We have a 'sausage fest' problem.

As co-founder of Calqi, a SaaS platform for architects and construction contractors, I'm surrounded by men. Don't get me wrong, I like dudes as much as the next guy. But as a company, it's a festering problem.

Our startup is doing great. If you know startups, you know that means there's a lot of promise, but we're screaming in terror as we're hurdling forward. Our prototype evolved into a marketable product, we have our first customers, our first recurring revenue, first customer support calls, first bugs,... I'll stop here. You get the picture.

We're at a stage where we're looking to take Calqi to the next level. To make the product more robust, build a marketing machine, expand our sales effort. That means we'll be hiring people and take on new investments and financing.

Buddies and stag nights.

Up until this point, no one is to blame for our gender situation. Tim, the contractor, was talking to his friend, Maarten, the architect. They're buddies. They had the original idea for Calqi, and went to the best senior IT developer they knew, Joris. He's the godfather to Tim's daughter, of course they joined forces! My girlfriend, knows Tim's girlfriend and that's how we met. Next up, Tim goes to a stag night and meets our first investor, Ruben. A fourth generation contractor who believes in the idea.

Come the day of Calqi's public launch event, we learn that we received a public grant to hire our first employee ??. As fate would have it, after the launch presentation, an enthusiastic guy approaches us. He's a fan and if we ever want to hire someone, we should call. Turns out, he's an architect with product knowledge that we don't yet posses and very much need, and he's also called Maarten. The case is very strong. He becomes our first employee.

A serendipitous series of events has brought us here, a fantastic, yet very homogeneous team. Great diversity in skillsets, zero diversity on all the other fronts.

Why is this lack of diversity an issue?

Several reasons:

• Attracting Top Talent: if we look like a bunch of white dudes who only hire white dudes, we will attract only white dudes, and miss out on a huge talent pool. As much as we hope that everyone can tell by our smile and twinkel in the eye, that we are not misogynistic racists. For anyone that doesn't know us, we could be. "Why else would they have only white guys on the team?"
• Improved Problem Solving: Different backgrounds and different lives lived, mean new ways of looking at problems. Enough studies have shown that gender diverse and culturally diverse teams are more creative and innovative than homogeneous ones. ( 1, 2, 3)
• Broader Market Insights: We build a digital product that is used on all kinds of screens in all kinds of places by all kinds of hands. We've already seen multiple examples from Silicon Valley, that not having your user base represented in your team, can lead to pretty bad outcomes. ( 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Easier International Scaling: At my previous job I witnessed the process of a local company becoming a multinational through acquisitions. The Belgian team was inherently better equipped to work in the new international context. Our products, marketing, brand names, all worked in Dutch, French and English, because… Belgium. All our source code and internal documentation was written in English, because the team was always multilingual. Compared to the single language French and German counterparts, we were lightyears ahead. This doesn't only apply to language. One region's benign cultural tradition can be a glaring offence in another place (8). When scaling to new regions, you better know, or at least be aware. Having different people from different backgrounds on your team, makes you aware (9).
• Adding Diversity Becomes Harder The Longer We Wait: Collaboration in culturally diverse teams is initially more difficult. Culturally heterogeneous teams communicate more clearly and readily trust each other (10). In order to benefit from the advantages of a culturally diverse team, you first have to learn to communicate well and build trust. If diversity is baked in from the beginning, it becomes second nature to everyone to work well with all types of people. If diversity is added later on, the whole group needs to adapt their ways of communicating and learn to trust the other (11).

Fork in the road.

Now we find ourselves at a crossroads. As we are looking to expand, we have to start making conscientious smart moves for the long run. Until here, we can play the naive innocence card. We didn't choose the "unmixed life", it chose us. However, from here on out, our next moves will determine what kind of company we become.

"The construction and investment business are just a very male driven businesses. ??" - one might say.

If we do nothing, it is certain that the next hires will be guys in our network. Just like the next investor will probably be a man like us.

Whether we like it or not, we'll be subtly scaring away others. Others, that would be perfect additions to our team, but who may think that this uniform team, is the way we want it to be. The further we go down this road, the higher chance we start to attract guys who want to work in a mono culture environment, be among their similar peers. Which, according to experience and the science, will make us less creative than competitors, harder to scale, subject to make marketing faut-pas's, etc...

Call to action!

There are not many moments in the history of a company, where seats of power open up. An investment round is such a moment. If Calqi is to become a diverse company from top to bottom, then this is the moment.

Building a viable startup is hard enough as it is. There are already so many hoops to jump though, hurdles to overcome. Why make it any harder by adding self imposed rules?

Of course, we are over the moon if anyone is crazy enough to join us on this adventure, regardless of gender or race. We most definitely appreciate anyone who is willing to help fund this enterprise.

Needless to say, the main criteria for any hire or partnership will be competence, skill, experience, attitude,... . Rest assured, the next faces you see appear on any Calqi post will have earned their place on merit, and merit alone.

That being said, if you know of ways we can mix up this sausage fest, please let us know. If you know any advisors that share this vision, or investors that can lead the way, please let us know. Feel free to contact me through any channel.

??

Kasper

Co-founder, CEO at Calqi

References

1. Yang Yang, Tanya Y. Tian, Teresa K. Woodruff and Brian Uzzi (2022) Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas
2. Jie Wang, Grand H.‐L. Cheng, Tingting Chen, Kwok Leung (2019) Team creativity/innovation in culturally diverse teams: A meta‐analysis
3. Watson, Warren E;Kumar, Kamalesh;Michaelsen, Larry K (1993) Cultural Diversity's Impact on Group Process and Performance: Comparing Culturally Homogeneous and Culturally Diverse Task Groups
4. Alex Najibi (2020) Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology
5. Jeffrey Dastin (2018) Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
6. Kate Conger (2019) Uber Settles Federal Investigation Into Workplace Culture
7. Daisuke Wakabayashi (2017) Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech
8. VPRO (2014) Russel Brand and Black Peter: Our Colonial Hangover
9. Marina Iskhakova, Dana L. Ott (2020) Working in culturally diverse teams: Team-level cultural intelligence (CQ) development and team performance
10. Warren E Watson, Lynn Johnson, Kamalesh Kumar, Joe Critelli (1998) Process gain and process loss: comparing interpersonal processes and performance of culturally diverse and non-diverse teams across time
11. Bouncken, Ricarda; Brem, Alexander; Kraus, Sascha (2016) Multi-Cultural Teams as Sources for Creativity and Innovation. The Role of Cultural Diversity on Team Performance.