A recent study of venture capital funds by dot.LA found that top VCs were nearly 90 percent male. Of that, 72 percent of founders were white. Mendoza Ventures, a five-year-old venture capital fund based in Boston, is working to change those numbers.
The husband-and-wife duo behind the firm is two funds in, and has 10 portfolio companies invested, one acquisition, and houses a family of investors that has grown from Boston to Norway.
Sixty-seven percent of their portfolio is invested in people of color, female, and immigrant founders.
“We’ve got to practice what we preach throughout the organization from who we hire, to who we invest in,” founder Adrian Mendoza said.
“Our goal is to have our investor base be as diverse as our team and our startups,” co-founder Senofer Mendoza said.
Alongside investment ventures, the firm just created a summer fellowship program aimed at those with a master’s degree in business administration who are diverse or female.
“We didn't have enough women in our organization. So this helped us start reaching out to other communities to make sure that we're doing what we're asking of our startups and investors,” Senofer said.
The inaugural program will have two fellows in the summer. Patricia Decker, from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, will be Mendoza Ventures' first West Coast hire. Boston-based Jeremy Soares, from Yale School of Management, will represent the East Coast fellowship.
“I am thrilled to join Mendoza Ventures as a Summer Associate and to learn from the incredibly talented team," Deckern said in a statement. "Founders Adrian and Senofer’s industry expertise is vast, and the energy and passion they bring to their work is infectious.”
Her colleague Soares hopes to add to his studies at the business school by seeing Mendoza’s hands-on approach in action, as they partner with diverse founders to build early stage startups and offer solutions in the AI and fintech space. At the end of his fellowship, he will present a capstone of his experience to a faculty adviser at Yale.
Adrian Mendoza worked in the investment field for a decade prior to starting the firm.
“The only way we're going to create these opportunities for investors of color is by doing it ourselves,” Adrian said.
The Mendozas were entrepreneurs in the Boston tech ecosystem prior to starting their VC firm and wanted to become investors who would go beyond writing checks by helping founders grow their footprint in the earliest stages of entrepreneurship.
The firm wants to avoid the “same, typical Boston funds coming into the same deals”; their goal is to open opportunities up to the Black and the Latinx-owned funds that are starting to emerge, he said.
Potential startups go through a two to three month process of research by the firm prior to investing. Founders must demonstrate that they not only have domain expertise, but that they are willing to do the work and that the tech they developed is performing well.
In those three months, founders can build interpersonal relationships with the investors.
This is done through family-style dinners along with connecting founders with potential mentors that are already in the Mendoza portfolio. “I think we're the only VC firm that offers carnitas with our investment,” Senofer said.
