Finding the right startup for you: A conversation with Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou

Breakthrough startups can transform industries, even whole societies. (Remember life before the gig economy?) They can also alter the fortunes of the hundreds and thousands of employees who work at the winning companies. There’s just one challenge: Those professionals have often been overwhelmingly white and male. Today, many startups and large tech companies are setting out to change that.

There’s many reasons to do so: Companies with greater ethnic and racial diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry medians, and those with high gender diversity are 15% more likely to outperform peers. Diversity and innovation also go hand-in-hand, which translates into higher revenue and profit margins. 

But, much remains to be done. Google, often a workplace trendsetter, boosted female hires 4.5% while women in leadership slipped by 2.4%, according to its 2019 diversity report. “Even incremental progress in hiring, progression and retention is hard-won,” the company says.

LinkedIn Editors reached out to Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou, founders of Project Include, which aims to foster diversity at tech companies, to find out what’s happening on the frontlines in the fight for inclusivity — and how you can find the right startup fit.

LinkedIn: Why did you start Project Include? Has the diversity situation in tech changed since you launched? If so, how? 

Tracy Chou and Ellen Pao: We started Project Include in 2016 with six other women to provide meaningful, effective solutions and actions for tech leaders. As diversity and inclusion became more prominent in discussions about our industry, we were also hearing people ask what they could do; they wanted to do the right thing but didn’t know what the right thing was. With Project Include, we aimed to guide them toward inclusion of everyone, comprehensive solutions, and metrics and benchmarks for accountability.

Since then, we’ve seen many companies adopt better metrics and targets for diversity. We’ve seen startups make meaningful progress, including ones we’ve worked with that have teams that are 10% Black, 10% Latinx, 45% female, and 5% nonbinary. We’ve also seen the opposite; companies focused on binary gender end up sputtering in race and diversity in the leadership ranks. We continue to see a dearth of Black and Latinx investors at the highest levels in venture capital firms. We continue to see homogeneous tech leadership at big companies, especially in the categories with the most power like engineering and product.

What issues are endemic to tech startups for people who are not white and male? 

The prevailing culture and accepted best practices of tech startups are designed for white men of privilege, and the further someone is from that archetype, the harder it is to even participate in the game, much less succeed. Hiring processes are stacked against people who didn’t go to prestigious universities, previously work at a select group of elite companies, or know employees at the company who can prepare them. Team bonding activities after-hours exclude people who have familial obligations and can’t easily or affordably get childcare. Even when there is diversity on teams, inclusion is often lacking, such that leadership, opportunities, and decision-making continue to be driven by the same homogeneous set of workers and leaders, and different perspectives are not included in product, design, engineering or business. Technical women are repeatedly questioned and forced to prove that they are “technical enough.” Black and brown people bump up against persistently racist stereotypes in the workplace and not infrequently get mistaken for janitorial or serving staff at events. Asian employees hit a “bamboo ceiling” that can block them from promotion beyond a certain level. Those living at the intersections of different dimensions of marginalization, for example Black and Latina women, experience multiple, layered forms of discrimination. All of this barely begins to describe the issues around diversity, equity and inclusion at tech startups.

Tracy has written that, “Every company has some way of hiding or muddling the data on women actually in engineering roles.” If that’s the case, how can a prospective job candidate evaluate a tech startup’s inclusivity?

The best way is to speak with people from underrepresented backgrounds who work at the company or recently left, and to ask them what their experience is like and how the company thinks about diversity and inclusion. Some caveats apply: Current employees may have incentive to paint a more flattering picture of what it’s like to work there, especially if they are trying to recruit you, and past employees are also a biased pool to draw from, as they are the ones who’ve chosen to leave. However, this is the kind of information that will be most useful with respect to subjective experience at a company. 

Posts on job or company review sites are hard to trust, since they’re anonymous and not vetted; sometimes company leadership or HR ask their employees to write positive reviews, and with smaller companies it’s too difficult for people to write true reviews and include useful details without de-anonymizing themselves. 

Apart from speaking to current or former employees, which is most useful, there are a few other data points that can serve as preliminary information: The diversity of the current team, leadership, board members and investors; how the company represents itself in marketing materials; and what the company values are. If a company has annual reports, all the better to review. Many will not, particularly smaller companies; in that case, whatever is available from the company website, online profiles of employees and press coverage will have to do. 

Do you recommend that a candidate ask during the job interview how the company works to achieve diverse representation and unbiased compensation?

Yes, for all candidates. If you care about [working at] a place where all employees are treated fairly and encouraged to contribute and thrive, you want a place that is inclusive in all areas. And these are two important components. I would also encourage them to ask how diversity and inclusion is promoted and supported — and what the budget for D&I initiatives is.

Let’s say a candidate gets a job offer from a tech startup and salaries there are negotiated; how should they prepare for this discussion? Is it possible for them to evaluate the fairness of the offer they're receiving relative to members of other, more represented groups?  

Ask about how salaries are set. Look for salary bands based on roles and experience. Ask how experience is measured. Look for distance traveled as a measure and for criteria that go beyond just years’ of experience in tech. Ask around and look at other salaries to get a sense of market rates for your job level and years of experience. Square engineer Jackie Luo’s Twitter feed shares some detailed comparables.