Hello and welcome to Tech Check Plus. I'm Julia Borsden. I'm very excited to be joined now by Sarah Coos, founder and managing director of the Cleo Capital. Sarah, thanks so much for being with us today.

Thank you.

So, Sarah, just to kick it off here, I want to talk a little bit about your background

and your work, but you've just completed some very important research

in partnership with Harvard Business School, looking at the race,

ethnicity, and gender of assets under management in the very power of venture capital space.

Talk to us about what you found in your research. Yeah, so you know I run

Cleo Capital. It's a venture fund that I started in 2018 and you know what I didn't realize

when I started is how rare it was to be a black woman starting a venture fund.

You know, when you look at the stats, the research that we just published that we just completed with Harvard Business School, you know, white men control 63% of all venture capital dollars and that's compared to black women who control 0.03%. And so there's just this massive, massive inequality there. And I

suspected that over the years of running the fund and seeing how few other people look like me.

These numbers are not good,

no matter how you slice them, but particularly

looking at the intersection of race and gender,

there were just huge gaps there.

You know, black men control about 1% of venture dollars under management.

And while that is not a lot, that is a lot more than the 0.03 that black women control.

And so there's just, you know know these staggering inequities that are happening and

we're the first people to ever actually go through and and do that math and say look at these

numbers and by the way they've been bad for a long time and they're not getting better.

So talk to us a little bit about how you put this research together. I understand the numbers are from

2020 and you worked with some data sets that were out there and

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