All Raise | Rewiring for Equality

Welcome to Grey Matter, Greylock's podcast that shares inspiring stories from today's most important company builders. I'm Elisa Schreiber, marketing partner at Greylock and an advisory board member at Allrays. In 2017, a group of prominent female venture capitalists were fed up with stories of discrimination and harassment of women in Silicon Valley. So together they formed a nonprofit called Allrays to focus on women's equality in the VC and tech startup ecosystem. Since then, Allrays has built an engaged community of more than 20,000 people across four US tech hubs, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Boston. Today we're joined by Pam Koska, the CEO of Allrays. Thank you so much for being with us on the pod. Pam, hi.

And thanks so much for having me.

I'm excited to chat with you. In recent weeks, All Raise has made some news. You've launched a new program to help more women get on boards of private high velocity tech companies. And you've announced that you've raised more than $11 million in funding. So we're going to talk about all this. We'll talk about the impact Allrays has already made and so much more. But before we get started on all that, I would love to just give our listeners a short introduction to get to know you a little bit. So do you mind sharing a little bit about your background, which as I understand it, is somewhat non traditional for the CEO of a nonprofit organization?

Yeah, it is a little bit different. It's no different from most stories in tech, but different for a nonprofit CEO. So I came to Silicon Valley in 1995 in a product manager capacity for an enterprise software company and was a startup junk junkie from day one and continued to be throughout my entire career, starting in product management, kind of growing up into the CMO suite, expanding into some sales experience, and ultimately into the CEO chair for enterprise software startups. And I don't think I ever had a vision of what my next chapter would be that would involve nonprofit, but I met all raise and that all changed for me and I really was not necessarily looking for and was was kind of looking for what the next chapter in my career was going to be looking like. And I was super passionate about doing something that was mission aligned and deeply important to me and always kept on popping up on my screen. I'd been watching it for some time in the news ever since it had launched and really thought, you know, this is something that's deeply meaningful to me as a woman in tech I've had my. My own share of experiences of how difficult my journey was. And when I met people at always, I kept on thinking every time I would have an interaction with someone, my life would have been so much easier if I could have just plugged into this community. And it was deeply important to me as well, because I have a young daughter, she's 11 years old. She has her own kind of entrepreneurial business herself, and she has a business called Bravelets. And it was really a chance for her to practice being brave every day by producing bracelets, basically. But I loved her entrepreneurial spirit and I loved the lessons that she was learning from it. And I wanted her to have the option of a different experience as an entrepreneur going forward. And so it spoke to me personally based on my own experience. It spoke to me on her experience. And I just met all rays and felt also like it was a startup, it was less about being a nonprofit and really running itself like a startup, which spoke to that startup junkie in me and was thrilled to really join something that was going to challenge me in all honesty, no small feat, no small ambitions at all. Ray's to kind of change an industry and rewire it from the inside. So all of that spoke to me and brought me to the CEO chair.

So you're here. We're so grateful, by the way, to have you on board as the CEO. And you've talked a lot about what drew you to all Raise, but it might be helpful to just give folks an understanding about what is all raise. Like, what is the mission, what are we focused on, and what kind of work is the organization doing every day?

Yeah, well, our mission is unchanged from the start, which is to accelerate the success of women founders and funders to create a more prosperous and equitable future. And, you know, it was launched in the MeToo moment within Silicon Valley, kind of the era of Susan Fowler and Justin called back a grassroots initiative and a call to arms from Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures, who sent out an email in the wake of all of this froth that was happening in Silicon Valley and said, now is the time for change and reaching out to her peers in the industry, some of whom she knew really well and some of whom she knew less well and kind of just corralling this force together. And from that all Raise was born and continues to this day to really be an organization with a bias towards action and a bias towards change. And so our ambitions are great. We really want to move the dial for the representation of women in venture, the representation of women as entrepreneurs and the representation of women as senior operators within tech and taking a really inclusive approach to building that.

What do you mean by inclusive? Can you expand on that?

Yeah. So we want to be both women for women and we want to make sure that that's inclusive. As the name suggests, all raise the all in all rays means all women. So historically underrepresented women, Black entrepreneurs and VCs, Latinx entrepreneurs and VCs, non binary individuals. We want to make sure that all have the same access to opportunity to succeed in the tech ecosystem as their male counterparts. And so we want to make sure that we are being radically inclusive in building this, not just for women, but for all women in the industry.

Is there a place for men in all race?

