'All early-stage entrepreneurs have challenges, but add in the layer of an immigrant entrepreneur, and then on top of that an immigrant women entrepreneur, you’re looking at a whole different set of challenges.'
TweetShareShare As part of our Founders + Funders SF 2019 summit, held in partnership with Seneca VC, we brought together an exciting group of startup founders and investors for a day of learning, networking and growth.
We’ve identified untapped potential that may be stuck with an educational visa in the US educational system, or being sponsored at a corporation, and not being able to leave either to start a company full-time company. We feel that if you can grow the size of the pie and give untapped potential the opportunity to succeed, they will succeed faster.
Mitch Kapor has written a brilliant piece about this. But an immigrant naturally has a distance they’ve traveled, not in miles, but in the journey. And when you understand that, you understand something called the adversity muscle. The adversity muscle is what we call in America “grit”. I think we’re borrowing it from immigrants, veterans, and athletes because those are the groups of people that have to work extremely hard to find a way to succeed.
When we raised our first fund, which was $4.5m, we had to really convince people to take a bet on us. Not on the thesis, not on the opportunity, but on us. The second fund, we have a little more data. Right? We now have founders from 19 different countries, all six continents. I recognize there are seven. I’m not going to get the seventh [laughter]. 38% of my founding teams are led by women. We’re two male Indians running the fund.
You have to be intentional and understanding that everyone has different challenges. All early-stage entrepreneurs have challenges, but add in the layer of an immigrant entrepreneur, and then on top of that an immigrant women entrepreneur, you’re looking at a whole different set of challenges. What we’ve been able to see across fund I to fund II is, in the first fund, the time to next dollar raise after us was approximately 11 months. In our second fund, that’s down to 11 weeks. That’s an incredible change for us to even recognize because it shows that maybe the talent hasn’t changed, but the people’s view of us has. We were actually diversifying selection for our founders, and we didn’t even realize that when they first took our money.
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