May 20, 2022 • 40 mins
Arlan Hamilton is not the typical Silicon Valley venture capitalist. She built a venture capital fund from the ground up while experiencing homelessness. Anita Hill sits down with Hamilton to discuss the personal obstacles Hamilton faced as well as how she is providing solutions to the systemic disadvantage that entrepreneurs of color face in trying to navigate Silicon Valley.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Getting Even is produced by Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to
Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other
Pushkin shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign
(00:35):
up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot fm. Anybody can invest their own
money and be a part of this revolution and be
a part of innovation in a part of the future.
It belongs to every single one of us. That's Arlin Hamilton,
(00:59):
founder of the Backstage Capital Fund. Breaking into Silicon Valley
isn't easy, especially for a black woman in the United States,
and an ordinate share of industry funding goes to white men.
Hamilton was living in Texas working as a tour manager
for musicians like Tony Braxton and Kirk Franklin, and then
(01:23):
she got turned on to venture capital. I was thirty
thirty one, and I started getting the bug a little bit,
just seeing it here and there, learning a little bit
here and there. And I did what I do when
I get really interested in something, and I just devoured
information because as broke as I was, you can't take
(01:43):
away from me that ability to learn. Hamilton was relent bus.
There were times when she didn't have enough food, and
at one point she was homeless, but she never wavered.
I was up against so much and it almost seemed impossible,
and in fact, many people told me it was impossible,
and many people laughed me out of rooms. But in
(02:06):
twenty fifteen, she created Backstage Capital and Extraordinary Achievement and
began her mission to invest in underrepresented funds and founders.
I was talking to founders from all over the country
who were building amazing things. And I don't think that
the current investors that are out there would meet these founders,
(02:30):
would even know where to find them. And that's why
I knew for sure I needed to build this fund.
I'm Anita Hill. This is Getting Even, my podcast about
equality and what it takes to get there. On Getting Even,
I speak with people who are improving, are imperfect world,
(02:53):
people who took risks and broke the rules. In this episode,
Arlen Hamilton and I discuss how she achieved immense success
in Silicon Valley, all the while challenging a system that
excludes women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community.
(03:16):
There are some real basics that I want to hear about.
It's sort of teach us a little bit about financing
and venture capitalism one oh one. What is a venture capitalists? Well,
a venture capitalist is someone essentially who takes a little
bit of their money, but mostly other people's money, and
that can be pension funds, could be high net worth individuals,
(03:39):
family offices, etc. And they take that money and their
job is to look for outstanding individual companies that are
private and at different stages and hopefully turn that portfolio
of investments into more for their limited partners, who are
the ones that I just listed. And so their job
(04:01):
is to hopefully see into the future a little bit
and to make some really interesting bets. So you have
to be a risk taker and you also have to
be patient exactly, and I have an incredibly high tolerance
for risk. And I also think in decades, not in quarters,
and so that's part of what has made it possible
(04:23):
for me to not only work in this industry, but
to innovate within it. Wow. Well that's our first lesson
thinking in decades, not in quarters. So you also have
to learn some lingo. I know that there are certain
terminologies that are out there that people refer to, like
angel investing and impact investing. How did you get familiar
(04:47):
with the language of this kind of enterprise. I read
a lot. So I was in Parland in Texas, which
is part of Houston, and I was thirty thirty one,
and I started getting the bug a little bit, just
seeing it here and there, learning a little bit here
and there, and I did what I do when I
get really interested in something, and I just voured information.
(05:10):
Because as broke as I was, as much housing insecurity
as I had and food insecurity as I had, you
can't take away from me that ability to learn, and
so it was it was almost kind of a power
play for me too that I don't think I've ever
really said. It was also this way of remaining in
control having this information. So I thankfully had access to
(05:32):
the internet, so I could read everything, you know, do
all these searches and really not know what I was
looking for, but kind of go through the vortex, you know,
you get on YouTube where you go here or there
and you just start looking. And then I would go
to bookstores in the library and I would sit for
hours and read. So I would just kind of learn
that way, and I just paid attention to people too.
(05:55):
So if I learned about a specific investor that was interesting,
to me or said something, whether I agreed with it
or not, I would follow that lead, almost like a journalist,
and I would just continue really pulling at that thread
and started reaching out to people. There was a lot
of curiosity. Had you been that way since you were
(06:16):
a child? Yes, yes, my mother would tell you, oh yes.
I mean I think most children ask questions, But I
was asking questions all day long from a very early age,
and it was mostly what got me in a lot
of trouble in school. Unfortunately. You know, when a tall
black girl in the South is asking questions in school
(06:39):
and disrupting class quote unquote, it's something different sometimes than
it would be for others. But I would just question, Okay,
I understand it's in the book. I understand that the
books was written twenty years ago, but why is it
necessarily still the case? You know, this is me in
the fourth grade, you know, looking at why is it
(07:00):
necessarily the end all be all? Just because it's in
a book? Somewhere? I challenged and questioned everything. I questioned
if someone was being treated poorly, why couldn't we make
it different. It's just a constant throughout my life. I
also wonder if you were thinking I want to find
(07:21):
out those things that they're not teaching us, that maybe
we're not even supposed to learn, which is why VC,
you know, was interesting to you. Yes, No, you're definitely right.
I just always had this sense of there's no room
I shouldn't be allowed in. So if there's something that
(07:42):
seems like it's really complex or it's for only a
certain group of people, that's just a challenge to me.
If I'm at all interested in it, that doesn't stop me.
And it's my way of democratizing things. It's like having
that information. Yeah, democratizing things means democratizing knowledge. Yes, exactly.
(08:02):
So when you were doing your reading, were you thinking
that you were going to become a venture capitalist? Where
you thinking about a career shift at all? At the
beginning of it, I was reading about venture capital so
that I could know how to talk to venture capitalists
once I started my own company. My original idea was
(08:24):
to start a company in the tech space because I
had always felt like an entrepreneur, and then when I
learned about startups and venture capital and angel investing in
all of those things, I thought, oh, this is where
I have belonged my whole life, and didn't really understand
it until now, and let me do the research to
(08:44):
be prepared in these meetings that I'm of course going
to have with venture capitalists. And so it was in
that research when I came across these statistics after a
little while, very early in the process, and I started
reading more and learning about the beginnings, and I thought, oh, okay,
so I probably can get into the room because I'll
(09:06):
make a way, but I may not be welcome and
I may not be followed by anybody else if I do.
At least ninety percent of all venture capital in the
United States goes to white men in a country where
they make up less than one third of the country.
