How Tech for Good Investors Pick the Founders Who Truly Make a Difference, with Dama Sathianathan

just tell your real story.

Exactly.

So, like, the process is obviously very equitable.

And you've kind of, you talk about that quite strongly in terms of this is a vibe check.

Like, this is, are we right for you? Yeah.

I guess, what does that change about who ends up in that kind of 10 to 15? And particularly interested, given your passion as well around diversity, what does that mean in terms of social mobility, ethnicity, gender? What have you seen in terms of those patterns from BGV?

So I guess once applications close, we do an online interview as well.

And that's also, again, this sort of happened as a result of COVID, but we've also realized it's just much more accessible if we don't demand that everyone comes to London for the interviews.

Yeah.

Because train tickets, my Lord, so expensive.

One of the ways is also just being really clear on what this sort of application process actually entails.

So once applications close, we invite up to 40 to 50 companies to interviews that happen online.

Wow.

We give them sort of briefings around what to expect from those conversations and how they should really present in the first five minutes that they get, because it's not meant to be a pitch, but more of a let's show B2B what we got, in a sense.

Yeah.

But I guess in terms of how the sort of makeup then focuses on to the 10 to 15, it's really around.

So we have an explicit commitment to back to achieve 50% gender parity.

So which means we want to back more female founders than we've previously done and more than the industry average, which is really poor.

And we're at sort of 38% at the moment.

So we're not too far off from our goal.

But we don't take that into our decision-making as such because we still want to focus on backing the best founders.

And that's just naturally also included amazing women, amazing people who identify as non-binary, amazing men who just want to build really good tech for good businesses.

So actually... being able to decouple that from the investment decision process, because we ask about demographic data separately from our application form, except for gender, which is one thing that we always report on.

That sort of gives us more granular data around sort of the founder demographics as well.

And usually I use that data to then focus our next call for ventures or application process on going to communities where there's more founders, for example, who are focused on supporting black entrepreneurs or who are focused on supporting entrepreneurs with disabilities and really just hone down on like just being more aware, spreading more awareness that B2B exists and that we have an emphasis on wanting to back founders from all walks of life because that ultimately also makes the world more inclusive and better.