- Why publish with Sifted?
- In short, I chose Sifted because the piece goes against much of their existing content, so they’d be the least likely to publish - and so I’d have to sharpen my arguments the most and it would be a much bigger win to get to publication https://sifted.eu/articles/atomico-angel-programme-2021
- The process from initial pitch to publication of the first piece was 8 weeks (including 5 weeks of review - usually it’s 1 or 2 emails!), during which time I broke down the four types of racism, the history of the invention of racism, the weaponisation of unnecessary racialisation, and, amongst other things, developed a repeatable experiment to demonstrate that we should expect company gender ratios to follow a leptokurtic normal distribution rather than them all being 50:50.
- In the end, the claim ’the venture DEI machine works’ is falsifiable and I proved it wrong. They challenged the proof and couldn’t find a flaw in it, so they were happy to publish - even though they may not have liked the result personally. This is simply good journalism.
- Moving from ‘opinion’ to disproof
- The same now goes for everyone else. Just because you don’t like something, that doesn’t make it untrue. You don’t get to have your own facts. You don’t get to say “I don’t like those facts, therefore they’re not facts.”
- If you can disprove this, show us your disproof. If you can’t, accept that you’re wrong. Otherwise, you’re just a pseudoscientist who refuses to address their own internal biases, who refuses to operate transparently and openly, and who refuses to seek consistency.
- Every ounce of attention drawn away from infrastructural solutions (that don't focus on eliminating bias or building non-exclusionary congregation) is unconstructive and takes us further away from our shared mission.
- Understanding the journalistic process
- A few people appear to be trying to treat this as a personal blog piece or a piece of promotional material, rather than an opinion piece, here’s how they differ in this case:
- Promotion: Naturally, I wasn't allowed to go into detail on Simplify itself. But as stated, the core point is that eliminating the personal cost of setting up a fund plus gaining access to SFOs is the core problem - which Simplify solves. The magic is how - which I’d love to break down in more detail on the right channel.
- Writing: It’s a 600-800 word piece (standard for an opinion piece), so there was a lot that we couldn’t include (which is why I’ve written extensive supplementary blogs instead). Naturally, it’s Sifted’s piece, so while they did definitely give me a say after editing, I didn’t get the final say (again, this is standard). I was very happy with the edits overall, and there are only two things I would have sought to change/emphasise if I had my way:
- Emphasising Both Lines in the Sand
- Line by Colour: This is a form of discrimination known as colourism which still permeates our society today - there is no reason to reinforce it (the Sifted promo focused on this)
- Line by Ancestry: This is a form of discrimination known as mongrelism (note: this term was in the copy that I approved, but was nixed after - I’m sure there’s a good reason), which we abandoned last century - again, there is no reason to bring it back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dyyt2kVOEg
- Atomico Angel Programme
- It won’t take a genius to realise that there was a lot more going on here than was explicitly printed - below is what I submitted, and what made print 👇
- 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.”
- 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?”
- Next Steps
- To round up, diversity initiatives should be jumping for joy at Simplify, because while corporate diversity programmes will rightly be killed off (because they provably deliver zero value on average), Simplify will continue the mission - the reason a small minority of people are complaining is because they will not be the ones to carry the torch forward https://freakonomics.com/podcast/roland-fryer-refuses-to-lie-to-black-america/
- Critic response speed is telling, most of the reactionary pseudoscience (without disproof) came in without the first 24 hours (there’s no way you’re going to have internalised Simplify’s fund model in that time), and beyond that it was just all broad-based agreement (again, with no disproof). As such, this is an issue of (a lack of) healthy ops and comms policy more than anything else, when I say ‘people don’t think’, this is what I’m talking about https://medium.com/@harrymclaverty/a-reflection-on-10-years-in-vc-at-28-52182a1279da
- Update 24/08/23: If you can disprove the thesis, let’s talk; beyond that, I’m not going to ‘debate’ people who simply don’t like it but can’t prove it wrong; to quote Prof G, this is akin to an immunologist ‘debating’ the claim that vaccines cause autism - all research has disproved it, you don’t get to have your own facts https://www.profgalloway.com/truth/
- Finally, this is just Part 1 - the ‘chill’ one. If you don’t like Part 1 then you’re really not going to like Part 2 (the ‘main’ piece) - which explores why people are pumping out this pseudoscience (hint: your LP base is a very strong indicator) 🙃