So we got to change the whole system if I
(09:28):
want to play in this arena. Wow. So that's a
pretty big undertaking to think you having to change an
entire system to be able to do what you wanted
to do. But it sounds as though you were pretty
clear that it was worth the risk, as you say,
you're you have a tolerance for risk. Yeah, And when
(09:50):
I think back on it now, I mean I was
up against so much and it almost seemed impossible, and
in fact, many people told me it was impossible, and
many people laughed me out of rooms. There was one
woman who told me in early twenty fifteen, after me
working on this for like four years, I told her,
I'm going invest in a hundred companies led by underrepresented
(10:12):
founders by twenty twenty. I said that in twenty fifteen
to her, she was in a place of privilege and
I wanted to have a partnership with her. And she
literally started laughing as she walked me out of her
office and told me to come back when I was
more realistic and skipping ahead just a bit. We reached
one hundred investments in twenty eighteen. Right, and have you
(10:36):
had a conversation with her? I couldn't pick her out
of a lineup. I have no idea what her name
was exactly, but I will bet that she could pick
you out of a lineup today. Perhaps, what are the
barriers that you faced when you were first trying to
start your own VC firm and you'd moved from being
a founder yourself to being someone who finances. I think
(11:00):
a major part to understand is that not only was
I trying to kind of walk into a place that
wasn't bill for us, which most things weren't. I was
also personally destitute. I don't mean that I was cute broke.
I was broke broke. We you know, we didn't have
money and it was a struggle for a long time,
(11:21):
and every once in a while we get some money
and you know, make that stretch for as long as
we could. I ended up living essentially at the San
Francisco Airport for a stretch in twenty fifteen and watching
people walk by who I knew were investors. At the
very beginning. Of course, people were brushing me off and
(11:41):
kind of not really paying close attention. But I was
also calling out the system, and in doing so, calling
out various companies and firms. And even though I had
this small platform, I started getting messages both direct and indirect,
that I needed to shut up. And it was coming
(12:03):
from someone who wanted to protect me and said, we
don't do that. That's not how it works here. And
it was also coming from people who thought that they
could truly shut me up. They were making it very
clear to me that, in their opinion, you don't go
up against these titans of industry without their being a fallout.
(12:27):
And they learned kind of earlier on that they couldn't
silence me, but it did ruffle feathers and it I
was just so surprised. I was honestly so shocked and
surprised by it because I thought, all I'm doing is
expressing my opinion. I don't have any power here. How
in the world is it upsetting so many millionaires and
(12:49):
billionaires that are successful, mostly white men, who could put
their thumb down and kind of squash me. It was crazy,
but I think it just showed just how fragile things
really were. You know, there's a lot of money that
flows in to Silicon Valley, and there are a lot
(13:12):
of closed door decisions that are made that affect so
many people. And I was sort of saying, you know,
putting the spotlight and saying, hey, look over here, look
what they're talking about, showing people like here, Okay, let
me open up the blueprint for you. This is where
you go, this is who you talk to, this is
what this means. And if I'm able to do that
without a college education, without any money, without any connections,
(13:36):
homeless coming from nowhere, it must mean in their opinion,
they're not as special as they've made themselves out to be. Yeah,
I mean so you were questioning the exceptionalism that they
were trying to promote that was key to success. It
seems to me that what you were doing was key
to what you saw as the need for a systemic change. Yes,
(14:00):
and so that's why you kept doing it. Oh. Absolutely.
I think if people hadn't been so against me doing it,
I probably would have not proceeded. I probably would have said, Okay,
I've said my piece. I'm probably gonna go over here
and I'll help a few people out and raise some
money for my company. But when I started seeing people
raging against it, in very powerful men writing to me
(14:22):
or having their minions right to me or do whatever,
I thought, Oh, there's something more here. There's definitely something
that's being hidden. We're gonna keep going. I'm glad you're
stuck in there. But you had, by that time moved
from Houston to the Bay Area. Yeah. I had took
a one way flight that I crowdsourced the money to
(14:45):
get because I'd been accepted into a two week investor
boot camp at Stanford and it was right before they
were getting ready to like have a lot of women,
you know, come out about things in Silicon Valley. But
It was during a time where it was important to
them to have more women represented at this boot camp,
(15:07):
and so they took their twenty thousand dollars tuition down
to ten thousand for women. So I found my way.
I crowdsourced a third of that. I stayed in an
airbnb for a few days, and then after the catered
lunches at the boot camp, I found myself at the airport.
(15:28):
You were physically sleeping at the airport, yes, How did
you choose the airport? I was very specific about the airport.
I wanted a place that was indoors for many reasons.
I wanted a place that I thought, Okay, it's probably
going to be embarrassing and I might have to explain
myself a lot, but I also want to be safe
(15:51):
as possible, and there's access to facilities, and so to me,
I had to do this mentally. I said to myself,
I am a traveler, the world traveler, and I've missed
my flight, so I'm going to sleep on the floor
of the airport tonight. And I said that to myself
(16:13):
over and over again each day to make it possible
to do. For most of us, two nights would have
been about as much as we could do. But I
guess when you're determined, you can figure out how to
do it. Yeah, it was a lot more than two nights,
but I don't say the amount of time. I didn't
count every day, but it was too long, so I
(16:35):
don't really share it because I did have people rich
people start to ask me, now, how homeless were you?
Like literally, and I'm like enough, like I don't know,
Like it was fun to find out or interesting in
that way, and so I just started protecting myself and saying,
you know what, I don't know how homeless you This
(16:57):
particular person needs me to be for it to be legitimate.
But it was more than it needed to be, and
it was for a long time, and it was alone.
After the break, Arlin Hamilton and I discuss how she
created her fund and grew it using her keen instincts
and abilities to recognize great ideas and the innovative people
(17:18):
behind them. You're listening to getting even. I'm Anita Hill.
I'm speaking with investor Arlin Hamilton about how she started
backstage capital of venture capital fund. Hamilton backs underrepresented and
(17:41):
unlikely founders, democratizing who gets to be part of Silicon Valley.
So were you getting the information that you thought you
would need to persuade investors that there were companies out
there that could benefit from their money and that they
(18:01):
could benefit from Yes. So I was talking to founders
because I wanted to know my stuff. One of the
first things I learned when I learned about venture capital
was the phrase that deal flow is king, deal flow
being what kind of companies do you have access to,
who would let you invest in them? What are you seeing,
(18:22):
what's the quality, etc. And that stuck with me and
I said, well, if deal flow is king, I'm winning
here because I'm seeing all of these companies. And I
don't think that the current investors by and large that
are out there would meet these founders, would even know
where to find them. And I don't know if the
(18:43):
founders would know how to get a call with the investors.
So of course there's this really interesting gap that could
be lucrative. So I was having those conversations. I was
letting the founders know, Hey, I don't have a fund yet,
but I'm raising one. So I was kind of establishing
a track record a network and also realizing, oh, I
(19:05):
have chops, I have a nose for this too, But
you were doing all of this without the infrastructure that
you now have. Correct So basically what was important was
the work Exactly when you were first doing your work
to find investors to find founders, were you experiencing any
(19:29):
racism or sexism or both in those exchanges and finding founders. No,
it was on the investor side, it really was. It's
one of those things that it's hard to kind of
show because it's all happening behind closed doors. But I
remember getting a very late night phone call, probably two
(19:50):
thousand and sixteen, after I had raised from a few
interesting people, and this person was an early investor, a
man with power, and he told me, Hey, I just
want to let you know that I just left a meeting,
like a closed door meeting, probably a poker game or
(20:13):
something like that, and they were talking about you, and
they were representing lots of different funds that you have
to deal with, not only to raise from, but for
your companies to raise from. And I want to say
this as carefully as possible. They essentially put a hit
on my fund. They put a no one's going to
(20:36):
touch this fund. We're not going to let it succeed
type of thing. Now, was that racist? Was that sexist?
Was that very specific to meet? What was it? I
don't know. And this person was telling me, and he
was giving me a heads up because he had invested
in I guess he just stayed silent in the room
and I didn't ask him why he didn't say anything.
(20:58):
But you know, it is what it is, and those
types of things happen. And talking to the founders, people
would tell me incredible things. Women would tell me about
what male investors would dare say to them. I think
people in public don't say as much to me blatantly
(21:19):
because they know that I do have a platform. But
founders will tell me that male investors have said things like,
will invest in you if you don't get pregnant for
the next couple of years so that you can focus
on your company. You know, I've been in rooms with
black women who have PhDs, who have all the chops
(21:39):
in the world, who are generating revenue when there are
some young white man who can raise ten million dollars
off of an idea. And I've listened to the questions
asked of these women. I've given a quick example. There
is a woman who at the time I was in
my early thirties and she was in her early forties.
She was an adjunct professor at Stanford. I sent her deck,
(22:05):
her pitch deck, which talks about her company, and I
sent another They're from a white man and the guy
had an idea, and she had a full fledged company,
an invention with patents and was making money. And I
got several emails back and with over a week's time
from the people I sent it to, because I was
sending it to mostly white men because that's who was
(22:27):
writing checks, and almost all of them said, I'll take
the meeting with this company, which was led by the guy,
and for this company. They would say, I don't understand
the market, so that I'm going to pass on this one.
Now the market this was a product that was for
hearing loss, so the market is for people who can
(22:50):
hear and for people who cannot hear. It was for everyone.
So you know, those subtle things add up. I call
them papercuts. You know they add up. So my reaction
to all of that was creating more success for myself
and for the company. You seem very secure in who
(23:14):
you are, but I wonder if you see a number
of people who are kind of changing who they are
to be more appealing. In some ways, it's code swishing
or changing your personality or being something that you aren't
in order to appeal to this very very limited thinking
(23:39):
about who will be successful in business. Yes, absolutely, I've
definitely seen it the entire time I've been in this industry.
I see it today. I rail against it, and I
often implore people not to do it. Especially in the
early days. I thought, am I supposed to change the
way I talk? Am I supposed to be quieter? Am
(24:02):
I supposed to change the way I dress? Because I
certainly don't dress the part. Am I supposed to do
this or that? Or even aligned myself with certain people
who I don't really respect but who can get me
there faster. And even if I had a small inkling
of this, I would reset and say, oh, no way
(24:22):
on Earth, because it's just going to take longer and
be more difficult. But I'm going to get there, and
once I'm there, I have to be able to face myself.
I've turned down lots of money, for instance, because I
didn't think it was right to be in business with
certain people, and so many people came before me and
before us to make it, so so we should we
owe it to them. We will owe it to ourselves.
(24:44):
We owe it to the future generations not to do that.
So let's they are a point where you've gotten maybe
your first big VC inside or on your side, and
you realize that the company's going to happen. Was it
a moment or a series of things that happened that
convinced you, Yeah, it was. It was a series of things.
(25:07):
It wasn't one big moment. We had this moment where
I went from the airport to actually being able to
be in business, which was in September of twenty fifteen.
An angel investor named Susan Kimberlin stood up and gave
me the first fifty thousand to get started after spending
a few months getting to know me, not knowing about
my personal situation. Another thing that does continue to stand
(25:29):
out to me, which is Stuart Butterfield, the CEO co
founder of Slack. He reached out to me on social
and he said, hey, you know, I see what you're doing.
We developed a quick friendship and he made an investment
and he said, you know, put my name on the
deck on the presentation, put my face on there. Whatever
you need. Aaron Levy did the same thing from Box.
(25:52):
They're definitely in this story some really interesting upstanding men,
especially that I would have been surprised by. But the
thing is they were founders who were successful, massively successful,
who themselves work their way up, and I think that
they got me. They saw me as a founder, they
(26:14):
saw me as an entrepreneur more than anything, and maybe
they saw that the system didn't need to be changed. Yeah,
I believe so. So you have Backstage Capital, and how
did you come to name it Backstage Capital? My mother,
missus Arline Butler Sims, she came up with her name.
(26:34):
I just mentioned to her one night while we were
in Periland and again broke. I said, I had this
fund I'm putting together and it needs a name. And
she didn't ask me, how are you gonna have a
fund that doesn't make any sense? She said, oh, let
me think about it. And she came back within ten
minutes and said, how about backstage because you work with
musicians on tour, you know, for concerts, and you help
(26:55):
them get on stage, and maybe you can do that
for the people you're working with here. And I thought, well,
that's brilliant. I'm not gonna let her know how brilliant
it is. But I said, oh, that's great, that's good.
And then you know, every other week she's asking me,
where's my fifteen I came up with a name, where's
my fifteen percent? Well good, She'll keep reminding you. Yeah,
(27:18):
let's talk a little bit about the founders that you
have helped. You call the people you support underestimated founders.
How do you choose them? It's a gut reaction. It
is a shift in the atmosphere when I see it.
There's something called pattern matching right in VC and other
places where a lot of times these are men pattern
(27:42):
matching for Zuckerberg or Bassos or whomever. I'm doing pattern
matching two. It's just a different pattern. So I'm looking
for someone I call being hungry, not thirsty, and I
want to back that person who can combine that with
an incredible vision. If I can find something that is
(28:05):
like game changing, and it would take me a decade
or more to figure it out on my own, you're
going to have my attention because I get to live
through you. In that moment, my life gets to be fuller.
In that moment, I have the best seat in the house.
To innovation and you can want to grow exactly. Yeah,
do you do something different from what other vcs do
(28:29):
for your founders. I've had early conviction for a lot
of people. I've seen the potential really early for a
great deal of people, and I think that's what you're
seeing now is like the fruits of that. And whether
I had money at the time or not, I invested
my belief in them. I believe that people are so
capable of so many things. I represents hope for people
(28:54):
that their current situation doesn't have to be what they
are for the rest of their lives, or there is
more for them. Yeah, I believe in them, which you
encourage the people to throw the route that you do.
What advice could you give? My thing is like, it's
not necessarily the big deal is to become a venture capitalist.
(29:15):
I never thought that that was the big deal and
I still don't, right. The big deal is that over
the next few years, people are going to become founders,
and they're going to become entrepreneurs and start companies which
are going to be amazing, and there are also people
who will be able to invest in those companies as
part of the crowd, not necessarily being a venture capitalist,
but putting one hundred dollars fifty dollars a thousand dollars
(29:36):
of their money into companies. So I say, anybody can
be an angel investor. And I love angel investors because
in groups, they are very powerful, and they're very savvy,
and they have a perspective that most venture capitalists will
never have. They just won't have that. So if you
(29:57):
want to get into investing, there are many, many ways
to do it, but just to know that, like the
world is your oyster. When it comes to this, there's
nobody standing at a gate telling you, Okay, you get
to go do this as you're from this city, or
you went to this school, or you're this race. There's
no one there. It is yours for the taking. And
(30:17):
just be intentional about the research and say why why
would I want to do this? Is it because I
think I'm going to get rich really fast? Because you won't.
This is not a magic peal. But if you have
conviction around certain things, if you have skill, if you
have curiosity like I did, anybody can invest their own
(30:39):
money and be a part of this revolution and be
a part of innovation and a part of the future.
It belongs to every single one of us. I really
love your story. But I'm sure there are people who
are out there who will argue that you're the exception,
and you are, but they will also say that we
can't expect that everybody's going to be able to do this,
(31:02):
And it sounds to me like what you're saying is
that you don't want everybody to have to go the
route that you went. Oh no, nobody should have to.
I have invested in personally in about twenty five funds
now over the past three years that have a similar
mandate and thesis to Backstage Capital my firm. Twenty four
(31:25):
of them did not exist in twenty fifteen when I
started Backstage, which means that we have in some way
influenced dozens, if not hundreds of new firms to pop up.
And that's amazing. And I know them because I've invested
in them. Not each of them had to go through
what I did. There's a little bit easier, to call
(31:46):
it loosening the pickle jar. It's a little bit easier
each time. So I think that there's a lot to
look forward to. We have some more surprises up our sleeve.
Oh god, I'm sure you do, and I'll be curious
to hear about them. The name of the podcast is
getting even. How would you define parody in venture capitalism?
(32:10):
Oh well, I mean, I think the idea of walking
into a room or being on a cap table, which
is like a list of investors and a fund, being
in a deal and it just looking like the demographics
of the country, you know, I think that would in
itself be parody, that it was effortless rather than so
(32:32):
labored just to get into the room, just to get
into the deal, just to have exposure, because it just
feeds on itself over and over again. The PayPal mafia
then goes on to invest in Facebook, then goes on
to invest in this, and that feeding onto itself. I
just want to see that more spread out, more democratic. Absolutely,
(32:55):
why should people outside of Silicone Valley care about venture
capital firms? So many of the biggest companies in the country,
in the world are VC backed, and there were very
specific people who made a decision to invest in them,
who win off of their winds, and then there are
very few people who are those founders who are backed.
(33:18):
We have the opportunity to change the face of innovation.
To add to it that in itself. If you're talking
about generational wealth, you're talking about today's wealth, like that's
really important too. We talk about generational wealth, but I
talk about right now. You also talk about influence and
power comes from money a lot of times, and I
(33:42):
honestly believe that if there are more rich black people,
for instance, I don't think we would be seeing public
executions of black men on television. And then down to
the other side of the spectrum, which is there is
a video that many of us have seen of two
black hands under a soap dispenser, and the soap dispenser,
(34:04):
which is like automated, does not recognize the black hands.
This is happening in autonomous vehicles and other types of things. Now.
I don't know about you, but I want the cars
to see me at the sidewalk when I'm walking across
the street. I want autonomous vehicles of the future, which
there will be there already are some. I want them
(34:26):
to see me. And the reason that these things happen
is because who was in the room when it was
being built. We need to be in the rooms when
this is being built. We need to be making decisions.
A lot of the decisions come from the founders and
from their backers, and so you just wonder if there
had been a dark scanned person like myself in the room,
(34:50):
who could have been in there, who would have asked,
have you tested this for all scan colors exactly? Do
you have questions for me? Ah? Oh my god? How
much time do you do? I have questions for Anita here.
(35:11):
Do you believe that you've been able to understand the
impact that you've had on women black women, especially over
the decades, or does it feel a little detached from you?
It is who I am, And I like your phrase
hungry not thirsty, because the more I hear, the hungrier
(35:34):
I get. I would say that I probably started out
more detached because it was just so odd for me.
Right now, I feel completely responsible and I'm happy to
be here. I never would have seen myself as a
person to do podcasts, But when someone explained to me
(35:58):
this is how you get ideas out, and this is
how you can get an idea about what equality looks
like and where it needs to be examined and pursued
in the way that you're doing it, then I was on,
you know, I'll figure it out. I mean that'd be great,
but I'll figure it out. The more I work and
(36:19):
I think and I hear from people like yourself, the
hungry yet and the more I feel that it is
a part of who I am and always will be incredible.
I love what you're doing. I love the work. I
love the way that you've figured out, You've carved out
exactly where you wanted to go with it, and I
(36:40):
love the idea that, just in terms of what this
program is about, you are a be the change story.
I like to say people talk about the change, what
they want to actually live it and be it and
do it is very exciting. So I want to congratulate
you on that. Can I just say it is surreal
for me to hear those words from you. I met
(37:02):
you once a few years ago, just very very briefly,
and the only thing I said to you was thank
you because of your bravery and your outspokenness and being
a blueprint for so many others. So I appreciate that. Well,
thank you, and I know I don't have to convince you.
You will always be who you are and we are
so grateful. Thank you very much. Arlin Hamilton's story shows
(37:28):
the world the value of including people who are left out.
Hamilton has navigated through hostile systems to identify and invest
in the products that will further social justice. Her book
About Damn Time is a guide to how she found
her calling and achieved her vision. As Hamilton said, we
(37:53):
stand on the shoulders of those who come before us.
To stand on Hamilton's shoulders is a particularly special perch.
Through example, she shows the way for each of us
to be part of the change we want to see.
In the final episode of Getting Even, I speak with
(38:14):
two of my friends and co conspirators in social justice,
law professor Emma Coleman Jordan and feminist scholar Beverly Guyscheftall.
We talk about the value of friendship and creative collaborations.
I don't think I've ever said this to you publicly
or even privately. Meeting you in nineteen ninety two, when
(38:37):
I saw you standing up there talking, I said to myself,
one of these days, I'm going to speak publicly about
my experience with sexual assault for the first time. I
call myself for Survivor. Getting Even is a production of
Pushkin Industries, and it's written and hosted by me Anita Hill.
(38:59):
It is produced by Mola Board and Brittany Brown. Our
editor is Sarah Kramer, Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang,
and our showrunner Issha Matthias. Luis Gara composed original music
for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and
Letal malad. Our director of Development is Justine Lane. At
(39:25):
Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton,
John Schnarz, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Twitter at Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill.