Absolutely. So from day one, we recognize the importance of male allies. This is about power and where the power infrastructure sits today. Women have power, but men have more power. Just statistically speaking, in terms of the numbers, if we look at the representation of the number of women in venture, only 12% of women are at the what we call the check writer level. And 68% of firms still don't have a single female partner at that level within their organization. And the amount of funding going to female entrepreneurs is really low, 11% overall for women. And if you get to look at black or Latinx women, those numbers are in the single digits or fractions of a percentage point, not even a single digit. So we really have a lot of work to do and we are going to make this change by women helping women, but also men getting involved, our male allies getting involved, sharing their power and using their power to, to enact change within the industry.

Let's talk a little bit about enacting that change. As I understand it, you have a set of core priorities that you're really focused on at Allrays. Do you mind sharing those with us?

Yeah. We have three core priorities to drive our mission forward. One is to rewire the industry from the inside. The second is to reshape culture. And the third is to become a force for change for years to come. And I'd love to break those down. So when we really talk about rewiring the industry from the inside, we want to make sure that there's a dynamic where women can be featured prominently in the power structure of Silicon Valley and the tech ecosystem. So we want to make sure that they are powerful VCs, amazing entrepreneurs, prominently figured on boards, prominently figured as senior operators. And that's really rebuilding a new flywheel for the valley. Because right now it's, it looks a lot like white men funding empowering more white men. And that leads to a certain wealth generation and wealth creation vehicle. And we are looking to seed a new flywheel which changes that dynamic and ultimately gets to diversifying the cap table in the industry. We want more wealth creation to be shared across women and underrepresented minorities. The second thing we want to do is to reshape culture, which is to move diversity, equity, inclusion beyond just being a checkmark functionality and really get that into being synonymous with, with success. So that it's talked about in the boardroom with the same intensity and the same level of strategy and execution as say talking about the sales pipeline is and talking about all the financial metrics for the organization. And we want to celebrate women non binary founders, not as great female CEOs and great entrepreneurs and great female venture capitalists, but just as great CEOs, great investors, great operators. And so in order to do that we really need to normalize who people are. And that's through where women are figured prominently and that's through activation of our community. And then the third one is the force for change for years to come. We really just want to make sure that this is a problem that's hundreds of years in the making. And while we ultimately hope to put ourselves out of business by creating more equitable and diverse ecosystem, it's going to take us a couple of years to get there. And so we really want to make sure that we are a force for years to come, that we have the power, the infrastructure in our community, in our finances and in our processes and systems to make sure that we can be drivers of this change and take hundreds of years that took us here and make that into tens of years in order to get us to a new direction.

As you're describing the priorities, I couldn't help but think how many other organizations and other people have tried to crack this nut and have tried to improve diversity in tech along gender, along racial lines. From your perspective, what differentiates the approach at all raise, how do you think about what's unique in the approach? What you're taking on is as you described, it's hundreds of years in the making and it and sometimes can seem impossible. You know, you hear the stats that you talked about in the beginning of this podcast where it's still like very, very low for women check writers and women entrepreneurs who are getting funded. And then you layer on the intersectional aspect of it and it's even worse. So how do you think about allre's approach and why is it different?

First of all, we are a product of the industry in that we call ourselves a startup nonprofit. So we take all the actions of being a startup and what it takes to be a startup and how to approach problems and use that and apply that to this issue. So all to say that startups like to do impossible things. So we are here to do what seems to be impossible. And the way that we do that is one taking an inclusive and intersectional approach. So we talked about this earlier, not only in the market that we serve, but really looking across the ecosystem and all the players in the ecosystem and marshaling those individuals and all those stakeholders. The second thing that we do is really we have a bias towards action. We are not comfortable with the status quo. We want to move fast, we want to move aggressively. We are impatient for change. And our bias towards action really leads us to move aggressively and to leverage resources in order to make change. We aren't going to be satisfied with incrementalism. We want massive leaps forward as an organization. And part of the way that we do that is through the community that we have amassed around us. So we have this very large community of powerful stakeholders acting at our table. So this is where from our investors, people like Reid Hoffman at Greylock, like Melinda Gates at Pivotal Ventures, many other firms throughout the valley, all contributing not only time, but also expertise and some cases, dollars as well, to our caused to make a change. And we want to make sure that these power brokers are enacting change and kind of creating a network effect, if you will, within the industry. And so I love this concept that somebody said to me once of. This is like the horror movie when the call is coming from inside the house. These are the power brokers inside the house who are enacting the change, who are rebuilding this industry brick by brick and kind of blowing it up to be something different. And I think it is the wave of the future. It's where we're going. Those are the things that I think drive us as an organization, empower us as an organization to take on the impossible and make rapid change and progress forward.

