Chicago's venture capital industry is made up of mostly white men. But a new program from Chicago Blend and Melinda Gates-backed GET Cities wants to get more people from underrepresented backgrounds plugged into the city's VC community.
Chicago Blend, a local organization working to bring more people of color and women into Chicago’s startup and VC industries, announced the launch of the Chicago Venture Fellows, a program aimed at training aspiring venture capitalists who come from underrepresented backgrounds.
The program, which is aimed at Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, nonbinary and other marginalized groups, will offer four months of skills training, mentorship, education and other assistance in learning the VC ropes.
The fellows will be tasked with sourcing startups for potential venture investment by the VCs in Chicago Blend's network. If one of those startups ends up getting funded, the fellow receives a finders fee, said Joey Mak, the executive director of Chicago Blend. Fellows also receive a stipend for participating in the program.
The ultimate goal of the program is to help these fellows land full-time roles at Chicago venture firms, Mak said.
"We see this as a natural extension of our work to really diversify the VC talent pipeline here in Chicago," he said.
Chicago Blend launched in 2018 as a collaborative effort by venture capitalists in Chicago to measure and increase diversity, equity and inclusion at Chicago VC firms. The group's data shows that today Chicago's VC industry is 78% white and 66% male.
The Venture Fellows program looks to bring new faces into Chicago's VC scene through an initiative that gives boots-on-the-ground experience.
"This is an opportunity for them to get experiential learning," Mak said.
The program was piloted last year in Chicago by GET Cities, an initiative backed by Gates that's designed to accelerate the representation of women, trans and nonbinary people in tech. After launching with five fellows, Chicago Blend is now scaling the program to include two cohorts of 10 fellows each in 2022, one this summer and another in the fall.
If successful, the program could have ripple effects for Chicago's startup community by increasing the number of underrepresented folks working in venture capital. Then those fellows could also tap their networks to source startups, surfacing a crop of diverse founders that otherwise may have flown under the radar, Mak said.
"With a more diverse group of future investors, they are more likely to have more connection points to more overlooked, underrepresented founders as well," he said.
