It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through what’s been going on.
On Monday, WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new real estate company, reportedly at an over $1 billion valuation. Neumann’s return, flush with the biggest check that one of the best-known firms has ever written, was met with a range of reactions given his tumultuous leadership at WeWork.
A few days earlier, Kimberly Bryant was fired from Black Girls Code, the nonprofit she founded, by the board she appointed.
You’re caught up: We had a return and an ousting happening within a few days.
One common response was that women and people of color would never be owed the same “second chance” as Neumann because first chances are hard enough for the historically overlooked cohort. Allison Byers, the founder of Scroobious, a platform that aims to diversify startups and make founders more venture-backable, described feeling “a muted rage.”
The return came from the white male who misled investors and employees. The ousted was a Black woman who founded a nonprofit to get more diversity into the coding world.
If that’s where the analysis stops, it’s a disservice. As my colleague Dominic-Madori Davis put it, “people talk about these things without the nuance of two things at once, but that’s also with most arguments online. They turn things and people into one-dimensional objects as if that’s easy to parse.” If you’re not careful, you could scroll yourself into an opinion that misses the multifaceted nature of controversies.
Amplifying the difficulties of raising as a diverse founder can end up building a pressure cooker that those who do land a check are forced to operate in. The pressure can then make it harder for those same founders to make even one mistake. Acknowledge the tension, but appreciate that there are a lot of levers to be pulled here, whether it’s pushing for a new cadre of investors in venture, rethinking the role of the asset class and its incentives, or simply allowing that two things can be true at the same time.
Kimberly Bryant founded a nonprofit organization around increasing diversity in the coding space and was removed from her position without due notice. Former employees allege Bryant created a toxic work environment that included the misgendering of an employee.
Neumann, meanwhile, overpromised to his investors and employees about the success of WeWork, costing both parties money and time. He also built a company that transformed the way some people think about real estate — something that traditional venture capital is built to reward.
I’m not invalidating the fair questions being raised about whether Neumann would be given a second chance, or even a first, if he was from a historically overlooked background. Or that only some folks get a chance at remediation, while others are not set up with proper infrastructure to operate within a complex corporate world.
At the end of the day, controversial entrepreneurs aren’t going to put themselves in time out or say no to millions of venture capital. And diverse founders aren’t going to be without flaws.
Simply saying that it’s only hard for diverse founders to get funding doesn’t really make it easier for diverse founders. An investor once told me that oftentimes people will focus on the success of Black founders as people who are unconventional and defeating odds, which perpetuates the idea that they need to be unconventional and a shooting star in order to get funding. In reality, the onus is more on investors to widen their aperture, not on founders to only try to raise if they have the Most Disruptive Idea Ever.
Change doesn’t come from high-level comparisons. That should only be a starting point. And oftentimes, in the rush of crazy news amid a summer slowdown, and it’s easy to find yourself linking two news events in one hot take. The reality is that these stories are intertwined, but they need to be thought about differently — with care, nuance and weight.