What do you think some of the misconceptions are? I'll throw one out there. I hear oftentimes, and I want to tear my hair out every time I hear about the pipeline problem. As an example, what are some of the misconceptions about why there is this lack of diversity across tech and specifically in venture capital?

Yeah, the persistent pipeline myth that's out there. We're here to blow that one up. In particular, it's really a network access issue at the end of the day, and it's perpetuated by looking around the industry and, and who's in the room. And when we do that, actually, we realize the statistical improbability of what has been created in tech right now. It is statistically improbable that we would have so few women. I mean, women account for 50% of the population. So it is improbable that we would have so few seats in venture. It's improbable that we would not get this funding. So something is at work here and it is really a network access problem. And so we talk about this and work assiduously in all of our programs to blow up this concept that there is, you know, this isn't pipeline. There are lots of qualified women who are working in tech, There are lots of qualified black women working in tech, there's lots of qualified Latinx women in tech, and people just don't know them. And our networks have a tendency to be closed. And so one of the things we do is try to blow that up and say, this is about network access, access to opportunity, access to people, access to capital. It's one of the core foundations of what we're trying to blow up for the industry and to erase this pipeline myth that simply doesn't exist. The analogy that I've always found most helpful is the thought that, are you going to find people? If you're looking for fish, why are you fishing in the middle of a forest? This woman gave me this analogy once. She's like, if you're fishing in the forest, you're not going to catch any fish. You need to walk yourself over to the lake and the lake is full of fish. You will feed yourself and you will be able to fish in quantity. But if you're standing in a forest, you're not going to find the fish. And so this is about moving yourself from the forest to the lake and getting access to the fish.

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the programming then that you've built and some of the things that are in place at all rays to help hack this network gap as you described it? What are the things that we're doing to open up network access and create that connective tissue between the folks that are in the seats of power and the folks that deserve to be there, but maybe aren't yet?

So there's three areas that we're focusing on. We call it the funder Founder, operator, three legs of the stool. And all of our programs really take a approach that is primarily led by access. As we were just talking about. We want access to opportunity and access to people and network and resources, access to capital. We also look at guidance and support as kind of the three ways that we facilitate. And we've historically started with starting catalyzing a lot of fires, experimenting like any startup would, with where the programs have the most impact. And we've now isolated down into a series of programs that are in high demand. So when we look at the founder side, we're really looking at trying to engage entrepreneurs to be able to build the most amazing companies that they can. And what are the resources that we can give them in terms of access to capital and introductions in terms of the tips and tricks that they need, the inside track of knowledge to build an amazing company at any stage, and the community support to go after that. And so we have a series of boot camps that we run and there are so many amazing stories from this, but one of the ones that I love is Tiffany Dufu at the crew. We actually met at an unrelated all raise event in New York City. She came up to me and said, I've been told I should talk to you because I am starting my own company and I need some access to funding. So we got talking. She joined our boot camp. Tiffany today has raised well over a million dollars for the crew and is on her way to building an amazing business. And we continue to support Tiffany not just in her seed funding, but as she now goes to raise her a and beyond. We're continuing to support her in her efforts. And so our goal is to pick her up from the start of her entrepreneurial career and see her through a successful exit, adding what we call rocket fuel. She is an amazing entrepreneur in and of herself. We're just giving her extra power to get around the obstacles that the industry has set up in front of her. When we look at our first funder programs for investors, we're doing something similar and we're really trying to supercharge their networks, advance their careers and amplify deal flow. And we have a series of different programs that do that, from exposing them to, hey, here are new job opportunities that are coming up in venture, if you want to start in venture or whether you already have a job in venture. We are also pulling together cohorts, different type of cohort, mentoring models. And then we also have this large event at the end of the year called the VC Summit, which is our largest convening of women in venture and the power of what we can achieve on the funder side. An example that I would give is Jess Lee at Sequoia, who can say that three deals that she has led the investment on at Sequoia Capital have come as a result of introductions, deal flow, networking that she's done through the Allrays network. So. So she has an advanced notice and kind of ability to get plugged into new opportunities through all raise. And that's exactly what we want to do, is facilitate those network connections. And then our programs for operators are new and it's called Accelerate. And we're really trying to focus at least initially on board diversity from that perspective and pushing forward into making sure that women can take independent board director positions within organizations.

