Venture capital's diversity problem
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Will the Black Lives Matter movement bring change to an industry accused of being too white?
Nick Kelly, a black entrepreneur who runs Axela Ltd, says venture capital funds would only consider a certain kind of business idea from black entrepreneurs. He didn't raise any money from them when he went asking yet his business is now worth around $10 million.
Kenny Alegbe of HomeHero, another black entrepreneur says he only got investment from VC funds when he looked outside of the usual set of funds. Plus Manuela Saragosa speaks to Tracy Gray who runs the 22 Fund. She is a rarity in the VC community. She is female and a black investor, and says there has been no change in the VC world for the 20 years that she's worked in it.
(Picture: Black businesswoman looking at male colleagues whispering; Credit: XiXinXing/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragosan. |
| 0:06.7 | Coming up, when you're black, talented and have a great business idea, but you're struggling to find an investor. |
| 0:13.3 | It's hard for a lot of venture funds to meet a person of colour and think to themselves that person is going to be their next billion dollar outcome. |
| 0:21.0 | There's a degree of pattern matching and, you know, you don't fit, I guess, central casting. |
| 0:25.5 | So will the Black Lives Matter movement change anything? |
| 0:29.2 | Institutional investors need to invest in women and people of color fund managers. |
| 0:36.7 | It's simple. |
| 0:39.0 | Like I said, it's not rocket science. |
| 0:44.6 | Venture Capital's diversity problem coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.1 | My name is Nicholas Kelly. |
| 0:52.7 | I'm the founder and CEO of Xcel Group. |
| 0:56.3 | Nicholas, or Nick, as he prefers to be called, is a black 36-year-old British entrepreneur. Excellar is a group of companies within the healthcare space. So |
| 1:02.8 | we build and design programmes to be used within healthcare, but we also have domiciliary care |
| 1:10.2 | and assist the living facilities that |
| 1:11.9 | we support as well. Nick's mother Jackie works in the care sector, but he's good at the techie |
| 1:16.8 | stuff. Back in 2006, he saw an opportunity to link the two. We were trying to work out how to better |
| 1:24.0 | serve those that are within our care. And we realized that we needed to use the data |
| 1:28.8 | and information that we had. So we then created an internal system. And we built this internal |
| 1:33.6 | system to hold all the information and to kind of pull everything that we had on patients in one place. |
| 1:40.2 | And then we realized we actually had something there that could actually be commercialized, |
| 1:43.9 | but also could be the benefit of the wider community. |
| 1:46.4 | So we decided to go out and try and find funding to scale it up. |
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