In the world of VCs and startups, we talk about diversity a lot. In fact, I’ve yet to meet a founder or an investor who doesn’t believe in the need for it, or the value that it provides. What I think we often miss is that diversity is more than just gender representation. Diversity, in its truest sense, is the power of several different perspectives – certainly from different genders, but also from varying life and work experiences, degrees of privilege, cultures, nationalities, and more.
When I think of Maslow’s hierarchy – the roti-kapda-makaan of diversity, if you will – gender diversity fell right with roti for me. But here are two data points that tell a different story.
| Women-led startups ultimately deliver higher revenue — more than twice as much per dollar invested. BCG, 2018 |
| In 2023-2024, women founders and co-founders in India raised less than 5% of the total funding raised by startups. Mint, Encubay |
Fireside Ventures is just 7 years’ old, and while our investments are now bearing fruit, it’s still premature to call the wins. But here is what we do know.
Of our 55 investments to date, some of which are soon to be announced, we have:
The McKinsey & LeanIn.org Women in the Workplace Report suggested that “Women get valued for past experience, while men get valued for potential”. It’s the same reason why women don’t see enough representation at the leadership levels or promotions, where potential is the key factor.
The VC industry essentially “bets on potential”. At an early stage of investment, you have very little data or business metrics to back your investment, you’re mostly taking a bet on the potential – of the space, and founder. So how do you bet on potential? And how do you address biases that may run deeper than we are aware of?
In such a case, we need to debias the system, rather than continuing to urge people to debias themselves.
At Fireside, this is how we do it.
1. Evaluate the space, the consumer, the team, and then its potential
- Build deep theses around the spaces we believe will be disrupted in the years to come, backing our intuition with sharp consumer insight and understanding. When you’re not sure of the space, you tend to double guess the founder!
- Articulate the founder experience required for this business alpha, as well as the complimentary skills and style that would maximize value.
- Over-index on the founder’s sense of purpose (what we call the Value of Good), clarity, resilience and leadership, backed by obsession about the consumer and deep insights.
2. Use many lenses to observe and understand
- There are many of us who meet the founders at various stages of the assessment, as we do at the time of portfolio engagement. The idea is to calibrate our understanding and debrief, with different perspectives, this takes care of underlying biases in our assessment.
- The investing and operating team at Fireside comes from different genders and experiences (investing, consulting, operating, entrepreneurial).
- Bring more women into the mix at various levels, so that every founder pitching to the room finds comfort and familiarity.
3. Culture starts right from the top
- Make it a stated objective of the fund – hence the founding team made sure the system was built in that way.
- Define, practice, and replicate “founder-first” ways of doing business. At Fireside, we are clear about how we engage with them, about demonstrating empathy and respect, about always making them feel valued. It’s part of who we are, what we do and how we operate – how we hire and reward.
| "Fireside walks the tightrope between valuation and value of good in a very beautiful way. With a very innate and patient understanding of what it takes to mentor and invest in enduring brands. This approach is fundamentally more in sync with women led businesses." Shauravi Malik, Slurrp Farm |
| “If I have to be really candid, I think Fireside preferred me to my husband! It would have been very easy to front Anand, who comes from an FMCG background, as the face of the brand, but no! They are very woman founder-friendly to the extent that I think they prefer women founders for that magic to work. There are so many women founders who are superstars in the Fireside portfolio – Suhasini, Shauravi, and so on.” Nalini Parthiban, Sweet Karam Coffee |
At Fireside, we’re not trying to solve for diversity alone. We’re here to support founders and create iconic brands. Brands are mini empires. All empires need Kings and Queens 😊
In the consumer sector, women are at least 50% of the decision makers. And in many households, a majority of purchase decisions are made by women. Therefore, it makes intuitive sense that consumer brands have a more equal representation of women leading them.
I don’t believe that the solution is for VCs to support startups simply because they’re founded by women. Instead, it’s up to us all to weed out the institutional patterns and biases that prevent firms from recognizing innate potential, and world-changing ideas. I can see that the shift is already taking place, and there are no wrong approaches.
Be aware of your biases, we all have them, we're human. Debias the system, rather than relying on people to debias themselves.
We have always come from a place of sharing knowledge, of sharing our experiences, in the hope that it will benefit founders and investors alike. This piece is my attempt at describing our approach and what works for us.
Join the discussion