Describe Accelerate. I know you've just announced this program, so I'd love to know a little bit about how it's structured, who's involved. And then a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast are venture capitalists or founders themselves. So is there a way for them to plug in to this program?

There are a lot of different board programs out there that have been focused on diversity. We really honed in on the VC and PE backed, privately held ecosystem of companies. And the genesis from Accelerate actually came from a dinner party that Aileen Lee hosted back in the summer of 2019. And we were really interested in just exploring what opportunities existed. I happened to be sitting next to Jeff Richards at GGV Capital and he said that board diversity was a, a passion of his. And he said, I've got so many open independent board positions within portfolio companies at GGV Capital. And then we kind of opened it up to the table and found that there were 300, probably we estimated 300 open independent board positions in that room alone. And obviously that sparked my interest because that sounds like a hole that needs to get filled.

That also sounds like a very big dinner party.

There wasn't that many people. There was like 10, I think there were 10 people in Venture there. But that's the magnitude of the problem, right? There's 300 open positions just in that room. And so if we look across the venture ecosystem, there's a lot of opportunity for us to take action and fill the diversity in that room. And when you look at the statistics for private company boards, they don't look much better than the statistics that we talked about earlier. So 60% of private companies don't have a single female board member and only 7% of the private board seats are held by women. Most of whom are an only independent board seat, they're the only one on the board and so pretty stark numbers when you come to that. So it seemed like an opportunity for us to come in and define a program. So we took a very programmatic approach and Accelerate was born from that. It is basically a 90 day program that taps into the venture capital portfolio companies and the CEOs at them to identify who has a need. And then we put a very tight program around it. So one of the things we do is we leverage the all raise network and community of amazing female operators and people in venture to surface the best names of individuals who could fit a particular board need. So within the first 30 days of an accelerated engagement, we have identified the five finalist candidates for CEO and then we spend about 60 days in kind of a white glove search process marshaling through that process with the intent of within 90 days closing the board search and diversifying the board and putting a female or a non binary or an underrepresented individual into that particular board board seat. And it's a great experience for the CEOs who get a very efficient process. Typically these processes can take nine plus months. We take 90 days for them and the company showcases well. It's a very tight process and they get access to the best talent because it's becoming very competitive for landing women and underrepresented individuals for board seats. And so by running a 90 day process we, we are so competitive and we get and secure the talent faster than anybody else can. And our goal at Allrays is obviously to just create that diversity in the boardroom. And we know that if we diversify the boardroom, we will get diversity in the investment pool, we will get diversity in the companies as well. So just an opportunity for us to go in getting back to that flywheel and reconfigure that flywheel that's going and in Silicon Valley and in the tech ecosystem.

Can you share any stories from Accelerate at this point or is the program still new or are some of the searches still confidential?

We can share several successes. So we've completed five board searches and five board placements. Three of those are experienced board members, but two of them are brand new board members, people who got their first shot at taking a board C. So we've closed board searches for Handshake Work Board, Contentful Electric AI and Influx Data. We spent a lot of time in pilot mode perfecting this program that I described in partnership with GGV Capital, Sequoia, Sapphire Ventures and 343 were the primary partners that we worked with in that process. And what I'm happy to say is that as we are approaching kind of this launch, we've been starting to open out a little bit more and pull back the covers. We've already signed five new searches in January and we have a very broad pipeline of additional searches that are ready to sign. So we're starting to see already this network effect happen as a result of the five placements that we've gotten in the industry so far.

Is there a place where we can direct board ready or board experienced women if they want to be a part of the database?

Yes, we call it a talent network because we want to make sure that we're not having a database of women.

You don't want binders full of women?

I don't want binders full of women. If you want to be part of our talent network, Absolutely. Come to our website, click on the operator menu and you'll have a chance to submit your board profile with us and we'll continue and follow up with you from there. If you're a CEO that has an opportunity, wants to see see the benefits of diversity, because we know diverse boards result in outperformance for a company. So if your CEO wants to take advantage of that and plug into this program, you can also go to that same location and contact us there. Likewise, if you're a venture capitalist and want your portfolio companies to be able to take advantage of this program, you can also contact us through our website.

Well, it sounds like you have dozens of programs helping, as you called it, the three legs of the stool, the funders, the founders and the operators. And I know you've been serving thousands of these people. Is it working? How will you know when you've arrived?

