Deborah Choi on the experiences of founders at this intersection and what they need to ‘Rise and Thrive’
When Deborah Choi and Alina Bassi initially conceived of Berlin-based nonprofit Founderland, they intended it to be a one-day event for women of color entrepreneurs like themselves, with a stretch goal of 80 attendees. But the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in that plan. Instead, it grew into a full-fledged non-profit organization, which they co-founded with fellow entrepreneur Stephanie von Behr to provide support to women of color founders in Europe. It now has 400 members across 25 European countries, representing verticals from B2B to Web3.
A pilot organization in R/GA’s Make/Good for Businesses program and recipient of Google’s highly competitive Women and Girls Impact challenge grant, Founderland recently released a call-to-action for the wider startup ecosystem with its first major research report, “Rise and Thrive.” The report looks at the priorities, needs and motivations of women of color founders through the intersection of their experiences as both women and people of color in the startup and VC space.
Deborah Choi spoke with FutureVision about experiences that led her to launch Founderland, what she learned about the needs of her own community, and the conversations she hopes “Rise and Thrive” will spark.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the launch of Founderland initially come from?
In many ways, the launch of Founderland came from a place of frustration. I first met one of my co-founders, Alina Bassi, in 2019. We were both part of a program for women founders. We naturally gravitated to each other, even though in many ways we were so different. I’m Nigerian-American. I was at the time running a direct-to-consumer business. She is Indian-British, in climate and impact. But in sharing our stories, we continued to find that we had a lot of things in common when it came to conversations with investors, the whole process of fundraising and all sorts of microaggressions that were part of our journeys, which were not part of the stories that we were hearing from other women in that group.
Can you tell me a little bit about the need for Founderland to address those intersecting issues and identities that are particular to women of color founders?
We’ve had to be somewhat specific while also trying to be ambitious. In our focus on this intersection of race, ethnicity and gender, we are also well aware that there are other intersecting identities that pose opportunities, and sometimes also challenges, for the community that we’re actively serving. For example, one thing that we continue to see with our community is that there is a high percentage who also have a migration status. Migration matters when we’re talking about who can build a business, who has the ease or the challenge with even things like opening up a bank account, or getting a loan, or having a right to stay in a certain country and take on that high risk of being an entrepreneur. We also see within our community other intersections like parental status, which also has an effect on the founder journey.
It’s not easy to sit at the intersection of identity in general, whichever intersection that we’re talking about. There’s the risk of feeling like you might be negating or ignoring other intersections with the focus on one; I very candidly and personally sometimes feel that in focusing in one direction. But the truth is, to move forward, to make change, we have to start somewhere. Let’s figure out what is in our ecosystem, at least when we’re talking about the venture landscape and what founders get funded and what those numbers look like today. Currently, women of color receive less than 0.5% of venture funding in Europe. This is a very underrepresented group. So, if we focus on this intersection, if we’re able to move the dial here, we’re able to also positively affect other intersections. Because when you’re building and working towards supporting the most underrepresented, you can’t help but also make a positive outcome for everyone.
Our sister organizations often have subsets of their community that speak to individuals in our community, like a focus on founders with migrant backgrounds starting businesses in Germany, Migrapreneur, or Colorintech, people of color working in the technology sector. And there are also many ways in which founders in our community can just benefit from the additional networking of a wider group outside of the specific intersection of race/ethnicity and gender that we focus on.
In our focus on this intersection of race, ethnicity and gender, we are also well aware that there are other intersecting identities that pose opportunities, and sometimes also challenges, for the community that we’re actively serving.
Was there anything that surprised you or that you learned throughout the research for “Rise and Thrive” about the founders within your community?
One moment that really stood out was when some of the founders were talking about why they even started this journey of being a founder. We all have our reasons. But the reality is that for many women of color, there’s a pressure that’s brought them out of a traditional workplace. We have different terms for those pressures, whether it’s the glass ceiling or the glass cliff, or other ways of describing closed access to being promoted or having information or security, even in that workplace. This pushback from the traditional workplace that has motivated at least some women of color in our study to say, “How can I build my own security, to really question what I am good at, where my passion is, how I can make an impact, but also build a financial future for myself and for my family?” That, I think, is not talked about enough as an honest motivator to build something.
For the research, Founderland used the Citizen Social Science method. Could you explain a bit about how this method affected the qualitative data?
This methodology is not the White Tower, it’s not just academics speaking to academics: it’s a collaborative process with real people who immediately feel that, or live that problem or question. That is at the heart of the research.
