People

How do you make VC more diverse? Maybe start with the training schemes

Kauffman Fellows is diversifying its board and rethinking its business model in an attempt to make its investor classes more accessible.

Marlon Nichols of MaC Venture Capital

Marlon Nichols of MaC Venture Capital is one of the Kauffman Fellows new board members.

Photo: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

On Tuesday, the Kauffman Fellows unveiled its most diverse class yet: Of 61 investor trainees, 41% are women and 49% are people of color. It also announced that its board is now the most diverse it's ever been, thanks to three new members.

The program is betting that the board's increased diversity will help maintain the growth in diversity of its fellowship cohort — a virtuous cycle in a program where its group of fellows helps nominate and evaluate future trainees.

Going forward, Kauffman Fellows CEO Jeff Harbach sees this approach as one way to develop a more inclusive venture capital industry.

"I'm not going to tell any particular firm what to do about their next hire or their partnership dynamics or whatever else, that's for them to figure out," Harbach told Protocol. "But gosh dang it, if you're not doing your part in making your firm and the venture ecosystem look more like society as a whole, then you're lagging behind. It's not good enough."

The Kauffman Fellows' approach of leading from the top is just one way the venture community is tackling racial inequality. Earlier on Tuesday, for instance, the National Venture Capital Association unveiled its new nonprofit, Venture Forward, to make opportunities in venture capital accessible to people of all backgrounds.

The announcements from the Kauffman Fellows and NVCA were months in the making and not just a reaction to the news of the past few weeks. But the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder have magnified the importance of the venture community tackling racial inequality that's pervasive in its ranks.

"I'm very hopeful that this is a moment of change," Harbach said. "I can't imagine having so much momentum over the last couple weeks with so many emotional stories being shared that this would just go away or fall on deaf ears, and it gives me that hope that I know that we're not alone in this. There are people that have been working on this intently and will continue to work on it."

The investor training program has been working to improve representation in its fellow classes for years and has graduated notable alumni like Kleiner's Mamoon Hamid, Bessemer's Elliott Robinson, Aspect Ventures' Jennifer Fonstad, Defy Ventures' Trae Vassallo and Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Lyons.

But the last year has been "phase one" of a process to have its board more broadly reflect society, Harbach said. That includes adding the three new board members: Kauffman alumni Marlon Nichols (MaC Venture Capital), Melissa Richlen (MacArthur Foundation) and Allen Taylor (Endeavour). Their additions bring the board to one-quarter Black and three out of eight women. Next, Harbach wants to add more international representation to the board.

The program has also been trying to find new ways to diversify its revenue sources so that it's not as reliant on tuition dollars — which are currently $80,000 for the two-year program. Del Johnson, a venture capitalist not affiliated with the Kauffman Fellows, recently criticized the program's price tag and questioned what it was doing to make it more accessible.

The goal of the business model rethink is to both lower the tuition amount in the future so it is more accessible and also to try to find more sponsorship for its scholarship program, Harbach said. In the last year, the Kauffman Fellows program doubled the amount of scholarship money it doles out after partnering with companies like Carta and the Business Development Bank of Canada, Harbach said. It also worked with Textio and the Kapor Center to evaluate its applications and interview materials.

"We know that new fund managers and oftentimes women and underrepresented minorities are disproportionately affected by high tuition rates. So we've been focused on a lot of different efforts around making sure that we lower tuition and gain more access for fellows in need," Harbach said. "We don't want finances to be a reason why someone doesn't do the program."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins