A local organization working to bring more people of color and women into Chicago’s startup and venture capital industries has added new board members that it thinks will further propel its mission.
Nonprofit Chicago:Blend named community advocate Elle Ramel and tech entrepreneur Samir Mirza to its board of directors this week. They replace Ryan Mundy with Techlete Ventures and Juan Muldoon with Energize Capital.
Ramel, a gender equity advocate, previously worked as the Chicago director for Gender Equality in Tech Cities, a national philanthropic effort funded by Melinda French Gates. Mirza was the co-founder and chief technology officer at TapCommerce before he co-founded Fifth Star Funds, a Chicago-based venture philanthropy fund. Both Ramel and Mirza have been Chicago:Blend advisors since 2021.
"The board has traditionally been made up of mostly VCs and entrepreneurs over the past five years, and we thought about what strategic gaps we needed to fill for these new board members," Lindsay Knight, Chicago:Blend founder and board president, told Chicago Inno. "Both Elle and Samir have a multifaceted background that spans entrepreneurship, venture investing and philanthropy. We have not had anybody on the board who has had really deep operational experience with the nonprofit and philanthropic world."
Ramel and Mirza check those boxes for Chicago:Blend, coming with the perspective, connections and network to help grow Chicago:Blend, Knight said.
Founded in 2018 by venture capitalists frustrated with the inequities in the industry, Chicago:Blend works to examine and address the diversity gap in Chicago's tech community.
The organization releases data diversity on an annual basis, the latest edition of which showed that Chicago ranks well when it comes to female representation in the tech industry and that new Chicago startups rank well compared with their peers when it comes to other diversity measures as well. Knight expects the 2024 report to release in the fall.
However, as the number of venture-capital deals nationwide continues to fall — and reached its lowest level since 2017 in the first quarter of 2024 — Black founders have faced steeper declines than their peers, according to Crunchbase.
Knight said she learned long ago that the work of Chicago:Blend is a marathon, not a sprint.
"We are seeing slow improvement — not where we want to be or where we need to be, but it's slow improvement. Venture and startups are difficult right now. Raising money on all sides is difficult," she said. "We are hopeful that the trend will continue in the direction we want to see, perhaps [with] some blips, but that doesn't mean it's not moving up and to the right."
The shuffling of Chicago:Blend's board comes as the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm whose mission is to bridge the gap in venture capital funding for women of color founders, continues to face scrutiny for its work. A federal appeals court recently suspended the firm from continuing its grant program that provides business development grants to Black women entrepreneurs.
The court ruled that the program is "substantially likely" to violate a section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in making or enforcing contracts.
In light of this news, Knight said Chicago:Blend's perspective hasn't changed and that the organization will continue to pursue its mission regardless of what is happening in other parts of the country.