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
(39:49):
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot Fm. If you love this show and others from
Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Subscribe to Pushkin
Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin
shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up
(40:11):
on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like
to listen
Pushkin Getting Even is produced by Pushkin Industries. Subscribe to
Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other
Pushkin shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign
(00:35):
up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot fm. Anybody can invest their own
money and be a part of this revolution and be
a part of innovation in a part of the future.
It belongs to every single one of us. That's Arlin Hamilton,
(00:59):
founder of the Backstage Capital Fund. Breaking into Silicon Valley
isn't easy, especially for a black woman in the United States,
and an ordinate share of industry funding goes to white men.
Hamilton was living in Texas working as a tour manager
for musicians like Tony Braxton and Kirk Franklin, and then
(01:23):
she got turned on to venture capital. I was thirty
thirty one, and I started getting the bug a little bit,
just seeing it here and there, learning a little bit
here and there. And I did what I do when
I get really interested in something, and I just devoured
information because as broke as I was, you can't take
(01:43):
away from me that ability to learn. Hamilton was relent bus.
There were times when she didn't have enough food, and
at one point she was homeless, but she never wavered.
I was up against so much and it almost seemed impossible,
and in fact, many people told me it was impossible,
and many people laughed me out of rooms. But in
(02:06):
twenty fifteen, she created Backstage Capital and Extraordinary Achievement and
began her mission to invest in underrepresented funds and founders.
I was talking to founders from all over the country
who were building amazing things. And I don't think that
the current investors that are out there would meet these founders,
(02:30):
would even know where to find them. And that's why
I knew for sure I needed to build this fund.
I'm Anita Hill. This is Getting Even, my podcast about
equality and what it takes to get there. On Getting Even,
I speak with people who are improving, are imperfect world,
(02:53):
people who took risks and broke the rules. In this episode,
Arlen Hamilton and I discuss how she achieved immense success
in Silicon Valley, all the while challenging a system that
excludes women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community.
(03:16):
There are some real basics that I want to hear about.
It's sort of teach us a little bit about financing
and venture capitalism one oh one. What is a venture capitalists? Well,
a venture capitalist is someone essentially who takes a little
bit of their money, but mostly other people's money, and
that can be pension funds, could be high net worth individuals,
(03:39):
family offices, etc. And they take that money and their
job is to look for outstanding individual companies that are
private and at different stages and hopefully turn that portfolio
of investments into more for their limited partners, who are
the ones that I just listed. And so their job
(04:01):
is to hopefully see into the future a little bit
and to make some really interesting bets. So you have
to be a risk taker and you also have to
be patient exactly, and I have an incredibly high tolerance
for risk. And I also think in decades, not in quarters,
and so that's part of what has made it possible
(04:23):
for me to not only work in this industry, but
to innovate within it. Wow. Well that's our first lesson
thinking in decades, not in quarters. So you also have
to learn some lingo. I know that there are certain
terminologies that are out there that people refer to, like
angel investing and impact investing. How did you get familiar
(04:47):
with the language of this kind of enterprise. I read
a lot. So I was in Parland in Texas, which
is part of Houston, and I was thirty thirty one,
and I started getting the bug a little bit, just
seeing it here and there, learning a little bit here
and there, and I did what I do when I
get really interested in something, and I just voured information.
(05:10):
Because as broke as I was, as much housing insecurity
as I had and food insecurity as I had, you
can't take away from me that ability to learn, and
so it was it was almost kind of a power
play for me too that I don't think I've ever
really said. It was also this way of remaining in
control having this information. So I thankfully had access to
(05:32):
the internet, so I could read everything, you know, do
all these searches and really not know what I was
looking for, but kind of go through the vortex, you know,
you get on YouTube where you go here or there
and you just start looking. And then I would go
to bookstores in the library and I would sit for
hours and read. So I would just kind of learn
that way, and I just paid attention to people too.
(05:55):
So if I learned about a specific investor that was interesting,
to me or said something, whether I agreed with it
or not, I would follow that lead, almost like a journalist,
and I would just continue really pulling at that thread
and started reaching out to people. There was a lot
of curiosity. Had you been that way since you were
(06:16):
a child? Yes, yes, my mother would tell you, oh yes.
I mean I think most children ask questions, But I
was asking questions all day long from a very early age,
and it was mostly what got me in a lot
of trouble in school. Unfortunately. You know, when a tall
black girl in the South is asking questions in school
(06:39):
and disrupting class quote unquote, it's something different sometimes than
it would be for others. But I would just question, Okay,
I understand it's in the book. I understand that the
books was written twenty years ago, but why is it
necessarily still the case? You know, this is me in
the fourth grade, you know, looking at why is it
(07:00):
necessarily the end all be all? Just because it's in
a book? Somewhere? I challenged and questioned everything. I questioned
if someone was being treated poorly, why couldn't we make
it different. It's just a constant throughout my life. I
also wonder if you were thinking I want to find
(07:21):
out those things that they're not teaching us, that maybe
we're not even supposed to learn, which is why VC,
you know, was interesting to you. Yes, No, you're definitely right.
I just always had this sense of there's no room
I shouldn't be allowed in. So if there's something that
(07:42):
seems like it's really complex or it's for only a
certain group of people, that's just a challenge to me.
If I'm at all interested in it, that doesn't stop me.
And it's my way of democratizing things. It's like having
that information. Yeah, democratizing things means democratizing knowledge. Yes, exactly.
(08:02):
So when you were doing your reading, were you thinking
that you were going to become a venture capitalist? Where
you thinking about a career shift at all? At the
beginning of it, I was reading about venture capital so
that I could know how to talk to venture capitalists
once I started my own company. My original idea was
(08:24):
to start a company in the tech space because I
had always felt like an entrepreneur, and then when I
learned about startups and venture capital and angel investing in
all of those things, I thought, oh, this is where
I have belonged my whole life, and didn't really understand
it until now, and let me do the research to
(08:44):
be prepared in these meetings that I'm of course going
to have with venture capitalists. And so it was in
that research when I came across these statistics after a
little while, very early in the process, and I started
reading more and learning about the beginnings, and I thought, oh, okay,
so I probably can get into the room because I'll
(09:06):
make a way, but I may not be welcome and
I may not be followed by anybody else if I do.
At least ninety percent of all venture capital in the
United States goes to white men in a country where
they make up less than one third of the country.
