我对风险投资（VC）的兴趣，其实早在我真正打算创立一家风险投资基金之前就已经产生了。大学期间，我开了一家女装店，很快意识到：仅仅拥有一个好点子并不足以创业成功；企业的发展还需要资金支持，而筹集资金并非易事。这段经历让我印象深刻。
My interest in venture capital (VC) began long before I ever imagined building an actual venture capital fund. In college, I opened a women’s clothing store and quickly learned that having a great idea was only part of what it took to build a business. I needed capital to grow, and finding that money wasn’t easy. That experience stayed with me.
多年后，当我开始仔细研究在美国哪些企业能够获得风险投资、哪些企业却无法获得资金时，我发现我所遇到的创业难题其实只是更大问题的一部分。于是我开始深入分析相关数据。
Years later, when I began looking more closely at who gets funded in America—and who doesn’t—I realized that the entrepreneurial challenges I had encountered were part of a much larger story. So I started digging into the numbers.
当我首次研究风险投资领域中的种族差异时，所得到的结果让我震惊不已：有色人种女性占美国人口的近20%，但据估计，只有极少数风险投资资金被投入到由有色人种女性创办的企业中。这些数据不仅令人失望，更让我感到愤怒。尽管黑人女性占美国人口的约7%，并且她们创办的公司数量比其他任何群体都多，但研究显示她们在所有行业领域获得的VC资金占比却不到0.35%；而所有种族的女性加起来获得的VC资金占比也远低于50%，其余的资金都流向了男性创业者。
When I first started researching the racial disparities in venture capital, what I learned shocked me. Women of color make up nearly 20% of the U.S. population, yet our best estimates indicate that only of venture capital funding is invested in women-of-color-owned businesses. These numbers weren’t just disappointing; they infuriated me. And though Black women comprise approximately 7% of the U.S. population and start more companies than any other demographic our research reveals that they obtain less than 0.35% of VC funding across all sectors. While we comprise over 50% of the U.S. population, women of all races combined obtain less than of all VC funding. The rest is awarded to male founders.
我越深入调查，就越感到愤怒。我发现，风险投资者投入的大部分资金其实来自公共雇员的退休基金等渠道。公共雇员群体本身非常多元化：仅在联邦政府系统中，女性员工就占44%，黑人员工占18%，拉丁裔员工占10%，亚裔美国人占7%，原住民员工占2%，阿拉斯加原住民占比不到2%，夏威夷原住民和太平洋岛民的占比则更低（不到1%）。等等！
The more I dug, the more infuriating the story became. I learned that the vast majority of dollars venture capitalists invest come from sources like public employees’ retirement funds—their pension funds. Public employees are very diverse. In the federal workforce alone, 44% of workers are women; 18% are Black; 10% are Latino; 7% are Asian American; 2% are Native American; less than 2% are Alaska Natives; and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders make up less than 1%. Hold up!
总体而言，白人男性在投资女性、黑人和棕色人种的资金，却只将其中微不足道的一小部分重新投向黑人、棕色人种或任何种族的女性。换句话说，这些资金从不同群体成员的退休基金流向私募股权（PE）和风险投资（VC）行业，而这些行业几乎完全由白人男性构成。因此，大多数风险投资基金都投向白人拥有的初创企业，这并不令人意外。而这些资金极少被用于投资那些服务于资金赚取之地的社区的人。
That means, in general, white men are investing the money of women and Black and brown people, yet they direct just a pittance of those funds back to Black people, brown people, or women of any race. In other words, the money flows from the pension funds of diverse people to Private Equity (PE) and VC industries comprised almost entirely of white men. Not surprisingly then, most VC money is invested in white-owned start-up businesses. Very rarely does that money get invested into people serving the communities where the money was made.
这种不公让我感到作呕。从1619年奴役开始，到19世纪60年代奴隶制结束，黑人的劳动始终没有获得报酬；吉姆·克劳法开始实施后，他们又在长达一百年的时间里遭受低薪和经济剥削。然而即便如今，他们的储蓄仍在作为一名黑人女性，我不仅对当前这一问题有着更为切身的认识；我也比风险投资领域里几乎所有白人男性都更清楚地看到，将这些资源转向黑人和棕色人种女性所蕴含的巨大潜力。
The injustice made me sick. So not only were Black people not paid for their labor beginning in 1619 when enslavement began, and continuing until the 1860s, they were also underpaid and economically exploited for another hundred years after Jim Crow laws began to be imposed upon Black people. Yet even today their savings fund the descendants of many wealthy white landowners. More than 150 years after Emancipation, Black people are still underwriting the accumulation of white wealth. My head spun with this reality, though another part of me wasn’t the least bit surprised to discover yet another dimension of racial economic injustice and inequity.
由于我在种族多元的环境中成长，并在职业生涯中始终身处这样的环境，我深知，白人富人生活的那些空间绝大多数在种族构成上都十分单一。他们狭隘的视角不仅使他们存在巨大的认知盲区，也令我们的国家和全球经济极易受到各种认知偏见与失真、否认、群体思维、未经审视的成见，以及缺乏多元视角所造成的同质化的影响——更不用说，我们因此错过了数十亿人由上帝赋予的恩赐、才能与技能。
Right then and there, I knew I had to help ensure that retirement fund investments reflect the diversity of the people contributing to them. The challenge was huge, yet I felt undaunted. If I wanted to see change, I had to be a part of making it happen. As a Black woman, I was not only uniquely aware of the issue at hand; I was also uniquely aware of the upside possibilities that came with shifting these assets to Black and brown women more than almost any white man working in the VC space. Having grown up in and moved professionally within racially diverse contexts, I knew that the spaces wealthy white people inhabit are overwhelmingly monochrome. Their narrow lens not only leaves them with a colossal blind spot and it also makes our national and global economy incredibly vulnerable to various cognitive biases and distortions, denial, groupthink, unexamined assumptions, and the homogeneity that results when diverse perspectives are lacking—not to mention the reality that we miss out on billions of people’s God-given gifts, talents, and skill sets.
我们既能看到不作为的代价，也能看到改变带来的机遇。现在，是时候挽起袖子付诸行动了。
We can see the cost of inaction and the opportunity of change. Now, we need to roll up our sleeves.