Hooked on No Excuses. If you want a diverse company, prioritize it.

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” - Neil Peart, Freewill

If you don't seek reasons to cultivate a diverse team, this post may not be what you're looking for. But if you recognize diversity’s significance for your company’s sustainability, this post will help you solidify its place as a top priority.

What's going on?

At early-stage, the pressure on you, as a founder, to recruit great leaders is intense. You start out connecting to and recruiting talent within your immediate network. Referrals lead to more referrals — headcount is doubling, and growth is happening. But you're quickly realizing your intent to hire a well-rounded team with diverse backgrounds and perspectives isn't panning out as planned. Hiring momentum is hard to argue with, and your pressure cooker of 20 other hair-on-fire to-dos tends to outweigh any plans you had to diversify your team or pay attention to early systems and practices that support your goals. While this realization eats at you, what generally happens next is nothing. And even though this choice isn't nefarious, it's still intentional. After all, with continued growth, you'll eventually hire a people leader. All this can be their problem to solve, right?

Why does it matter?

Delaying decisions and actions creates diversity debt and sends a message about what is a priority and what isn't at your startup. And this message impedes your ability to attract and ultimately retain great leaders who opt out when they see the writing on the wall. All too often, diversity becomes an initiative led by HR later in a company's timeline. But these efforts are more focused on retrofitting or refactoring broken systems and behaviors that weren't intentional from the start. As a founder,?you are that start. The DNA of your startup not only begins with you — it's fueled by you. The leaders you hire follow your lead, adopting the priorities and behaviors you've set into motion. Your approach to human systems, practices, and processes will become the earliest form of established "best" practice. When you continuously fudge compensation to get talent in and throw?equitable pay practices ?out of whack, underpay because people don't ask or negotiate, operate within systems or processes that rely on gut, discretion, and favoritism, and hire your friend who isn't qualified, your team takes note. These actions will undermine efforts to build a healthy and sustainable business.?

What do others think?

"At Lexion, we made a conscious decision to prioritize building a diverse team. We knew this decision might come with certain costs, such as longer hiring cycles and spending more money on recruiting. Time and money are an early startup's scarcest resources, but we fundamentally believe that the long-term ROI of a diverse team far outweighs the short-term investments — and this has been proven to us, time and again. Today, our R&D and executive teams are more than 50% female. We've also emphasized hiring BIPOC and people with international backgrounds. Our diversity of perspectives has been a superpower for our company during this critical growth stage. If we hadn't prioritized DEI early on, it would have been very hard to retrofit." -?Emad Elwany , CTO and CoFounder at?Lexion

What do we think?

We've seen the magic unfold when teams in our portfolio prioritize building sustainably from the start. When this DNA is founder-led, great things happen. In the case of Emad (quoted above) and Gaurav Oberoi , CEO and CoFounder at Lexion, their commitment to DEI is a magnet for attracting and retaining incredible leaders like Jessica Nguyen , the team’s Chief Legal Officer, who strengthen and reinforce priorities established early on — cultivating trust, belonging, and community in tandem.

What do?YOU?think?

Take Action

Get your head around it.

• Start with Why.?Identify your motivation. Why does diversity matter to you and the way you build? This answer is your North Star. Define what diversity means and how you plan to champion your team’s efforts. No one can follow your lead if they don’t know what it looks like in practice. As example, establishing and committing to fair and equitable hiring, compensation, and people processes.
• Leadership alignment.?Alignment at the leadership level is vital. Any measurable impact will never see the light of day if you hire leaders who do not align with your mission.
• Get comfortable being uncomfortable.?Building a diverse startup requires stepping outside comfort zones to challenge biases and blind spots, seeking out differing perspectives, and being willing to learn, grow, and be wrong.

Act!

• Stay accountable.?As a founder, lead from the front courageously and demonstrate you can — and will — make hard decisions to stay true to the mission. A team that learns together will remain resilient and open. Address breakdowns when they happen versus letting them fester.

• Level the playing field.?As?Craig McLuckie , CEO and Co-Founder of?Stacklok ?said in the?Real Leaders in Tech podcast ,?"There's a lot of people who don't have any asymmetric advantages that come from the way that people treat each other. Just level the playing field. When you create a level playing field where people who have historically been running uphill into a headwind are now able to compete fairly because data speaks; the content is the thing that's valuable — not the charisma, not the presentation, not the format — great things happen."
• Recruiting.?Stop using "culture fit" as a hiring data point or hiring with your gut. Build a defined, consistent, and data-driven talent process to minimize bias and blind spots. When something is broken, fix it.
• Build sustainable people practices.?When it comes to compensation, leveling, and performance, use consistent standards, language, and measurement that limit bias.?Implement transparent and structured?pay practices ?as early as possible. The number one way to create inequitable pay amongst your team is by exercising discretion or "winging it." Stick to tight salary bands and leverage market-based compensation data.
• Show up in diverse talent pools.?Strategic sourcing is far more likely to lead to a diversified talent pool than reliance on applications because talent from marginalized backgrounds is less likely to apply. Support, partner, and be present in these pools. Be open to non-traditional backgrounds. As?Esha Joshi , Co-Founder at?Yoodli , shares,?"At Yoodli, we have learned the importance of being open-minded. We'd often write off candidates because they didn't fit a particular requirement. We're learning that candidate attributes, and mission alignment are what matter most — skills can be learned."