Silicon Valley's startup and venture ecosystem has traditionally been a kind of country club, says Pedro David Espinoza.
If you weren't a white or Asian male who had attended a top-tier school, you had a hard time getting in.
Espinoza, the vice president of business development at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group is hoping to help open up the club to a much wider range of people. He and the organization just launched a networking group designed in part to give a boost to non-traditional founders.
"Silicon Valley in the past has been a ... a Stanford-only, Berkeley-only VIP club," Espinoza said. "Through SVLG, we are breaking down this hack."
Dubbed the Launch Circuit Initiative, the networking group will offer two separate series of monthly events for founders.
The first is a speaker series, featuring prominent Silicon Valley executives. The group has already hosted Monica Lozano, Apple Inc.'s first Latina board member, and Anamarie Huerta Franc, the managing director of SAP Labs US. On tap for the future are Carlos Gutierrez, the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce; Rodrigo Liang, co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems Inc.; Christina Hall, chief human resources officer at Instacart; and Patty Hatter, chief customer officer of Palo Alto Networks Inc.
The second set of events is a series called Office Hours, which will offer founders a chance to chat with legal, marketing, finance and other business operations experts.
The Launch Circuit is open to members of SVLG's startup network, which costs $600 a year for early-stage companies. The group has already had success attracting non-traditional founders. Among the network's 80 members, at least a quarter are led by women or people of color, Espinoza said.
"Through networking, these women, Latinx, Black founders can get access to a venture capitalist, can get access to a new customer," he said.
Readers can learn more about the Launch Circuit Initiative at SVLG's website.
