Diversity, Risk Appetite & Action: The Secret in Value Creation when Visionaries and Investors from Diverse Backgrounds Jointly Build Companies

Last month I had the honor of being invited to co-host the ‘Investing in Startups and Identifying the Rocketship’ (ISIR) Summit together with Aakriti ‘Aku’ Srikanth. Aku is a prime example of a young Indian woman that immigrated to the U.S. to take advantage of the chances that the high-tech industry had to offer. Already in her first year of Master‘s study, Aku won a $100,000 competition for utilizing AI technology to match university students’ personal preferences to campuses’ many available activities. [1]

Since then, she has become an advocate for women in AI and a catalyst for startups in Silicon Valley. Recently she started to support Vendia, a potential next unicorn venture that raised $5.1M seed funding during COVID-19 [2], with the development of a multi-cloud serverless application platform. Aku is well-connected in the tech scene and hence brought together a group of renowned tech leaders from diverse cultural and professional backgrounds at the ISIR Summit to ‘identify the rocketship, involving discussions about indicators that define value creation and investment in venture development.

Yael Karov, Director of Google AI, opened the Summit by sharing her views about developing world leading AI products. Like Aku, Yael is non-Native American. Driven to solve the hardest questions in computer science, Yael fell in love with machine learning long before AI has entered the hype cycle. Yael is convinced that good product development starts with the right team, the right questions and the right problem statement.

Ginger Software, a company that Yael founded in 2007, is a great example for Yael‘s success bringing AI products to the market. As a non-Native English speaker, Yael had to study English pronunciation and grammar like many others. After spending time and effort on manually correcting her own English, she asked herself how software could help her and others with the tedious job of correction. [3] With her bias for action and background in computer science, it was natural for her to write a program that would help billions of people around the world. In 2014, Intel acquired Ginger’s patented technology for $30M.

Tasneem Minadakis, Engineering Director at Google EMEA, shares Yael‘s view on product development. Tasneem also derives passion from working on problems that help simplify everyday people’s life. [4] In her view, building tech products starts with finding creative ways to receive valuable customer feedback for an idea way before building a product. When Tasneem worked at Uber, her engineering team validated the product market fit of Uber Pass, a monthly subscription model, in just a few weeks. By simply sending a pop-up message to every user with a request to call the Uber hotline, the product was validated in a few hours after millions of users had called the hotline.

Over and above, Tasneem is convinced that diverse work environments with willingness to change for the better and strive to be self-critical are the key to product development. Sarah Clatterbuck and Lucia Terrenghi, colleagues of Tasneem at Google, strongly agree with her that diversity and critical thinking are necessary for promoting innovation within enterprises. In this case, Sarah and Lucia put strong focus on diversity in tech in the light of Silicon Valley‘s diversity problem during the Summit.

Although racial and ethnic groups are closely balanced in the Bay Area, the tech industry is still very much dominated by ”old boys clubs“ that are notoriously bad at welcoming and celebrating people from diverse backgrounds. [5] Many tech heavyweights, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, have woken up and started diversity campaigns, but change happens slowly.

Shruthi Rao, Co-Founder of Vendia and mother of four boys, has learned throughout her career that sameness and „least common denominator“ approaches don’t work for inventive people or companies. At Vendia, hence she established a strict “Kind Humans Only“ policy that encourages an environment where people are strongest when they work together effectively and harmoniously, while retaining their individuality. [6]

„I learned to challenge the status quo when I was fourteen and asked an Indian boy out for a date“, Shruthi joked. ”It is important that we teach our children in early childhood to be self-critical and think outside the box.“ Shruthi added. Shruthi‘s diversity policy is not only reflected in Vendia‘s code of conduct but also in the projects that Vendia pursues. Recently, Vendia helped 600+ decentrally organized Black Live Matters groups to connect their data sets and solve their disparate data problem. “You wonder what business opportunities you will find once you are open to diversity projects“, Shruthi concluded.

Hearing about the secret in venture development when self-critical minds from diverse backgrounds with a willingness to change for the better come together and jointly build companies, the ISIR Summit inspired me to reflect on my own passion to build more culturally aware and collaborative business models within and across companies. Cross-company collaboration will be ever more important for hyper-connected industries and a key determinant for future business growth.

In fact, corporates that respect working environments where people are encouraged to retain their individuality, as in the case of Vendia, will improve, realize collaborative synergies with others, and create “multipliers” to promote sustainable growth. On the contrary, corporates that continue to worship corporate cults with an unhealthy belief in their company’s own importance will fail to innovate due to wrong ego’s in leadership causing arrogance, self-centered ambition and no space for collaboration. [7]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/profile/aakriti-srikanth/#4ed61a316ff5

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/vendia-raises-5-1m-for-its-multi-cloud-serverless-platform/

[3] https://www.gingersoftware.com/yael-karov/

[4] https://www.modelexpand.com/blog/engineer-profile-tasneem-minadakis-director-at-google

[5] https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/17/the-future-of-diversity-and-inclusion-in-tech/

[6] https://www.vendia.net/kind-humans-only-policy

[7] https://medium.com/@ameet/why-ego-is-the-enemy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-a4eae45a81d8