It was a really wonderful and pleasant surprise for us to see how deep we could go in building this report in this way, in sync with the community. We had co-researchers who were the “citizens” in the social citizen science approach who were not academics, who were facilitating interviews and collecting information. I don’t know if we’ll necessarily do it the same way again for future research, but I certainly think we’ll consider it because it was just so collaborative, and I think that this keeps the ultimate output quite honest.
What are some other research avenues that you would like to pursue?
This report was a qualitative report, rooted in one of Europe’s leading hubs for entrepreneurship, Berlin. We do think that the outcome of a report in another hub in Europe could tell a different story about that experience and access and stakeholders.
But we also strongly believe that, not just for Founderland, but for all people who want to see change in a more equitable future, we need numbers. It’s not enough to have this metric that 0.5% of VC funding in Europe goes to women of color. We need to know more color and texture to what’s being built. Where are things being built? Who’s getting funding? How much funding? How is that looking year over year? We can react better to what we can track. We would love to build on this with more quantitative data.
The Founderland team with R/GA talent from the Make/Good for Businesses program, including founders Deborah Choi (bottom left), Alina Bassi (second from right), and Stephanie von Behr (bottom right)
Even though there’s still so much work to be done when we’re talking about the US, the US has a leg up in many ways: there is vocabulary, there is discourse, there is data, and there’s also a historical element to that data. And when you have discourse, you have terminology like POC, or even women of color, which is the terminology we use with Founderland, but it’s not terminology easily translated or even actively used in every European country, let alone in Germany. Words do matter. When we name things, there’s power there. There’s specificity as well.
There is unfortunately not a unified discourse, nor clear or translatable numbers, across a pan-European context. Everything is very siloed when you’re looking at a European context. There are great organizations that we consider sister organizations to Founderland that operate in only the UK, or only in France.
What does diversity look like, or even mean, when we’re not using an American context – or we’re using a German context versus a French one versus a British one? This is a topic on so many of my different WhatsApp groups, and even within my team with Founderland, because it’s one of those things where you feel the difference and you sometimes need to be on the ground in these places to really understand it. By and large, I do think there is a difference in what we’re talking about when we’re talking about diversity in these different countries.
On the micro level, there is the lived experience, and also the question of what grassroots groups there are, what resources are available, and who the players are. that are supporting different individuals from different and intersecting identities.
It can make it feel really hard and glacial to move forward to progress if we’re still trying to figure out a shared language or vocabulary. Sometimes I personally feel quite frustrated about that. With Founderland, we look at how we can build this community, how we can bring people together. We don’t want to sit and wait for the numbers. Let’s get the numbers from the lived experiences, one by one, from individuals who are building across Europe. And that’s been our approach. I would love to see just a bit more consolidation, more alignment on what we’re talking about when we’re talking about diversity: this is how we’re going to start to look at these numbers in a way that works with history but also looks towards the future.
You cite the very basics of getting capital as one of the most important factors, if not the most important, in success for these founders. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what you’re hoping to accomplish with the report and who’s the ideal audience to effect change?
We focus a lot in the report on the venture capital business case, and of course not every business needs venture capital and not all businesses necessarily make sense from an economics perspective for that specific financial instrument. In general, most businesses do need some level of investment to get off the ground, or to accelerate. And it could be VC funding, it could be angel investment, it could be a bank loan. Across the board, in these three kinds of financial instruments, the numbers are dismal in terms of how many women receive these various types of investments. And when you add in all those other intersections, those numbers become even more minuscule.
At the heart of it, most businesses need capital to grow. And we happen to focus on this lens. What we see when we’re looking at who’s allocating the capital is that there’s a lot of homogeneity there. In our report, we’re focused on venture capital, which is also very trackabe in many ways. 84% of the decision making capital allocators on the venture capital side are white and male. We need more diversity on the capital allocation side, because we continue to see that when we have funds that are raised by women, and funds that are raised by people of color, and funds that are raised by women of color, more capital is being allocated to more diverse founders.
We need more diversity on the capital allocation side across all the financial instruments that any business owner is looking at. We need the numbers to reflect the population of business owners. It doesn’t make sense to me that less than 10% – or even less than 5% – of any of these instruments goes to women, when around 50% of businesses are run by women.
Who is this report for? I don’t know if it’s cheeky to say it’s for everyone. The reason why I answer that way is because this is a systemic problem, and systemic problems require all actors in the system to be aware of the problem. We don’t have the prescription or the answers for everyone, but we’re at least raising awareness of this problem, the fact that it is systemic, and asking people to question what privileges they hold in this ecosystem; to question how it could be more diverse. These are the conversations that we hope to encourage.
Taken from: https://www.rga.com/futurevision/articles/founderland-calls-on-europes-startup-ecosystem-to-wake-up-and-support-women