Now back from late summer vacation, I’ve noticed that a number of people flagged inconsistencies in the production, distribution, and exhibition of an opinion piece I wrote for Sifted, a European tech news outlet backed by The Financial Times - which I’d like to address here 🤗

Disclaimer: This will only absorb comments made on posts I’m tagged in up to August 25th 2023; comments may have come through since then where views have been changed or clarified - but there is no indication of this from DMs and emails as of September 17th 2023.

Sifted commissioned me for a two-part series titled “Europe: you’re drunk on state aid and high on DEI”. Part 1 was to focus on DEI, and Part 2 was to focus on State Aid (which is where most venture funding comes from in Europe). The two parts are directly connected and I pitched them as “two parts of the same coin” - while modular (in theory, they can be published in any order), one is not complete without the other, hence the series format.

Here’s the core argument the series makes 👇

• Correlation: There is a very strong overlap between the funds driving provably fallible diversity initiatives and the ones who receive state aid
• Causation (likely): This is almost certainly because state aid is not incentivised to drive the highest returns
• Therefore, replace state aid with private capital and the diversity dollars disappear
• To make venture as fair and as open as possible (i.e. meritocratic), we must move private capital into fund seeders (like Simplify) that eliminate the personal cost of setting up a venture fund (and provide access to single family offices)
• This is part of Europe’s broader transition from a state aid dominant model to a private capital model - now possible thanks to the fund admin platform Bunch Capital which specialises in FoF infrastructure regardless of fund size

For reasons I go into detail on below, they have published a single piece titled “Europe’s venture diversity machine is out of control” without the context above. They are simply allowing me to take the flak for ‘botched writing’, when the reality is that the piece was written well and it is their distribution (at a minimum) that was botched. I flagged issues throughout the full process of production, distribution, and exhibition. They have now had at least four weeks to respond to each issue. They have read them multiple times (thanks, Superhuman!) and not responded to them - so I’m looking for some help to get some answers 🙏

Sifted’s opinion process is peculiar, especially compared to similar outlets like The Information, or its backer the Financial Times. With these outlets, you pitch, you have a call with an editor, and you sign a contract. I pitched them on Wednesday June 28th 2023, and to date have not had a call with them - and was offered no contract to sign. I strongly suspect that if they followed a standard and opinion process that these discrepancies would not have occurred. At other outlets, they simply would not be allowed to occur. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-to-get-your-opinions-published-in-the-information

In sum, there are potentially three issues with their opinion outlet; action, minimisation, and coercion - it may be some combination of the three 💫

1️⃣ Action: During the process, I was informed that each part would be edited in separate phases, which implied that they would be published with a >24 hour gap (which appears to be their standard), but this does not mean that they would strip the ‘series’ element completely. The final document that they signed off on Friday August 18th was titled ‘Series: Europe: You’re drunk on state aid and high on DEI, Part 1: Europe’s venture diversity machine is out of control’ - publication was Monday August 21st. The title of the piece was “Europe’s venture diversity machine is out of control”, and it was not until Thursday August 24th that the team informed me that they would not be editing and distributing Part 2. Clearly, they must have known this prior to the publication of Part 1 - otherwise, the piece would have retained its original series title. To be clear, I had no knowledge of any of this until after ‘Part 1’ was published.

2️⃣ Minimisation: Sifted claims to follow an unbiased process, but they did not treat this piece the same as their other opinion pieces. Their standard practice is for the journalists who edited the piece to share it on their personal LinkedIn accounts - which they did not do in this case. They have also only distributed the piece via the Sifted LinkedIn page and have provided no indication about whether or not they will share the article on X (fka Twitter) - they still actively use the platform. Further still, on their bio describing me - they flag that I’m building WarwickTECH and Simplify, and that I was on the Atomico Angel Programme in 2020. They entirely neglect that I started in venture at age 18 at Doughty Hanson and worked for or with a series of other venture funds (outside of my own vehicles) since then. They themselves are employing the same revisionist historical practices that my opinion piece criticises. https://sifted.eu/author/harry-mclaverty#

3️⃣ Coercion: Sifted is a small outlet (more power to them!) which means that they are limited in how much they can publish and the depth to which they can go into in each piece. This also makes them highly susceptible to coercion. The DEI part of the series rightly addresses that I participated in Atomico’s Angel Programme in 2020, but following a conversation between Sifted and the Atomico team, this section of the article was changed drastically. The editor of the piece is ex-Atomico - a fact I flagged during the process (in that I was impressed by the journalistic integrity!). The piece directly critiques the use of demographic ‘lines in the sand’, yet I was not allowed to critique Atomico’s use of lines in the sand in the article https://thisisinversion.notion.site/thisisinversion/Sifted-Diversity-Machine-Follow-Up-Public-23-08-23-18b477793867486da4c3f48008192d26

🅰️ Submission: “Now I should say one thing unequivocally. I was on Atomico’s angel programme in 2020 (Cohort 2) - this particular cohort was not racialised. They brought in their diversity quota [correction: it was actually a ‘target’] for Cohort 3 and beyond. If I knew they were going to do this - I would not have joined their programme.” https://sifted.eu/articles/atomico-angel-programme-2021#

🅱️ Publication: “After participating in the Atomico angel programme — which has always put an emphasis on selecting diverse angels — I definitely felt when I was raising for my own VC fund that LPs and other investors were scrutinising my past deals. Did I get into them because of my Atomico association or my skill alone?”

At a minimum, Sifted need to fix their opinion process - or scrap it. Either do things exceptionally well, or don’t do them at all. I am fully confident that this would simply not be allowed to happen at the Financial Times, The Information, The New York Times, or any other outlet. With each passing day the they do not address the action and minimisation issues, the likelihood that the core issue is actually coercion increases. I for one would like to know what’s going on, and I think the rest of us have a right to know too.