth gaps experienced by Black and Latinx founders and their communities. Inclusivity is not only “good business”, but should become an imperative across investment criteria in order to realize sustainable returns.

VC Hiring

Figure 3: GoingVC’s VC Talent Platform

As GoingVC’s cohorts grow, the program will continue to educate members on inclusive investing practices and culture while connecting our talent to firms. The recent launch of GoingVC’s VC Talent Platform, a talent database for firms to search for their next hire (Figure 3), will facilitate these direct relationships and encourage unbiased hiring practices by avoiding pattern matching. The Platform provides an overview of our GoingVC Members and their professional attributes including:

▶ GoingVC cohort

▶ Industry sector interests (ie. Enterprise, EdTech etc.)

▶ If they are searching for work

▶ Current location

▶ Preferred VC location (eg. Boston)

▶ Education level: Undergraduate degree / Graduate degree / MBA

▶ Resumes

▶ LinkedIn URLs

In just under eight weeks of completing the program, a few Cohort 7 members have already secured full-time VC roles while others have made it past the second round interview. Faiz Jalia, for example, recently joined an early stage fund (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Cohort 7 GoingVC member, Faiz Jalia, announces his full-time offer at an early stage fund

With more results like these, in the long run, we intend to see more inclusive teams at funds with high-return investments from diverse portfolios!

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