Panel-style discussion emphasizing that diversity and inclusion are business imperatives: companies need every talented person and must make them feel they belong. Leaders and CEOs are urged to prioritize diversity now or risk future competitiveness; inclusion requires more than hiring (it requires belonging and access), mandates can backfire, and organizers should focus on inspiring curiosity and active recruitment—including a stated goal to increase underrepresented founders from a small incremental increase (hundreds) to a much larger target (1,000 more next 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 going to have a business in five years. You will not be able to recruit top talent. You won't be competitively taking advantage. We really need for CEOs and leaders to really double down and look at diversity now, starting day one. 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, 12,000 people here, bringing another hundred 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.
