Upsie founder and CEO Clarence Bethea has joined the board of Beta.MN, a local nonprofit that supports startups.
The news emerged during a Twin Cities Startup Week panel session hosted by Bethea and Beta.MN board members Reed Robinson and Ryan Broshar. The appointment fulfills a pledge the board members made in June to add a Black member to their ranks.
The pledge emerged from conversations Beta.MN had with Black founders. Those conversations included speaking with Bethea, who runs warranty app startup Upsie, which raised $5 million in venture capital last year to boost its hiring. Broshar's Matchstick Ventures was a participant in that round.
Adding diversity to the board is a measure of accountability for Beta.MN, an influential ecosystem builder, Bethea said. He described the conversations leading up to his joining the board as emotional. It wasn't always a comfortable process, but stepping outside of one's comfort zone is necessary to make the sort of changes members of the startup community proposed after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Other members of the startup community have already fallen short on their commitments, he said, adding, "There's a lot of people who put things out just because it was a cool thing to do for two weeks."
The changes to make the startup world more equitable have come, but they've largely been on the small side, Bethea continued. "Have we seen tremendous change? It's a clear no."
Along with Bethea's appointment, board members used the panel as a way to assess openly how Beta.MN and Broshar's Matchstick Ventures had performed in meeting diversity and inclusion goals the organizations had set for themselves earlier this summer.
The group that selects companies to participate in Beta's semi-annual accelerator has also diversified, adding Bethea and Hack the Gap CEO Caroline Karanja, among others.
Broshar said that Matchstick, for its part, had seen 50% of its investments since the June pledge go to diverse founders, including people of color and women.
