Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezes. Andrew Sheets will be back next week, but today we have something a bit different for you.

We're going to hear a segment from one of our other shows, the Access and Opportunity Podcast with Carla Harris.

Carla is a vice chairman at the firm with 30 years of experience on Wall Street,

and now leads the multicultural client strategy group.

In each episode, Carla sits down with investors, entrepreneurs, and other leaders to explore how to increase the flow of capital of women and multiculturally led businesses.

In her latest episode, Carla talks with Charles Hudson, founder of precursor ventures, about how his experiences as an entrepreneur

have shaped his lens as an investor, why he focuses on pre-Ceed companies, and how the entire investing

landscape needs to change to better incorporate women and people of

color at every level. So let's talk a little bit about the industry. How do you feel

that or do you feel that the landscape is changing at all with respect to more investors focusing on multicultural

and female entrepreneurs? Is it shifting? Not as fast as I would like. I've had

frustrating conversations with limited partners, the people who fund venture capital

firms, and the rooms that we're very committed to improving the gender and racial demographics

in both venture and startups. What we do I'm like you should

give money to black and brown fund managers you do not have to give it to me this is not like a

sales pitch for pre-girls find the people who are already in these communities and

give them money.

Other than that, what can I do to make an impact?

I'm like, well, you can hope that the very firms that you work with today

that you have not pushed to do better will suddenly have an epiphany and change their ways.

I do not think that's likely to happen. I think to me the canonical example is if you look at what's happened with women in venture

in the last five years it's not as if all of the sudden we sprouted all of these great female investors they were sitting there in

...