Levelling the playing field

Is this chart prepared by Harvard Business School academics Paul Gompers and Sophie Wang really the best that the venture model can deliver?

For doctors and lawyers the entrance into the industry was relatively meritocratic as exams can be designed to unbias .With leadership comes the will to make the changes to do the work of attracting and retaining talented people from all demographics.

The question is whether corporate venturing as a profession can do better than venture capitalists relying on the good ol’ boy network and using pattern recognition to find others like them or the types of successful entrepreneur in the past.

Concentrating on the who does CVCs should enable greater professionalism and longevity among units as they think through who they recruit, retain and how they are organised. This is why the Global Corporate Venturing Leadership Society’s Diversity and Inclusion committee was formed in the wake of its successful Women in Venture lunches to look at the questions and best practices in this area.

There is an opportunity to spread the best practices of the top 20%, which do 80% of deals, to the other 80% and encourage new entrants to start more effectively by thinking through diversity and unit structure. But first – perhaps – has to come thinking how to find and support more diverse and inclusive entrepreneurs and making these companies even more successful than many already seem to be.

Together, the industry should make the allocation of capital to the right entrepreneurs more efficient and hence the world a better place if it can go from a local, lifestyle business model of venture capital to something that better enables society’s stakeholders and interests by in part making them look more like the societies that they are investing in.

Please click here to read the Global Corporate Venturing Leadership Society’s Diversity and Inclusion committee’s recommendations on improving diversity, equity and inclusion within CVC dealflow pipelines and portfolios.