So we got to change the whole system if I
(09:28):
want to play in this arena. Wow. So that's a
pretty big undertaking to think you having to change an
entire system to be able to do what you wanted
to do. But it sounds as though you were pretty
clear that it was worth the risk, as you say,
you're you have a tolerance for risk. Yeah, And when
(09:50):
I think back on it now, I mean I was
up against so much and it almost seemed impossible, and
in fact, many people told me it was impossible, and
many people laughed me out of rooms. There was one
woman who told me in early twenty fifteen, after me
working on this for like four years, I told her,
I'm going invest in a hundred companies led by underrepresented
(10:12):
founders by twenty twenty. I said that in twenty fifteen
to her, she was in a place of privilege and
I wanted to have a partnership with her. And she
literally started laughing as she walked me out of her
office and told me to come back when I was
more realistic and skipping ahead just a bit. We reached
one hundred investments in twenty eighteen. Right, and have you
(10:36):
had a conversation with her? I couldn't pick her out
of a lineup. I have no idea what her name
was exactly, but I will bet that she could pick
you out of a lineup today. Perhaps, what are the
barriers that you faced when you were first trying to
start your own VC firm and you'd moved from being
a founder yourself to being someone who finances. I think
(11:00):
a major part to understand is that not only was
I trying to kind of walk into a place that
wasn't bill for us, which most things weren't. I was
also personally destitute. I don't mean that I was cute broke.
I was broke broke. We you know, we didn't have
money and it was a struggle for a long time,
(11:21):
and every once in a while we get some money
and you know, make that stretch for as long as
we could. I ended up living essentially at the San
Francisco Airport for a stretch in twenty fifteen and watching
people walk by who I knew were investors. At the
very beginning. Of course, people were brushing me off and
(11:41):
kind of not really paying close attention. But I was
also calling out the system, and in doing so, calling
out various companies and firms. And even though I had
this small platform, I started getting messages both direct and indirect,
that I needed to shut up. And it was coming
(12:03):
from someone who wanted to protect me and said, we
don't do that. That's not how it works here. And
it was also coming from people who thought that they
could truly shut me up. They were making it very
clear to me that, in their opinion, you don't go
up against these titans of industry without their being a fallout.
(12:27):
And they learned kind of earlier on that they couldn't
silence me, but it did ruffle feathers and it I
was just so surprised. I was honestly so shocked and
surprised by it because I thought, all I'm doing is
expressing my opinion. I don't have any power here. How
in the world is it upsetting so many millionaires and
(12:49):
billionaires that are successful, mostly white men, who could put
their thumb down and kind of squash me. It was crazy,
but I think it just showed just how fragile things
really were. You know, there's a lot of money that
flows in to Silicon Valley, and there are a lot
(13:12):
of closed door decisions that are made that affect so
many people. And I was sort of saying, you know,
putting the spotlight and saying, hey, look over here, look
what they're talking about, showing people like here, Okay, let
me open up the blueprint for you. This is where
you go, this is who you talk to, this is
what this means. And if I'm able to do that
without a college education, without any money, without any connections,
(13:36):
homeless coming from nowhere, it must mean in their opinion,
they're not as special as they've made themselves out to be. Yeah,
I mean so you were questioning the exceptionalism that they
were trying to promote that was key to success. It
seems to me that what you were doing was key
to what you saw as the need for a systemic change. Yes,
(14:00):
and so that's why you kept doing it. Oh. Absolutely.
I think if people hadn't been so against me doing it,
I probably would have not proceeded. I probably would have said, Okay,
I've said my piece. I'm probably gonna go over here
and I'll help a few people out and raise some
money for my company. But when I started seeing people
raging against it, in very powerful men writing to me
(14:22):
or having their minions right to me or do whatever,
I thought, Oh, there's something more here. There's definitely something
that's being hidden. We're gonna keep going. I'm glad you're
stuck in there. But you had, by that time moved
from Houston to the Bay Area. Yeah. I had took
a one way flight that I crowdsourced the money to
(14:45):
get because I'd been accepted into a two week investor
boot camp at Stanford and it was right before they
were getting ready to like have a lot of women,
you know, come out about things in Silicon Valley. But
It was during a time where it was important to
them to have more women represented at this boot camp,
(15:07):
and so they took their twenty thousand dollars tuition down
to ten thousand for women. So I found my way.
I crowdsourced a third of that. I stayed in an
airbnb for a few days, and then after the catered
lunches at the boot camp, I found myself at the airport.
(15:28):
You were physically sleeping at the airport, yes, How did
you choose the airport? I was very specific about the airport.
I wanted a place that was indoors for many reasons.
I wanted a place that I thought, Okay, it's probably
going to be embarrassing and I might have to explain
myself a lot, but I also want to be safe
(15:51):
as possible, and there's access to facilities, and so to me,
I had to do this mentally. I said to myself,
I am a traveler, the world traveler, and I've missed
my flight, so I'm going to sleep on the floor
of the airport tonight. And I said that to myself
(16:13):
over and over again each day to make it possible
to do. For most of us, two nights would have
been about as much as we could do. But I
guess when you're determined, you can figure out how to
do it. Yeah, it was a lot more than two nights,
but I don't say the amount of time. I didn't
count every day, but it was too long, so I
(16:35):
don't really share it because I did have people rich
people start to ask me, now, how homeless were you?
Like literally, and I'm like enough, like I don't know,
Like it was fun to find out or interesting in
that way, and so I just started protecting myself and saying,
you know what, I don't know how homeless you This
(16:57):
particular person needs me to be for it to be legitimate.
But it was more than it needed to be, and
it was for a long time, and it was alone.
After the break, Arlin Hamilton and I discuss how she
created her fund and grew it using her keen instincts
and abilities to recognize great ideas and the innovative people
(17:18):
behind them. You're listening to getting even. I'm Anita Hill.
I'm speaking with investor Arlin Hamilton about how she started
backstage capital of venture capital fund. Hamilton backs underrepresented and
(17:41):
unlikely founders, democratizing who gets to be part of Silicon Valley.
So were you getting the information that you thought you
would need to persuade investors that there were companies out
there that could benefit from their money and that they
(18:01):
could benefit from Yes. So I was talking to founders
because I wanted to know my stuff. One of the
first things I learned when I learned about venture capital
was the phrase that deal flow is king, deal flow
being what kind of companies do you have access to,
who would let you invest in them? What are you seeing,
(18:22):
what's the quality, etc. And that stuck with me and
I said, well, if deal flow is king, I'm winning
here because I'm seeing all of these companies. And I
don't think that the current investors by and large that
are out there would meet these founders, would even know
where to find them. And I don't know if the
(18:43):
founders would know how to get a call with the investors.
So of course there's this really interesting gap that could
be lucrative. So I was having those conversations. I was
letting the founders know, Hey, I don't have a fund yet,
but I'm raising one. So I was kind of establishing
a track record a network and also realizing, oh, I
(19:05):
have chops, I have a nose for this too, But
you were doing all of this without the infrastructure that
you now have. Correct So basically what was important was
the work Exactly when you were first doing your work
to find investors to find founders, were you experiencing any
(19:29):
racism or sexism or both in those exchanges and finding founders. No,
it was on the investor side, it really was. It's
one of those things that it's hard to kind of
show because it's all happening behind closed doors. But I
remember getting a very late night phone call, probably two
(19:50):
thousand and sixteen, after I had raised from a few
interesting people, and this person was an early investor, a
man with power, and he told me, Hey, I just
want to let you know that I just left a meeting,
like a closed door meeting, probably a poker game or
(20:13):
something like that, and they were talking about you, and
they were representing lots of different funds that you have
to deal with, not only to raise from, but for
your companies to raise from. And I want to say
this as carefully as possible. They essentially put a hit
on my fund. They put a no one's going to
(20:36):
touch this fund. We're not going to let it succeed
type of thing. Now, was that racist? Was that sexist?
