Fun fact: CapitalT's portfolio is made up to a very large extent of companies with a female, BIPOC, or LGBTQ+ founder. 84% to be specific.

Another fun fact: CapitalT does not have a diversity mandate. It’s not our goal to invest in diverse founders. It’s our goal to invest in the BEST founders.

So how come our portfolio is so diverse? Turns out, many of the best founders just happen to be diverse. Unfortunately, they often get overlooked.
So what do we do at CapitalT do make sure we don’t miss out on these great people?

A large portion is our cold in-bound dealflow. We make sure to look at all pitchdecks we receive. Really. In fact, 26% of our current portfolio came to us via cold in-bound. Shoot us your deck here.

Another part is that our team does its best to be visible outside of the traditional founder/VC networks. We make it a point to step out of the “inner circle” and be approachable to everyone.

Lastly, it’s about being self-aware: We all have our biases, and we are all responsible for making sure they don’t cloud our judgement. This is a constant learning process and we’re doing our best to hold each other accountable for it. We also leverage a data-driven approach to team assessment to further reduce the risk of biased decisions. For this, we leverage our assessment tool VCVolt which is based on our partner Eva’s research on startup team dynamics.

As our partner Janneke said before: “Any suggestion that VCs must lower their standards to build a diverse portfolio is 100% insulting and 100% untrue. Diverse founders solve diverse problems — having a diverse portfolio raises, not lowers, the bar. And you get there by being open and accessible to all founders.”

Having a diverse portfolio raises, not lowers, the bar