Mitch Kapor argues diverse teams make better decisions, especially building products for low-income communities. He founded the Level Playing Field Institute to bring 150 high school students from underserved backgrounds to hackathons with engineers. Google's data shows SAT scores and GPAs don't predict job success, yet talent remains unevenly nurtured.
Have the teams talk about what kind of diversity they have on the team, either presently or in the future. Now, why is this scary? This is scary because I know many of you are thinking— this is from all my past experience with talking about this— that the minute anybody talks about diversity on the staff, They start thinking, oh my God, quotas. I'm going to have to hire somebody who isn't qualified, and I'm not going to do that. I'm running the other way. So you don't have to put your hands up around this, because I know that some of you are actually thinking that. I go, no, actually that is not what we're thinking about at all. I mean, that would actually be really fundamentally stupid in a suicidal kind of way for an investor to put anything like that whatsoever as a demand. Here's our perspective, which is that first, there's a lot of research that shows that teams that are more diverse— and this is across all dimensions, whether it's age or gender or race and ethnicity— tend to have certain kinds of advantages in problem solving. And they also have some disadvantages. If you're a homogeneous group and everybody is the same, You can make decisions much more quickly. But you can make decisions much better if there are multiplicity of perspectives. And that's what the research shows. If you have a product or service, as many of our companies do, that principally serves people in low-income communities of color, like you're doing some sort of K-12 product, well, 70%, 80% of the kids are not going to look anything like, let's say, Mark Zuckerberg. We ask, or me, you know, is there anyone on your team that comes from the community that is— what did I do— being served by your product? Could you— did I anger the gods? I must have angered the gods. Having someone around the table, particularly at a senior level, whose lived experience is a mirror of the market that is being served is extremely important. And we talk to entrepreneurs and say, well, you know, how do you feel about it? And are you open to or interested in or committed to building the kind of company that is broadly inclusive at the, at the staff level? And if so, we can, we can help you. And so I think we're just going to bake this into our practice because it's super important. Just a few words about how I got here because this is— I was the least popular child to ever go to the Freeport public school system on Long Island, or at least I thought so back in the 19— '50s and 1960s. And the one saving grace of my life was that I had early access to computers. I mean, very early, because this was like 1966. And that is me over on the left-hand side there seated at the keyboard. The computer is not the keyboard. The computer is the thing on the right that looks like the oil burner. About 1/1,000,000th as powerful as what you have in your pocket, but enough to write functional programs that did things. This, the main program that was at work here, was something that computed the orbit of asteroids, because I was at a summer program that gave me this access and exposure. And it was transformative. Put me on my path in life. And so the conclusion is everybody should have that chance. Genius is actually evenly distributed in society. It's just that we don't develop it evenly. And that's why a young woman was in one of the nonprofit education programs started by my wife, Frida, and myself of the Level Playing Field Institute. If we're going to develop all of the entrepreneurial talent that we need to help society, we have to reach much more broadly. We can't wait till people are in their 20s or 30s. We have to start much, much, much earlier. We sponsor hackathons. And these are the most amazing things when you get 150 high school students all from low-income communities of color for a whole weekend designing and building mobile apps that solve a problem in their own community. It is an astounding thing. And we recruit engineers and developers from our portfolio companies and others to come and serve as mentors to these kids so that— because I want to see them winding up in this audience. And the problem is people say, well, it's the pipeline. If you ask why doesn't XYZ company hire more, you know, more people from this group or that group, they say, well, it's the pipeline. We're not seeing them. Coming out our end of the pipeline. And that's— we go, yeah, because the pipeline is leaky. There's genius all over the place, but we're not developing it. And we need to fix the leaks in the pipeline as well as encourage companies to think more creatively about hiring. A milestone today, after many years of pressure, Google announced they will actually for the first time disclose the relative percentages of different types of groups in their employment. They've always— they've said, oh, we're not even going to do that, it's a kind of a trade secret. So they wouldn't even, you know, but now they've agreed to let everybody know how bad their numbers are. No, but it's a start. I'll tell you, Google is very important because they're so data and algorithm driven, and their head of people ops Laszlo Bock has given a number of interviews and he said, we've discovered that for years we used, we looked at SAT scores and what college you went to and GPAs in hiring as important factors. And you know something, people? They don't make any difference. They do not predict success at Google. So we're going to stop using those things completely. Oh, and by the way, answering the question about how many jelly beans it takes to fit into a 747. Which was a favorite kind of technical brain teaser in these interviews, also doesn't predict job success at all. We need to reach down a little bit more deeply and understand that talent can come in very different looking sorts of packages. And so another one of our practice is around looking more broadly at entrepreneurs. And I'm proud that about half of the last 50 companies we've done, the founders have been from underrepresented groups, either women or underrepresented people of color. These are just some of the entrepreneurs in the portfolio. So my encouragement to each of you is to think deeply about why you're doing what you're doing, how you pick the particular subject matter of the startup that you're doing. Does it have meaning to you personally? Can you get passionate about it? Because, by the way, you'll need that passion because it's so hard to do startups, and we all know that. Most of them fail anyway. And it's not because people aren't smart or don't work hard. They do. You do. It's that startups are just hard. But think about finding something in what you do that, in whatever way is meaningful to you, helps make the world a better place. And think about how you can bake that into the DNA of your company. You'll be doing yourselves a favor and the world a service. Thank you.