Was that very specific to meet? What was it? I
don't know. And this person was telling me, and he
was giving me a heads up because he had invested
in I guess he just stayed silent in the room
and I didn't ask him why he didn't say anything.
(20:58):
But you know, it is what it is, and those
types of things happen. And talking to the founders, people
would tell me incredible things. Women would tell me about
what male investors would dare say to them. I think
people in public don't say as much to me blatantly
(21:19):
because they know that I do have a platform. But
founders will tell me that male investors have said things like,
will invest in you if you don't get pregnant for
the next couple of years so that you can focus
on your company. You know, I've been in rooms with
black women who have PhDs, who have all the chops
(21:39):
in the world, who are generating revenue when there are
some young white man who can raise ten million dollars
off of an idea. And I've listened to the questions
asked of these women. I've given a quick example. There
is a woman who at the time I was in
my early thirties and she was in her early forties.
She was an adjunct professor at Stanford. I sent her deck,
(22:05):
her pitch deck, which talks about her company, and I
sent another They're from a white man and the guy
had an idea, and she had a full fledged company,
an invention with patents and was making money. And I
got several emails back and with over a week's time
from the people I sent it to, because I was
sending it to mostly white men because that's who was
(22:27):
writing checks, and almost all of them said, I'll take
the meeting with this company, which was led by the guy,
and for this company. They would say, I don't understand
the market, so that I'm going to pass on this one.
Now the market this was a product that was for
hearing loss, so the market is for people who can
(22:50):
hear and for people who cannot hear. It was for everyone.
So you know, those subtle things add up. I call
them papercuts. You know they add up. So my reaction
to all of that was creating more success for myself
and for the company. You seem very secure in who
(23:14):
you are, but I wonder if you see a number
of people who are kind of changing who they are
to be more appealing. In some ways, it's code swishing
or changing your personality or being something that you aren't
in order to appeal to this very very limited thinking
(23:39):
about who will be successful in business. Yes, absolutely, I've
definitely seen it the entire time I've been in this industry.
I see it today. I rail against it, and I
often implore people not to do it. Especially in the
early days. I thought, am I supposed to change the
way I talk? Am I supposed to be quieter? Am
(24:02):
I supposed to change the way I dress? Because I
certainly don't dress the part. Am I supposed to do
this or that? Or even aligned myself with certain people
who I don't really respect but who can get me
there faster. And even if I had a small inkling
of this, I would reset and say, oh, no way
(24:22):
on Earth, because it's just going to take longer and
be more difficult. But I'm going to get there, and
once I'm there, I have to be able to face myself.
I've turned down lots of money, for instance, because I
didn't think it was right to be in business with
certain people, and so many people came before me and
before us to make it, so so we should we
owe it to them. We will owe it to ourselves.
(24:44):
We owe it to the future generations not to do that.
So let's they are a point where you've gotten maybe
your first big VC inside or on your side, and
you realize that the company's going to happen. Was it
a moment or a series of things that happened that
convinced you, Yeah, it was. It was a series of things.
(25:07):
It wasn't one big moment. We had this moment where
I went from the airport to actually being able to
be in business, which was in September of twenty fifteen.
An angel investor named Susan Kimberlin stood up and gave
me the first fifty thousand to get started after spending
a few months getting to know me, not knowing about
my personal situation. Another thing that does continue to stand
(25:29):
out to me, which is Stuart Butterfield, the CEO co
founder of Slack. He reached out to me on social
and he said, hey, you know, I see what you're doing.
We developed a quick friendship and he made an investment
and he said, you know, put my name on the
deck on the presentation, put my face on there. Whatever
you need. Aaron Levy did the same thing from Box.
(25:52):
They're definitely in this story some really interesting upstanding men,
especially that I would have been surprised by. But the
thing is they were founders who were successful, massively successful,
who themselves work their way up, and I think that
they got me. They saw me as a founder, they
(26:14):
saw me as an entrepreneur more than anything, and maybe
they saw that the system didn't need to be changed. Yeah,
I believe so. So you have Backstage Capital, and how
did you come to name it Backstage Capital? My mother,
missus Arline Butler Sims, she came up with her name.
(26:34):
I just mentioned to her one night while we were
in Periland and again broke. I said, I had this
fund I'm putting together and it needs a name. And
she didn't ask me, how are you gonna have a
fund that doesn't make any sense? She said, oh, let
me think about it. And she came back within ten
minutes and said, how about backstage because you work with
musicians on tour, you know, for concerts, and you help
(26:55):
them get on stage, and maybe you can do that
for the people you're working with here. And I thought, well,
that's brilliant. I'm not gonna let her know how brilliant
it is. But I said, oh, that's great, that's good.
And then you know, every other week she's asking me,
where's my fifteen I came up with a name, where's
my fifteen percent? Well good, She'll keep reminding you. Yeah,
(27:18):
let's talk a little bit about the founders that you
have helped. You call the people you support underestimated founders.
How do you choose them? It's a gut reaction. It
is a shift in the atmosphere when I see it.
There's something called pattern matching right in VC and other
places where a lot of times these are men pattern
(27:42):
matching for Zuckerberg or Bassos or whomever. I'm doing pattern
matching two. It's just a different pattern. So I'm looking
for someone I call being hungry, not thirsty, and I
want to back that person who can combine that with
an incredible vision. If I can find something that is
(28:05):
like game changing, and it would take me a decade
or more to figure it out on my own, you're
going to have my attention because I get to live
through you. In that moment, my life gets to be fuller.
In that moment, I have the best seat in the house.
To innovation and you can want to grow exactly. Yeah,
do you do something different from what other vcs do
(28:29):
for your founders. I've had early conviction for a lot
of people. I've seen the potential really early for a
great deal of people, and I think that's what you're
seeing now is like the fruits of that. And whether
I had money at the time or not, I invested
my belief in them. I believe that people are so
capable of so many things. I represents hope for people
(28:54):
that their current situation doesn't have to be what they
are for the rest of their lives, or there is
more for them. Yeah, I believe in them, which you
encourage the people to throw the route that you do.
What advice could you give? My thing is like, it's
not necessarily the big deal is to become a venture capitalist.
