Can a venture studio change the racial dynamic in Silicon Valley?
Have you heard of venture studios?
They're like movie studios, but instead of producing and releasing movies they create startups ready to scale. A venture studio focuses on just a few ventures and puts more funding into them than you'd see with an accelerator which places many small bets. They also recruit top executives once the existential question of "is this solution commercially viable?" can be answered with "yes".
One venture studio may be a way to solve a longtime problem in Silicon Valley: only 1% of VC goes to black- or brown-founded startups.
The sweet spot of Revitalize Venture Studio, from longtime SaaS entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, is knowing how to get a high-potential startup founded by diverse black and brown founders to product-market fit.
Often these are the very founders that lack access to early seed capital (up to $750K, far beyond most Family & Friends raises) needed to extend the life of their startup to get to product-market fit, which is a necessary stage to attract VC funding for Series A.
I just had the pleasure of meeting Clarence and learning more about his venture studio and want you to take a look at this pragmatic opportunity to support more POC in the Silicon Valley universe.
When the problem is taboo, the investment is taboo?
Congratulations to advertising veteran and entrepreneur Cindy Gallop for successfully raising $2M for her social-sex site Make Love Not Porn. Read the news at TechCrunch.
A year ago I told Cindy this story.
When I was an editor at Internet World magazine in dotcom NYC, I recall I was assigned a porn business story for the day's email newsletter. I was one of the very few women at this trade publication for Internet technology and e-business, and a newer hire. Clearly this wasn't a plum assignment.
It was hard to get any business and industry analysts to even discuss this foundational part of the internet. In the end I had to beg former Internet World staffers-turned-analysts to go on record so I could file the story.
I told Cindy that I often think about that when I see her posts about the struggles of raising funds to solve such a critical, obvious social problem with her service that was already generating $500k/year.