Jason M. Lemkin and panelists argue that diversity is a business imperative for tech companies competing for global talent. They distinguish between tokenistic hiring and genuine inclusion, where people actually feel they belong. SaaStr is targeting 1,000 under-represented founders to join its community in the coming year.
Chapters
The reason to build a diverse and inclusive company is because you need every talented person on the planet who can help your company achieve its goals and achieve its mission. You need those people to want to work at your company.
You need them to walk in the door and say, "I belong here." Any CEO that's not thinking about diversity, you're not gonna have a business in 5 years. You will not be able to recruit top talent. You won't be competitively taking an advantage. We really need for CEOs and leaders to really double down and look at diversity now, starting day one.
You know, this is a societal issue. It is really manifested in technology because we are such a microcosm of so much in so little space with so much wealth. But the reality is, like, this is a societal issue. So to change it, it takes everyone in the society sort of standing up and saying no.
You know, just bringing someone into your company who's different but not having them be included isn't success. It might check a box, but it's not success. So I've really seen a lot of efforts by a lot of companies to make people feel included.
What I might think is inclusive behavior may not feel like inclusive behavior to somebody else. When it comes to inclusion and it comes to equality, we're never done. There's always something we can improve on. There are always more opportunities to create access for people that otherwise aren't going to have that access. And most of all, it's not the job of underrepresented people to drive this change.
I think the biggest mistake is requiring or mandating diversity and inclusion programs. It's super important to let people come to this on their own, to put on programming that evokes thought and gets people curious, and hopefully they'll come to a lot of this work just through their own curiosity.
With 10,000, 12,000 people here, bringing another 100 founders here is not enough. We need 1,000 more people here, 1,000 more underrepresented founders to come next year to meet our goals and aspirations. And that's a project.
