When Mallun Yen started Operator Collective last year, she wanted to build an investment business for people who had no voice in Silicon Valley. This involved connecting women and people of color with operators who have been intimately involved in building businesses from scratch, and then providing investment at an early stage.
Then she brought in Leyla Seka as a partner. Seka helped transform AppExchange at Salesforce into a powerful market for companies built on top of the Salesforce platform, or who have connected to the platform significantly to sell their offerings directly to Salesforce customers. Through this role, she met a lot of people in the startup world and saw a lot of inequity.
Yen, whose background includes eight years as vice president at Cisco, and co-founder of Saastr with Jason Lemkin, wanted to build another type of business, one that would connect these operators - women like her and Seka, who had come a long way from running large businesses - with people who usually aren't heard in the halls of venture capital firms.
These operators themselves tend to be underrepresented in investment stores. The company now has 130 LP operators, 90% of whom are women and 40% are people of color (including Asians). In particular, the company can achieve this by removing the strict membership requirements. LPs can contribute as little as $ 10,000, up to millions of dollars, within their means, and that makes a much more diverse pool of LPs.
While Seka admits they are far from perfect, she says they are having a good fight. So far, the company has invested in 18 startups with a more diverse set of founders and executives than most companies that invest in business startups. This means that 67% of their investments include people of color (44% Asian, 17% Latin and 6% black), 56% include a female founder, 56% have an immigrant founder and 33% have a female CEO.
I sat down with Yen and Seka to discuss their thinking on corporate investing. Although they have a much more inclusive philosophy than most, their general approach to investing in companies is not that different from what we have seen in previous surveys of business investors.
What are the trends you are most passionate about in business from an investment perspective?
