1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity (Part 3)

Heather Hiles: I spoke to the incoming class at Hass business school. I looked at hundreds of folks there and saw a very small minority of black and brown faces and even a smaller minority of folks who are from this country. I said, “How many of you are planning to go into investing?” Most hands went up. I say, “You’re at a deficit because you will be missing whole groups of opportunities of founders with who you have no interaction with and who will be creating the best solutions in the world.”

At Black Ops, we were able to get many LPs from the likes of Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Andreessen Horowitz. The VCs realized that there are communities of founders that they never encountered. I’m talking to 15 founders a week. We see the best and the brightest in our community and we will invest in them.

Sramana Mitra: I want to ask you a few statistic questions. Given your vantage point, you may have some range. How many black founders are there in America right now, both men and women?

Heather Hiles: I don’t know the latest numbers. I don’t want to misquote right now. I haven’t looked at the numbers recently enough. There are people who are collecting that information at the NAIC.

Sramana Mitra: Just a ballpark. Are we talking tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands? There are 400,000 startups registered every month in America right now.

Heather Hiles: I don’t know what portion. I think of the total amount of organizations that are coming online every month, I would venture to say that something like 7% to 8% of that is black-founded. We make up about 12% of the population. We’re slightly under that percentage but not far out of sync with representation in the country.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about education and not having access to knowledge. When you look at the schools where technical disciplines are taught and not just the Stanfords and MITs but also the large engineering schools that create the pipeline of trained engineers, what is the representation of blacks in that community?

Heather Hiles: I should be up to date with the statistics. At the Gates Foundation, I watched the CS programs throughout the country. We are poorly represented in the pipeline of education, especially when you look at college. We are behind. The majority of black youths coming out of K12 schools are behind our counterparts academically. The majority of us do not have the skills to enter into CS programs. We’re very underrepresented.

The last time I checked, we were something like 2% to 3% of the student population in undergraduate CS programs. You do bring up a good point. I graduated from business school at Yale. There were four of us African Americans in our class. We’re certainly seeing underrepresentation on the business side as well as the technical side. It is one of those problems where we are running faster and harder to catch up for the under-educated and under-resourced experiences we’re having in our K12.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity
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