By Lindsay Siegel, Head of Impact at Company Ventures
When founders begin the process of building their companies, they start with a beautiful, blank slate. And on it, they have the opportunity to write their own story and develop a narrative for their business with the potential for that story to become as true as they make it.
But if on that page, they are writing a copy of a story that already exists, one that they think is true about founding a company – maybe it’s Steve Jobs’s story, or Mark Zuckerberg’s story, or Brian Chesky’s story – then they are limiting themselves.
I love working with founders because they think anything is possible—even their most outlandish ideas. And yet in venture capital we keep nudging founders to build similar companies, following the same limiting patterns. Research has made clear that pattern breaking is the process for innovation and the path for success in sound venture capital, but instead of mold-breaking ideas, we find ourselves with more Ubers for X and Monday.coms for Y.
There is more evidence than ever that we need a new vision upon which to base a startup story—a completely new one that hasn’t yet been told. Imagine with all of your new founder optimism, a work environment where Sunday Scaries did not exist. A culture where friends and colleagues became overlapping terms for everyone on your team. A place where you could choose how much of yourself to reveal, but knew that no matter your choice, you’d be embraced.
Imagine the type of businesses we would build, the type of thoughtful and impactful technologies we could create.
Now envision this blank slate starting to fill with ideas and personalities. The page gets colorful. A future starts to take shape for this business. This early moment is when the spark of culture is established. This is when trust is built, and when the founder becomes a leader.
To leverage this pivotal moment, my colleagues and I developed a playbook for early stage founders, in collaboration with J.P. Morgan, to provide the tools to build better companies in accordance with their leadership journey.
I particularly love this reflection captured in the playbook from Alyssa Ruderman Hager, co-founder of Lantern (recently acquired by Wellthy). “At Lantern, our commitment to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, identity, and experience drives the teams that we build, the leaders we cultivate, and the users that we serve. To other founders, I would simply say that products are a reflection of the teams that build them. If your entire leadership suite has gone to college, is Catholic, is straight, is white, grew up in a rural area, comes from a two-parent household (you get my point)...you're missing out on an opportunity to represent and serve folks who have differing vantage points, and that's a real failure for both your internal culture and your users.”
The DEI Playbook does not fully solve culture challenges at a startup—but the feedback we’ve received since launching it in January is that the actionable and high quality resources within it are a valuable first step for creating a better culture.
Join us on May 25 for the first event in a series called Investing in Diversity. This will be an opportunity to learn with other founders and investors about the lens through which we build better culture and build better trust as an organization. At its earliest days, companies can fill the blank slate with frameworks and processes that build both a different work environment and ultimately a more successful organization.