OpenView’s Ongoing Commitment to Diversity
If you follow OpenView regularly, you know by now that we’ve made diversity and inclusion an integral part of our quarterly and yearly firm goals. We make every effort to not just talk about diversity and its benefits (smarter, more productive teams to name just a few) but we strive to actually increase the diversity of our own team and those of our portfolio companies.
And our efforts, along with an increased focus on D&I across tech, are working. Encouraging data from our upcoming 2018 SaaS Benchmarks Report show that SaaS companies are moving in the right direction with more companies reporting female board members and senior-level leaders. This year, 39% of SaaS companies we surveyed had at least one female Board member, up from 29% last year. Meanwhile, 75% had at least one female leader on their team (i.e. Director-level or above), up slightly from last year’s 72%. (Want the full data set when our report launches? Sign up below.)
So how have our efforts paid off thus far in 2018?
Our Teams
In the first half of this year, we announced the promotion of Liz Cain to Partner, recently added Kate Murdock as an Associate on our investment team and have made several female, senior-level hires for our portfolio including the Chief People Officer at Deputy, Director of Product Management at Loopio and Director of User Experience at JumpCloud.
Beyond just building out diverse teams, we’re proud to partner with the The Athena Alliance to ensure that diversity reaches the highest levels. This year, Lessonly added their first female board member with the addition of Claudia Reuter. And another OpenView portfolio company will be announcing a similar such addition in the coming weeks.
In the year of #MeToo, it’s encouraging to see positive — if incremental — improvement in the area of diverse hiring. And we’re only getting started.
Our Pipeline
Hiring diverse team members across our firm and portfolio is just one part of the equation. This February, we launched Accelerate, a program aimed at bringing more female-founded B2B software companies into our investment pipeline. We’ve committed the full resources of our firm to working with the Accelerate finalist and her company for six months on everything from recruiting to market strategy. We look forward to continuing and expanding on this program with future Accelerate cohorts for years to come.
This year we also made our discrimination & harassment policies and reporting contacts available to the public when we joined #MovingForward. You can learn more about the movement in an episode of our podcast, BUILD, featuring co-founder Ginny Fahs here.
And finally, last week we partnered with Victress Capital, Flybridge and Greenspring Associates to host more than 100 female VCs and founders in the Boston community to help both sides build their networks and pipelines.
It was a great event that fostered new connections, built upon existing networks and opened the door to further collaboration. And it’s one we hope to repeat over and over again.
If the first half of 2018 has taught us anything it’s that while we’re making strides around diversity and inclusion, these efforts are more important now than ever. We look forward to expanding our network and pipeline as we work towards our goal of achieving 100% gender parity. If you would like to join in these efforts or contribute content around how startups can implement D&I policies, please reach out to me at lizc@ov.vc.
