Update 6/23/2020: After the publication of this article, three companies reached out with responses from Tymewear, Jellyfish, AllHere. The story has been updated to reflect this new information at bottom.
Boston’s tech boom has led to a huge need for tech-related talent. But while the last decade has brought nearly 72,000 new tech jobs to Massachusetts, the growth brought with it slim progress regarding the makeup of who actually fills those roles. (Spoiler: It’s largely white men.)
According to MassTLC, it will take until 2085 for Black workers to reach the same hiring rate of white men in the industry today. For Latinos, it will take until 2045. And for women, it will take until 2070.
In this month’s Boston column, we decided to check in on the region’s diversity efforts. Boston is a city that has been defined both by a historically racist reputation and its university-driven liberal bonafides. As companies across the country have reacted to systemic racism with promises to do better when it comes to hiring, we wondered: Is Boston stepping up to the plate when it comes to hiring underrepresented candidates?
Using a list generated by a simple, time-bounded Crunchbase search for most recent Boston-area fundraising events. we turned to 15 companies that have recently raised within Boston and asked about their diversity efforts:
- Ginkgo Bioworks
- Wasabi Technologies
- Orbita AI
- Atea Pharmaceuticals
- Amwell
- Hemista
- LifePod Solutions
- Jellyfish
- AllHere Education
- Canvas GFX
- PIC Therapeutics
- Tyme Wear
Only a handful of companies responded, which wasn’t a good sign. Boston has a stunted record of releasing diversity data, so the silence was somewhat expected, if a little disappointing. Let’s review the responses we received to see what we can learn from both the answers (and the nonanswers).
At the end, we’ll look at some recent Boston venture data. We also have a new Boston investor survey coming later this month, so stay tuned.
The responses
Patricia Hume became CEO of Canvas GFX in 2019 and said she hopes her presence makes the company more diverse. “Of course this is not a box you can tick or a task you can mark as complete. It’s part of who we are and we need to work to make sure it stays that way,” she told TechCrunch.
The 25-person company represents 13 nationalities and one-third of the team are people of color; one out of five team leaders are people of color as well.
Hume also noted that her company is working on diversity beyond race as well: She is a female tech CEO in her 60s, and the company has female leaders in sales, sales engineering, finance and fulfillment. Canvas GFX is also looking to provide career opportunities for veterans.
Diversity, by nature of data, is easier to accomplish when you have a smaller team. As Hume said herself, she has a direct relationship with each person on the team. The true test will happen when the company grows to a bigger size.
Josh Aviv, founder of SparkChange, said diversity needs to be beyond the “lowly intern” and brought into leadership positions and the cap table. Aviv, a Black founder, told TechCrunch that five out of six leadership positions at his company are filled by diverse individuals. Roughly half of SparkChange’s cap table includes women and minority-led funds.
The purchasing power of a diverse team, Aviv said, can bring real change.
“That one paycheck we sent to that one employee went to the grocery store, it went to the movie theatre, he paid his rent, and he sent money outside of that city to another community,” Aviv said. “When you multiply it by 10, 20, by 100 or 1,000 you can impact a community. Your employees can impact a community.”
As for how he recruited candidates from underrepresented groups, “We used Workable, we used LinkedIn, we used Indeed,” he said. “There’s no secret fancy program, we’re hiring diverse and super talented individuals.”
It is worth noting that of the entire cohort we reached out to, the only two immediate respondents who were willing to share on the record were underrepresented founders.
Amwell, reached by email like the rest of our cohort, responded that it is “currently in a very active process of reviewing and updating our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives,” saying that it was “premature” to share details. Of course we’d like to hear more from the telemedicine startup in time, but it was somewhat encouraging that work was already afoot at the company, which recently raised capital and is expected to go public shortly. (A representative later followed up adding that Amwell has “many initiatives to ensure ongoing business and cultural excellence including within the area of Diversity and Inclusion.”)
Two more companies expressed interest in responding but haven’t yet.
What were we hoping for? A little more honesty, and perhaps, a commitment to do more. It’s easy to celebrate companies when they raise money — that’s when they are most likely to talk — but when it really counts, it’s harder to get companies to share.
Our read of the general silence in response to our queries is that some of the companies aren’t doing much on this matter, or that they are but don’t want to talk about it. But as the latter doesn’t make much sense — who wouldn’t want some free publicity as they look to hire after adding capital to their accounts — the former seems to sit a little closer to the balance of probability.
As promised, an update
After the publication of this article, three companies reached out to clarify their position on diversity and add more context: Jellyfish, AllHere, and Tymewear. It’s worth nothing that these are all very small companies, so their diversity metrics should be taken with that context.
Tymewear is a startup of three full time people, all of whom are immigrants to the United States. The company said that 2 out of 3 people in its management team are non-white. Tymewear also works with three part-time consultants, 1 woman and 2 men, who are from 3 different countries. It makes up 6 nationalities from 4 continents in a team of 6, making 50 percent of the team non-white.
The company did not share any other information on the record regarding diversity initiatives, but did confirm it will not hire in the near future.
Three-year old startup Jellyfish confirmed that of 26 people on its staff, only six people are BIPOC (Black or Indigenous people of color). The company is working with diversity and inclusion coaches, its current staff, and other companies to figure out a game plan on how to increase representation beyond 23% of the entire staff. The company has not yet decided on a specific strategy to increase diversity.
Equity financing for Boston-area startups according to Crunchbase data was a bit mixed in May. The month saw very few known rounds — just 10, discounting grants and nonequity events — but those 10 rounds were supersized.
Indeed, the 10 rounds were worth $538 million, though the lion’s shares of that tally came from two rounds: Amwell’s $194 million Series C and Atea Pharmaceuticals’ $215 million Series D. Those two rounds were worth 76%, or a little over three-quarters of the total. Some of the companies we reached out to for this piece were part of the month’s tally notably.
But don’t read too much into this data; much reporting of VC results viz startups was delayed in May. So, we’ll get a better look at the real state of affairs in May in June.