We'll know. We'll arrive. Visually, it'll be very apparent to us. You know, we'll be able to all walk into a room and there'll be no ambiguity about whether we've solved this problem because we'll look around the room and as a woman or a black woman or Latinx woman or a non binary individual, you'll be able to walk in a room and you can see the diversity in the room. And so we'll know from that. But we also obviously are data driven. We're going back to our startup ethos. We are very data driven and data centric. So at the highest level, we have two metrics that we track to keep ourselves and the industry focused on making change. So one is the number of check writers that are in the industry. And we really look at that as the number of women who have the ability to make an independent investment and sit on a board. When we started all raise that number was at 9%. It's grown to 12%. Our goal is by 2028 we should be at 18%. And then we also look at the percentage of funding going to female founders. Now here we are trying to move the number from 11% to 23% by 2030. And thanks to the time of COVID unfortunately these numbers slipped last year. So there is a decided backslide in the percentage of venture dollars invested going to female founders. And so we have more work to do in this area. But we do look at the number of women served. The good and the bad news is that demand continues to outstrip our ability to serve everybody in the industry. So that's something we're working on today and we're why we've recently done some fundraising is to unlock kind of our ability to serve the market. Last year alone we served over 2000 investors. 1700 founders went through our raising seed and series A boot camps and over 2,500 women also participated in other digital programs we have. So we're just getting started is what I like to say and we're going to keep on driving forward aggressively in the industry.

So you mentioned your fundraise and I was actually just about to ask about that. Obviously you do need capital to run these programs and to continue to grow. You've already announced the initial tranche of your fundraise, the 11 million and you have this capital campaign going. I'm super proud that Greylock is a contributor. I know Reid Hoffman personally partnered and there's a bunch of others you mentioned Melinda Gates and pivotal. Who else has invested in all raise and how can people help if they want to support.

So it all gets back to the same thing where we like to rewire the industry from the inside. And we talked about this community of stakeholders that we have as a key differentiator for all rays and it is that community of power brokers, people who are in the industry funding and investing not only their money but their time and their energy and enacting change for us. So we have a host of venture firms and individuals. I won't be able to manage 100% of them here. But certainly as you said, Reid and Greylock have made generous donations for us, Sequoia, ivp, GGV Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital and of course a significant portion of the all raised community leaders such as AILEEN Lee, Kirsten Green, Jenny Lefcourt all have made contributions. And I think it's important for me to underscore that it's contributions not only of their dollars, but of their time, their energy, their passion, power to enact change and to bring others to the table and to share their power in order to create space and opportunity for those who are coming up in the industry as either funders or founders. And then we also have founding and national partners like Silicon Valley bank and Pivotal Ventures, as well as a host of other kind of key banks and service providers in the tech ecosystem who also are really passionate about helping us drive this channel change forward. And so we feel honored that we are kind of activating all of these like lights within the industry and across the industry and pulling them together in a common purpose and in a focused purpose to lend their energy and effort to making a change. And we're just thrilled to have everybody here helping us drive forward. And it really does speak to our ability to build lasting change, not only today, but over time.

Well, this was so fantastic, Pam. I'm so glad that we got a chance to have this conversation. I'm wondering, is there anything that we missed that you want to make sure that we talk about?

I guess the one thing I would say is we talked a lot about the power brokers, but it's every person in tech who gets to make a change. It's every one of us who can step forward and lend their power and influence and create opportunity for somebody else. Championing diversity, equity and inclusion is something that just takes focus and energy. And if you focus your time and energy, change will happen and it's from the micro to the macro. So I just would say, you know, you don't have to be a power broker necessarily to be at the all raised table. We welcome everybody to our tent to get engaged and help us enact the change. And it is as much the micro changes that we make as some of the macro changes that we're driving that's kind of to make a difference.

That's fantastic. And you'll be sure to let us know when Brave Letts is doing their series A and we'll be able to.

Absolutely. Greylock's going to be the first door that she knocks on. I'm going to get in on that.

Well, thanks again, Pam. It is just a delight having you on the pod and I'm just really grateful for your time and for sharing the story of Allreys.

Thanks for having me.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. If you liked this interview and you want to hear others, please hit subscribe. You'll be able to catch up on Gray Matter episodes you may have missed, like Reid Hoffman's two part series on building your startup board, and you'll get new episodes delivered directly to you. You can subscribe to gray matter@soundcloud.com greylockpartners on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find new episodes of blog posts every week on greylock.com and of course you can follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Elisa Schreiber and thanks so much for listening.