On Wednesday Minne Inno hosted its first Bytes with the Beat, a new virtual event series featuring one-on-one interviews with high-profile members of Minnesota's tech and startup community.
For the first installment of the series, Minne Inno Editor Maddy Kennedy was joined by Dionne Gumbs of GenEQTY for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities facing founders of color in their venture capital journey.
Gumbs worked in major financial institutions in New York for more than a decade before embarking on her first startup with a friend from business school. Despite their experience and expertise, both women struggled to find funding.
"We found along the way there were a lot of difficulties," Gumbs said. "We were two highly-educated women with business degrees from top 10 universities, both with careers in banking and top performers in our own right. Still, we had a very difficult time raising money."
In 2018, Gumbs founded GenEQTY, a digital banking platform that manages all aspects of business for women-owned and minority-owned companies. GenEQTY aims make the banking system work for those typically overlooked by traditional financial institutions.
Despite Gumbs' passion and strong financial background, she found it difficult to gain interest or traction in the Twin Cities when she moved here several years ago. There's a notion of sameness and familiarity that VCs and angels follow when scoping out potential investments, Gumbs said, and it's especially strong in the Twin Cities.
"When I walk into a room, there's no way of hiding it – I'm a Black woman," she said. "And it doesn't matter how many degrees or years of experience I've had. There's an inherent bias of 'Is this person familiar to me?'"
In Minnesota, she added, it often comes down to you know and even where you went to high school,
"I check zero of these boxes," Gumbs said. "I'm a girl from Brooklyn with a Caribbean background. I think that's a difficult value proposition and that slows down the process when it comes to fundraising in the Twin Cities."
Although she's had more than a decade of experience in finance, she said she's had potential investors tell her to try interning at a bank.
"That's one glaring and recent example," Gumbs said. "When you are armed with knowledge of your market and knowledge of your product, to then be belittled by an external environment can be daunting and challenging."
Gumbs also said that the local startup scene holds promise, adding that the region's racial and professional dynamics made it a great place to launch a digital banking platform that could help companies find funding in non-traditional ways.
"I underestimated the challenge in getting that started here, but it hasn't really stopped me," she said. "It was just a different kind of wake up call."
