When Silicon Valley was in its hour of need, the internet responded with snarky

memes. From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty

Carino.

During the chaos last weekend after Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by federal

regulators, but before the guaranteed customers access to their deposits, there was panic

in the tech world. And please for the government to step in and help thousands of businesses

that could have been crushed. But cries of victimhood from the tech sector? Well, they were

often met by the internet's smallest violin. And the government's actions to stabilize

the situation sometimes derided as a billionaire bailout for privileged tech bros. So we called

up an insider who is definitely not a tech bro to talk about Silicon Valley's image problem.

Sarah Coonsd is a general partner at the venture capital firm, Cleo Capital.

There are a lot of people who have understandably strong opinions about Mark Zuckerberg or Elon

Musk or Jason Taylor Canis because these people are out there sort of trying to get the

biggest audience possible, doing things that seem to be mainly focused on enriching maybe

themselves versus making the world a better place always. And so, you know, very divisive,

very public figures are often sort of the tip of the spear for any specific industry. But

there's a long tail of venture capital investors that people don't think about or don't know.

And candidly, you know, a lot of people would like if they got to know them. And yet as

we've talked about many times on this show and you have research to back up, it is probably

pretty fair to say that the VC ecosystem and the tech industry at large does have a real

diversity problem, right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I recently did did research with Harvard Business School

...