We Raised $50m+ To Back New Venture Capitalists Who Don’t Look Like Me
It’s weird to try and help fund people who are going to compete with me, right? Well, I couldn’t be more excited to do just this.
Ok, the headline is announcing Screendoor, a $50m+ collaboration of some like-minded early stage investors to back new VCs from underrepresented groups (basically people who don’t look like me). Alex Konrad/Forbes covered the announcement and has some good details, plus our own blogpost. This initiative matters a lot to me because we’ve purposefully designed our fund (Homebrew) to not grow in partnership size and not be multigenerational. So in some ways, alongside the companies we’ve backed directly, Screendoor represents the best way for our values to live on beyond our firm. A few additions to the links above that I think are worth emphasizing or sharing our thinking.
Satya and I have been thinking about ways to punch above our weight in this area since we started Homebrew, but in order to have the credibility to do so, needed to get our own firm built first. We want future “Homebrews” to be started by all different sorts of people and believed adding capital commitments to mentorship would be the best way to accomplish this. It can’t just be about supportive tweets or ‘office hours’ – write the damn check.
