When Jim Goulka took the lead of Arizona Tech Investors 10 years ago, things were a little rocky at the start.
“I did my first dues renewal right after I took over, and members dropped like flies. So a few months into it, we were down to like 15 members,” he said. “And of those 15 members, we didn't have any women and that seemed incredibly stupid to me.”
In the intervening years, Goulka, ATI’s chairman and managing director, made an effort to increase the diversity of the angel investing group but he said there is still work to be done.
A diverse investor group, according to him and several women members at ATI, helps the group make the best investment decisions.
“Women bring a different perspective, and that's what investing is all about, is getting a different perspective,” said Ann Damiano, who has been with the group for six years. “You can leverage that as you make your decisions about where to put your money.”
Damiano is a senior cloud sales manager at VMware and she said that being an angel investor is a way to diversify her finances, but she noted that writing checks to early-stage companies is extremely risky.
“You have to be really comfortable with never seeing that money again,” she said.
Goulka said he interacts with more than 1,200 companies a year at the top end of the vetting process, though, the interaction is brief with many of these companies. Companies seeking funding can send an application into ATI, and upon acceptance of said application, the company pitches to ATI's screening committee.
If the screening committee approves the pitch, the company advances to pitching the entire ATI group. From there, ATI members decide for themselves whether they want to invest and how much they're willing to put up.
Last year ATI invested over $2.25 million in 19 companies, five of which have women CEOs and nine of them are based in Arizona. ATI is one of several early stage investment groups in the state, such as the Sonoran Founders Fund in Scottsdale or the Desert Angels in Tucson.
More women involved
When Michelle Tinsley joined ATI eight years ago, she was one of seven women; The group now has 103 members and Tinsley estimated that more than 30 of them are women. For her, making money is not the core reason she got involved.
“If it's just about the dollars and the bottom line return, there's way easier ways to go invest your money,” she said. “That's part of it, we don't want to just do this as charity, but we do want to also be active and advise these companies, make introductions, help them get sales, help them pivot, as they need to, in these early stages to really truly be successful.”
Tinsley spent 26 years at Intel before leaving in 2017. She has since gone on to co-found a startup herself, currently serving as the COO at YellowBird, a hiring platform for environmental health and safety professionals. Last year YellowBird raised $400,000 in a pre-seed round.
In their years since joining ATI, Damiano and Tinsley have honed their investing eyes to find the companies that will last; Both women invested in CampusLogic, a Chandler startup went on to raise $120 million last year.
A more recent arrival to the group is Abtihal Raji-Kubba, who previously worked as an engineer and executive at medical technology company C.R. Bard. She has been a member of ATI for the past 18 months.
“This is my way of fueling innovation,” she said. “I may not be the engineer working on this anymore … But I'm now the individual who's actually supporting these small companies to come out and giving them the fuel to deliver the next big thing. I don't know what that will be, when that will be, but I know that I'm part of that big story.”
'We're missing people'
One key decision Goulka made in the early days of his tenure was the plus-one rule: He allowed members’ spouses to join the group for free. This “twofer” rule had the early effect of men bringing women to the group.
“It actually worked so well that I've had board members, plenty of my screening committee members, leaders in all kinds of groups arrive out of that process over the years, and we continue it today,” he said.
Tinsley got involved with ATI when she was working at Intel and now she sits on ATI’s screening committee which decides which pitches will be shared with the full group. Tinsley broke the mold cast in the early days of ATI: She brought her husband to the group.
“My husband is reaping on the reverse benefit. He's an engineer, also former Intel, and he loves to come,” she said. “He has very different questions and sees different things than I would.”
Goulka said efforts to diversify the group have been successful so far, but he’s eager to bring in more people of color. He specifically noted his desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic people in the group.
“We're missing people that naturally should be members,” he said. “You've got to get to people to enable them to see it as something they want to do. And that takes cultivation. And so reaching out more systematically, I need to do.”
He said building trust and making personal connections is easier to do in person, so recruiting has taken a hit during the pandemic. There is some turnover in the members each year, so Goulka said he is constantly recruiting new members.
Ultimately, Goulka said, a CEO pitching their company to a group of people that looks like they do will be more comfortable.
“There's no reason for a group of people, whether they're characterized by ethnicity, race, gender, any of those kinds of things to be systematically underrepresented in what it is that we do.”
