Every February, the surroundings of Fox Theatre in Redwood City, CA get taken over by a diverse crowd. Inside the giant white tent covering the Courthouse Square, Google, Oracle, Intuit, and others offer free coffee and gifts. Over the years, the streets around the area have been blocked for another tent to receive 50 startups from around the world. Lately, the crowds have exceeded Fox Theatre’s capacity and spilled over into the Century Movie theatre around the corner.

 

What’s screening? The old fashioned lettering on the movie sign of Fox Theatre reads: Startup Grind Global Conference.

 

Belonging Beyond Borders: the Value of Diversity

 

In my first column about the conference, I wrote about how Startup Grind has successfully built—and maintained—a spirit of community among entrepreneurs everywhere. Because it is a truly global community, diversity is intrinsic to Startup Grind.

 

Recalling a study from 2017 by McKinsey, companies with more ethnically and gender diverse executive teams can have from 15% to 35% better financial returns. By welcoming different points of view to the table, these companies enriched their decision-making.

 

At its global conference, diversity is a key part of ensuring that attendees receive value and quality. To Karlie Valine, Chief Marketing Officer at Startup Grind, this is intentional, but also natural. Sure, diversity is evident in the conference speakers lineup, but it’s not forced—you don’t hear people walking around bragging about diversity as “a thing.” It was accepted by all as just the state of things, as elemental to interesting and high-quality content as what was on the lunch buffet menu.

 

[Picture of speakers lineup]

 

As I walked through the conference, diversity was in evidence, from an age, gender, ethnicity and various languages being spoken. This was not my imagination:

 

• Among attendees, there were around 3,000 women and 3,500 men.


• One-quarter of attendees came from outside the United States, with at least 114 countries represented;


• Seven out of 10 attendees were from companies with fewer than 50 employees, and a majority of those were companies with fewer than 10 people;
  
  
  
  • (This generally matches business demography in most countries, but was refreshing to see at a major conference where it’s easy to get lots of people from big companies.)
  
  
  
  


• Nearly two-thirds of attendees’ companies were bootstrapped or had raised less than $500,000;


• At the conference were 200 Startup Grind local directors from 54 countries (out of 600 Chapter Directors in 153 countries).

 

Diversity matters because it enhances the quality of conversations, as well as the likelihood that people will feel represented by them.

 

Diversity in Data

 

One of the challenges of diversity and inclusion when it comes to startup ecosystem assessment is measurement. More specifically, meaningful measurement. In most places, there is some basic descriptive data on diversity: X% of businesses are owned by women or minorities, for example. But this type of data can also obscure the challenges behind the numbers, or the ways that might close gaps and broaden the ecosystem’s inclusiveness. What many ecosystems end up having, then, is hollow headlines: top-line data but no meaning within.

What we’re seeking to do in our work is make diversity and inclusion part of the performance assessment of an ecosystem. Not just a nice-to-have piece of data, but a key element of how your ecosystem is doing. And, to help ecosystem leaders determine how fast (or slowly) the gap is closing, and what actions are (or aren’t) moving the needle. It’s not enough to just have data on diversity and inclusion; it needs to be meaningfully measured, meaningfully constructed, and made a meaningful part of performance. Only then will we see progress made.