underrepresented founders

This episode originally aired on June 4th, 2021. Nicole is joined by Arlan Hamilton, the founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital: a venture capital fund that invests in underestimated founders, including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. She talks with Nicole about hating the “Homeless to Harvard” headlines written about her early on in her career… until she started embracing the label, and skyrocketed to success.

Check out Panoramic Ventures: https://panoramic.vc
Check out SoftBank's Opportunity Fund: https://theopportunityfund.com
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Check out Harlem Capital: https://harlem.capital
FOLLOW Henri: https://twitter.com/hpierrejacques
FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

0:01 Jason intros Tom Uebel & Lolita Taub
5:17 George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests impacting Venture Capital, Angela Benton's tweets about her bad experience with Cowboy Ventures, how can VC move forward and be better towards underestimated founders?
17:37 Lolita & Jason reflect on some imperfect investor moments towards founders
23:55 How investor bias towards underrepresented founders manifests itself
28:23 Tom on focusing on diversity in hiring at the earliest stage of a companies life, how people with raw talent miss out on opportunities due to pattern-matching
39:23 Zoom's shuts down a Chinese pro-democracy account, importance of Data privacy at Command E, Jason's thoughts on Zoom only giving end-to-end encryption to paid accounts
52:36 Wall Street Bets, Meme stocks and a new generation of Robinhood traders
56:59 Reddit appoints YC CEO Michael Seibel to its board after Alexis Ohanian steps down, former interim CEO Ellen Pao has words for current CEO Steve Huffman
1:03:07 Issues of free speech & why relying solely on government organizations may be the wrong decision
1:05:45 Juneteenth observation, potential reparation ideas
1:10:27 Assessing COVID-19 recent death numbers & risk of getting back to work
1:23:03 Lolita shares her founder-investor matching tool
1:25:30 Tom demos Command E