Race In Silicon Valley

In the furor over race in Silicon Valley, I had a few ideas on how to improve the situation:

- Expand recruiting beyond Stanford, Cal, CMU, MIT. Georgia Tech is the #4 engineering school and one of the most diverse engineering student bodies around. One of the things that's always pissed me off is SV hiring managers not taking the 4 hour flight to recruit in the US from a major public school, vs. bitching about not being able to find diverse candidates.

- Be transparent about your workforce diversity. Mike Swift of the SJ Mercury news tried to cover the hiring practices of a number of major Valley companies (who shall go nameless) and they slapped an injunction on him, stating this was competitive information. My understanding is that the data showed that these "select" companies were far more likely to hire overseas nationals than US minorities, even when the overseas nationals didn't go to the sacred 4-5 schools.

- Also look at the better ranked HBCU's, Tribal Colleges, etc, several of which have joint degree programs with the top schools. For example, one can attend Morehouse and get a joint MS in Engineering, Physics, etc. from Georgia Tech. Wellesley has a joint deal with MIT as well. The NSF is a great resource for other schools for recruitment.

- Kill the STEM education in high schools, etc. canard. It's always used to justify the lack of brown faces in SV companies. There are plenty of minorities in engineering fields, though from my perspective clearly not enough. The issue is that SV companies/VC's have to stop being so lazy and recruiting at the same 4-5 schools. I also wonder how many SV companies even bother to check the NSBE/SWE/SHPE memberships on the top 4-5 campuses?

- Not everyone needs to be a BS/MS/PHD in Engineering/Computer Science to work in High Tech..How many Sales/Marketing people are PHD's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford? As a point of comparison, look at the relative diversity of Pharma sales forces; most of those people don't have life sciences masters or PHD's. Same thing with big Telco. Far more diverse in sales/marketing than High Tech w/o the necessity for advanced degrees from a select group of schools.

- Increase diversity of the VC GP pool. I think there are less than 50 GPs of color in VC firms nationwide. I'm a strong advocate of bringing back the SBIC program for Equity Investment firms, and creating a new generation of more diverse VC firms, by composition, strategy, etc. That will also create more competition with the incumbents.

- Public retirement LP's of venture firms have to start scorecards for VC's. Little known secret is that VC's only need to put in 1% of the Fund from their own pockets as per NVCA rules. That means the other 99% is OPM (Other People's Money). Much of that is from public LP's(Calpers, Calstrs, Utimco, etc). So, retirement fund money from a diverse population(50%+ in California) goes to VC funds who then overwhelmingly invest in startups led by white men (87% according to CB Insights http://bit.ly/aiQ50C ). Over a 10 year basis, most VC firms have barely tracked the S&P, so you can't say that this strategy is yielding higher performance. I think this is one of the roots of the problem; change the funding behavior and the trickle down effect of having a more diverse leadership group in funded companies will naturally create a more diverse pool of employees.

That's all I got. Now, gotta get back to running my company and being a statistical anomaly...;o)