About a week ago we hosted a phenomenally successful trivia night fundraiser for Forward Through Ferguson. It seems fitting to keep asking: How do you make an entrepreneurship ecosystem more equitable for women and entrepreneurs of color?
Thanks to a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, St. Louis has had the opportunity to ask and start to answer this question. Even with more than a year under our belt (in a region that has been talking about racial equity for the past four years) we have just started to scratch the surface. The work started with a coalition of the willing and available (officially known as the St. Louis Equity in Entrepreneurship Collective and one of my clients.) The Collective has done racial and gender equity training participated in identifying ecosystem problems and brainstorming solutions and is collecting so we will someday know how many women and entrepreneurs of color are in our ecosystem from ideation to exit.
This is generational work. We think it starts by creating a baseline understanding of and common language to discuss systemic racism, sexism, and gender oppression. We’re looking at how the system of wayfinding and navigation work (or don’t) for all entrepreneurs and how the problems finding and accessing resources compounds disparities for some unrepresented entrepreneurs. There are questions of what type of entrepreneurship this includes (Lifestyle or high growth? Mainstreet or high-tech?) and we are wrestling with issues of power and privilege, the myth of meritocracy and in the inherent competitiveness of entrepreneurship where there are real winners and losers.
One recurring conversation is the dynamic tension between where the money is and what kinds of companies women and entrepreneurs of color typically build. The money and power are in tech-based scalable companies. They get investments and create wealth for owners and investors. They are preferred by policymakers, politicians and popular culture. They are what every economic development person wants founders to build and grow in their MSA. Women and entrepreneurs of color are underrepresented among tech company founders, while also being virtually non-existent in investment portfolios and practically absent from venture capital leadership circles.
I tell my clients to spend time thinking about what kind of company they want to build. There is nothing wrong with building a lifestyle company or a small, local business. Not every idea is scalable and not every founder/owner wants to scale. What’s unacceptable is being prevented from building the company you want. What’s unacceptable is not having a seat at the table or being marginalized for building the companies that create wealth for families and neighborhoods even if they don’t create wealth for investors. It’s unacceptable to cut ourselves off from the path of scalable venture creation because others underestimate our capability or discount the potential of the markets we seek to tap.
It’s about getting investors to think differently about what and who is fundable. And creating new investment vehicles to put confidence money into potential serial entrepreneurs from marginalized backgrounds. It’s also about helping founders to think differently about what they are capable of building and how building ventures that require skills and people beyond themselves gives them the power of profits to close generational wealth and wage gaps.