(29:15):
I never thought that that was the big deal and
I still don't, right. The big deal is that over
the next few years, people are going to become founders,
and they're going to become entrepreneurs and start companies which
are going to be amazing, and there are also people
who will be able to invest in those companies as
part of the crowd, not necessarily being a venture capitalist,
but putting one hundred dollars fifty dollars a thousand dollars
(29:36):
of their money into companies. So I say, anybody can
be an angel investor. And I love angel investors because
in groups, they are very powerful, and they're very savvy,
and they have a perspective that most venture capitalists will
never have. They just won't have that. So if you
(29:57):
want to get into investing, there are many, many ways
to do it, but just to know that, like the
world is your oyster. When it comes to this, there's
nobody standing at a gate telling you, Okay, you get
to go do this as you're from this city, or
you went to this school, or you're this race. There's
no one there. It is yours for the taking. And
(30:17):
just be intentional about the research and say why why
would I want to do this? Is it because I
think I'm going to get rich really fast? Because you won't.
This is not a magic peal. But if you have
conviction around certain things, if you have skill, if you
have curiosity like I did, anybody can invest their own
(30:39):
money and be a part of this revolution and be
a part of innovation and a part of the future.
It belongs to every single one of us. I really
love your story. But I'm sure there are people who
are out there who will argue that you're the exception,
and you are, but they will also say that we
can't expect that everybody's going to be able to do this,
(31:02):
And it sounds to me like what you're saying is
that you don't want everybody to have to go the
route that you went. Oh no, nobody should have to.
I have invested in personally in about twenty five funds
now over the past three years that have a similar
mandate and thesis to Backstage Capital my firm. Twenty four
(31:25):
of them did not exist in twenty fifteen when I
started Backstage, which means that we have in some way
influenced dozens, if not hundreds of new firms to pop up.
And that's amazing. And I know them because I've invested
in them. Not each of them had to go through
what I did. There's a little bit easier, to call
(31:46):
it loosening the pickle jar. It's a little bit easier
each time. So I think that there's a lot to
look forward to. We have some more surprises up our sleeve.
Oh god, I'm sure you do, and I'll be curious
to hear about them. The name of the podcast is
getting even. How would you define parody in venture capitalism?
(32:10):
Oh well, I mean, I think the idea of walking
into a room or being on a cap table, which
is like a list of investors and a fund, being
in a deal and it just looking like the demographics
of the country, you know, I think that would in
itself be parody, that it was effortless rather than so
(32:32):
labored just to get into the room, just to get
into the deal, just to have exposure, because it just
feeds on itself over and over again. The PayPal mafia
then goes on to invest in Facebook, then goes on
to invest in this, and that feeding onto itself. I
just want to see that more spread out, more democratic. Absolutely,
(32:55):
why should people outside of Silicone Valley care about venture
capital firms? So many of the biggest companies in the country,
in the world are VC backed, and there were very
specific people who made a decision to invest in them,
who win off of their winds, and then there are
very few people who are those founders who are backed.
(33:18):
We have the opportunity to change the face of innovation.
To add to it that in itself. If you're talking
about generational wealth, you're talking about today's wealth, like that's
really important too. We talk about generational wealth, but I
talk about right now. You also talk about influence and
power comes from money a lot of times, and I
(33:42):
honestly believe that if there are more rich black people,
for instance, I don't think we would be seeing public
executions of black men on television. And then down to
the other side of the spectrum, which is there is
a video that many of us have seen of two
black hands under a soap dispenser, and the soap dispenser,
(34:04):
which is like automated, does not recognize the black hands.
This is happening in autonomous vehicles and other types of things. Now.
I don't know about you, but I want the cars
to see me at the sidewalk when I'm walking across
the street. I want autonomous vehicles of the future, which
there will be there already are some. I want them
(34:26):
to see me. And the reason that these things happen
is because who was in the room when it was
being built. We need to be in the rooms when
this is being built. We need to be making decisions.
A lot of the decisions come from the founders and
from their backers, and so you just wonder if there
had been a dark scanned person like myself in the room,
(34:50):
who could have been in there, who would have asked,
have you tested this for all scan colors exactly? Do
you have questions for me? Ah? Oh my god? How
much time do you do? I have questions for Anita here.
(35:11):
Do you believe that you've been able to understand the
impact that you've had on women black women, especially over
the decades, or does it feel a little detached from you?
It is who I am, And I like your phrase
hungry not thirsty, because the more I hear, the hungrier
(35:34):
I get. I would say that I probably started out
more detached because it was just so odd for me.
Right now, I feel completely responsible and I'm happy to
be here. I never would have seen myself as a
person to do podcasts, But when someone explained to me
(35:58):
this is how you get ideas out, and this is
how you can get an idea about what equality looks
like and where it needs to be examined and pursued
in the way that you're doing it, then I was on,
you know, I'll figure it out. I mean that'd be great,
but I'll figure it out. The more I work and
(36:19):
I think and I hear from people like yourself, the
hungry yet and the more I feel that it is
a part of who I am and always will be incredible.
I love what you're doing. I love the work. I
love the way that you've figured out, You've carved out
exactly where you wanted to go with it, and I
(36:40):
love the idea that, just in terms of what this
program is about, you are a be the change story.
I like to say people talk about the change, what
they want to actually live it and be it and
do it is very exciting. So I want to congratulate
you on that. Can I just say it is surreal
for me to hear those words from you. I met
(37:02):
you once a few years ago, just very very briefly,
and the only thing I said to you was thank
you because of your bravery and your outspokenness and being
a blueprint for so many others. So I appreciate that. Well,
thank you, and I know I don't have to convince you.
You will always be who you are and we are
so grateful. Thank you very much. Arlin Hamilton's story shows
(37:28):
the world the value of including people who are left out.
Hamilton has navigated through hostile systems to identify and invest
in the products that will further social justice. Her book
About Damn Time is a guide to how she found
her calling and achieved her vision. As Hamilton said, we
(37:53):
stand on the shoulders of those who come before us.
To stand on Hamilton's shoulders is a particularly special perch.
Through example, she shows the way for each of us
to be part of the change we want to see.
In the final episode of Getting Even, I speak with
(38:14):
two of my friends and co conspirators in social justice,
law professor Emma Coleman Jordan and feminist scholar Beverly Guyscheftall.
We talk about the value of friendship and creative collaborations.
I don't think I've ever said this to you publicly
or even privately. Meeting you in nineteen ninety two, when
(38:37):
I saw you standing up there talking, I said to myself,
one of these days, I'm going to speak publicly about
my experience with sexual assault for the first time. I
call myself for Survivor. Getting Even is a production of
Pushkin Industries, and it's written and hosted by me Anita Hill.
(38:59):
It is produced by Mola Board and Brittany Brown. Our
editor is Sarah Kramer, Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang,
and our showrunner Issha Matthias. Luis Gara composed original music
for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and
Letal malad. Our director of Development is Justine Lane. At
(39:25):
Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton,
John Schnarz, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Twitter at Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill.
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
(39:49):
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot Fm. If you love this show and others from
Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Subscribe to Pushkin
Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin
shows add free and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up
(40:11):
on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like
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