Expose your own biases
Learn how a school teacher can become a venture capitalist from Vanessa Colella
"She is as strategic as she is bold," said Arvind Purushotham, Managing Director at Citi Ventures in Palo Alto, about Vanessa Colella. Indeed, when I asked her about what could be done in venture capital to attract more diverse investors, Vanessa got very serious. She described how the industry is changing across the world, thus creating new opportunities that should be taken by women and minorities, rather than expecting that they will be given to them.
"Humans are neurologically wired to react to quick changes. We learn about the 'fight or flight mode' in early science classes because it is embedded in humans by nature. However, a change that happens slowly is more challenging for people to see and react to," Vanessa's biological background was speaking.
"A change that happens slowly is more challenging for people to see and react to."
Recognizing such hidden changes is a venture investor's job. That is why I am a big advocate of systems thinking: if you were not schooled in this art, it's never too late to study it on your own. As for Vanessa, not only did she graduate from MIT with a degree in biology, but she also taught courses on the dynamics of complex systems. She always thought long-term, even when she started teaching kids right out of college. "I was interested not only in education but more so in the areas that require large-scale change and transformation. I joined the charter corps of Teach for America because public education, particularly for the underserved communities that we were working with, was one such area.
"I was a molecular geneticist by training, so I taught science to seventh-graders. I was fascinated by what we could do in the education field that could help change the trajectory for students, but also the system overall. When one works as a teacher, one gets a really great grasp of all kinds of challenges and issues that students and teachers face every day in the classroom. You can get a ground-level view of what works and what doesn't, but you have less — if any — of that bird's eye view of the overall system. This leads to a poor understanding of how the things that work can be scaled," she artfully explained by breaking down complex issues into units.
"I started spending a lot of time in technology and education, with different sorts of tools that could help drive change across the education system. And I realized that I just didn't know enough to drive that kind of transformation from a single classroom. I thought a lot about how behavior and technology are changing, and I needed to learn how those two things can come together to make a systemic change," Vanessa continued.
"I went back to graduate school to learn from Seymour Papert and Mitchel Resnick, pioneers in technology and education, at the MIT Media Lab. One of the most interesting things about it was that the corporations were bringing in real-world challenges or problems that they saw for students to connect those challenges to technology. It was a fascinating way to realize how little I understood about corporations."
By her early 30s, Vanessa had never worked for any company, staying in some form of academia — either studying or teaching. She decided to work for McKinsey for two reasons. "Firstly, the notion of transformational change that consulting companies help their clients overtake was intriguing. Secondly, I read a lot about how much one learns about the intricacies of business by working in consulting, and I knew nothing."
The academic experience made Vanessa a quick study. She swiftly accelerated from there to working at one of the largest tech companies at the time, Yahoo!. However, it wasn't a big corporation that intrigued Vanessa. She got extremely curious about rapidly growing small businesses, aka startups. She could help them deal with the management challenges that they had and achieving their aspirations most effectively. She tested her abilities at US Venture Partners (USVP) as an entrepreneur-in-residence for a while and got recruited by Citibank soon after.
When we were speaking about diversity, Vanessa was fairly optimistic. "Venture capital, as an industry, is undergoing a significant structural transformation. It is slow and, therefore, barely noticeable to the untrained eye. When we look back 20 years from now, we will see this period as the time of great change. I think that gives us many opportunities to bring new kinds of people into the field and change mindsets and behavior. But it won't just happen on its own without enough effort from everyone involved.
"We need to make it a habit of making sure that the voices around the table are heard and funded."
"Firstly, we need to expose our own biases, which are natural for both men and women. There are a lot of studies on the matter. One of them (unrelated to venture capital) by which I, personally, was intrigued, studied the auditioning of musicians for an orchestra. To exclude gender bias, they started auditioning people behind a curtain. However, when people were coming up, the judges could still recognize women walking across the stage in high heels from men walking in shoes. So they had to make the musicians show up in socks, to exclude that factor too! This highlights just how much work we need to do to address bias.
"Secondly, and most importantly, we have to stay focused on the goal of making our environment more diverse. The biggest danger is that we make a little bit of progress and think that we don't need to do anything anymore. It makes us slide right back to where we were. We need to make it a habit of making sure that the voices around the table are heard and funded."