Awesome People List - Ep 28

Black Lives Matter and hiring diverse talent

Hi founders and fellow VC Friends,

Out of respect for Blackout Tuesday, we’re taking this week off. Black Lives Matter. We’ll be back with our scheduled programming next Tuesday. 

Like many of you, we’ve spent a lot of time glued to the news and not sleeping this week. It feels like America is at a breaking point.

We must do better. And I’m hopeful that we can do better. 

As a tech community, we must hire and promote diverse talent. By working together, we can elevate more awesome people, across all backgrounds and experiences. 

We’re committed to taking action: 

• Featured Talent: We will feature more diverse candidates. As always, we prefer to highlight trusted referrals. Please send us anyone who we should feature. 

• FT Gems: Sometimes you meet great candidates who aren’t a fit for one reason or another. When you discover awesome diverse candidates, can you send them our way? We’d love to promote them. 

• Tooling: We’re building internal tools. We plan to release public-facing tools to help you source and hire a more inclusive workforce. Stay tuned later this year as we test things out. 

We’re in this together and committed to doing our part. 

I love you all. 

Stay awesome, 

Julia 

P.S. Lastly, while I’m in your inbox, I hope you’re doing ok. These are extremely tough times. Many people I’ve spoken with are having trouble getting out of bed. If you need a break, please take one. It’s ok. Your team will understand. We’re living through a crisis on top of a crisis. Self-care is real and this is a long road. Give yourself a big hug. 

❤️🤗❤️