NVCA-Deloitte Study Provides Actionable Insights on Creating More Successful Startups

Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management theory, contributed enormously to modern management strategies. He advocated flexible, collaborative work environments where people were empowered to experiment, take a risk, and work as a team to achieve common goals.

I was reminded of this Peter Drucker quote recently when I received notice that The NVCA-Deloitte Human Capital Survey, second edition, had been published.

“What gets measured, gets improved.”

The 2019 NVCA-Deloitte study assesses the state of talent management, with a special focus on diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the U.S. venture capital industry.

It benchmarks results against the baseline findings from the first edition of this study originally conducts in 2016.

Key findings:

• D&I Progress, yes, but continued underrepresentation by all measures.
• Women investment professionals (21% versus 15% in 2015)
• Women investment partners (14% versus 11% in 2015)
• Black and Hispanic employees underrepresented across all positions at 4% and 5% of all employees, respectively.
• Nearly a third of firms report tracking diversity or have D&I strategies; more do not. However, though there is more work to do, back in 2016, the percentages were in the teens.
• D&I strategies are associated with more women in leadership.
• D&I matters because companies that are diverse and inclusive get better results.

And that leads me to a second Drucker quotation:

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

At Rev1, ingrained inclusion is a corporate value. Diversity and inclusion are core to our investor startup studio program and to the companies we serve. In 2018, 50 percent of the companies we funded had diverse leadership, defined as a firm with a minority, woman, or veteran as an inventor, founder, or leader.

Read about the most recent successful acquisition of female-led and Columbus-based Oris Intelligence, a Rev1 portfolio company that provides near real-time analytics on pricing inconsistencies for brand manufacturers.

Columbus Business First: Pam Springer leads price-sleuthing startup to acquisition.