All Raise CEO discusses Fearless Fund lawsuit

Aug 08, 2023

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Mary Dillon’s Footlocker turnaround isn’t easy, Starface’s founder launches another startup, and All Raise’s new CEO deals with a changing landscape for diversity in VC. Have a wonderful Wednesday.

– New job. In April, Paige Hendrix Buckner became the permanent CEO of All Raise, the organization that supports women and nonbinary people in tech and venture capital. She first stepped into the role on an interim basis in January when her predecessor, Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, left the position.

As All Raise’s new CEO, Hendrix Buckner was focused on building community, supporting founders, scaling and professionalizing the originally all-volunteer organization, and engaging potential LPs when another priority was dropped on her doorstep this month: the racial discrimination lawsuit against Fearless Fund, a small venture capital firm that backs women of color founders.

Four months in, Hendrix Buckner—like many people in venture capital—is navigating the impact of a lawsuit that threatens the work All Raise and its members have been doing to put more capital in the hands of diverse founders and funders. All-women founding teams receive about 2% of VC dollars and Black women get less than 1% of VC funding.

Hendrix Buckner says her immediate reaction to the lawsuit, which alleges that Fearless Fund’s $20,000 grants to Black women founders discriminate against non-Black people, was “shock.” But a few weeks later, she’s clear-eyed about what the future might hold. “This is not the last time we’re probably going to see something like this happen,” she says. (Indeed, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, the conservative organization behind this suit and the suit that led the Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action in higher education, filed another suit against law firms for their diversity programs this week.)

The All Raise network includes influential investors, like board members Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures and Jess Lee of Sequoia. Hendrix Buckner is aiming to mobilize All Raise’s community to continue to support the organization’s work.

“This lawsuit signals that our work is more important than ever,” she says. Before the suit was filed, Hendrix Buckner said one of her key priorities was telling stories about successful diverse founders and funders in the press, in fiction, and in academia. Some of that storytelling targeted potential LPs, especially high net-worth women who have traditionally put money towards philanthropy rather than investing.

That’s even more important as the suit could lead some to worry that investing in funds that mainly back women or women of color might come with risk. “We need to say, ‘Remember, even as lawsuits like this are popping up, Black women fund managers, marginalized fund managers are still a good bet,'” she says. “They have a unique vantage point into markets that haven’t been seen by majority-led firms.”

The All Raise CEO’s job—with a mandate to change not just an organization, but an industry—is a tall order; Hendrix Buckner is the organization’s third CEO in four years. Throwing an industry-shifting lawsuit in the mix doesn’t make that job any easier. But it does make its importance clearer.

“This fires me up,” Hendrix Buckner says, “to continue to do our work.”

Emma [email protected]@_emmahinchliffe

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