Daisy Onubogu and Breaking Down Systematic Inequality

It isn’t often that we come across an article that’s eye-opening, mind-blowing, and has us agreeing with every single word.

But, that’s exactly what happened earlier this year. 

Back in February, we discovered an amazing article on Medium titled ‘Underrepresented Founders are Merely Collateral Damage’. 

After spending 13 minutes reading it (with our jaws hanging open), we immediately reached out to our podcast team. 

We knew we HAD to have Daisy Onubogu, the author of the article, on And She Spoke. 

And we’re so glad we did. 

Daisy works at Backed, a seed-stage fund based in London, and specializes in helping high potential founders at early stages build things that will change the world (or at least make it a better place to live in). 

She’s also responsible for Backed’s Diversity & Inclusion initiatives. 

And she’s committed to change the unequal world of Venture Capital. 

Here’s what she had to say about it in the article: 

“I like solving problems, and I also really like the feeling of making people happy, or at least un-sad. So VC’s big old diversity problem was perfect bait; an issue so messy and tangled it had defied solving for so long, and one which if solved would make lots of people un-sad”

See why we had to have her on our show?

Tune into today’s episode to learn more about Daisy’s efforts in understanding, tackling, and changing the diversity issue in VC (aka, the business world’s giant elephant in the room). 

She discusses everything from WHO benefits from the VC system (don’t we all know the answer to this one?), WHY our current methods of dealing with the diversity problem aren’t really yielding results, and HOW we can actually move forward. 

Here’s a peek at what else we discuss:

+  Why it’s hard to affect change in the VC-world despite best-intentions
+  How capitalism is the root cause of systematic oppression in business
+  What led Daisy to write the Medium Article (and the reaction of her team when she did)
+  The problem with a small group of people (*cough*white men*cough*) given absolute control over resources
+  How the VC system is simply not set up for scalable approaches to diversity

And so much more!

Speaking with Daisy was so incredible because not only is she smart and passionate, but she’s also vulnerable. She admits that she doesn’t have all the answers to this giant systematic problem (and that no one should be expected to), and how we can work towards change anyway. 

This is something that affects everyone (even if you think it doesn’t!), which is why we think this is one of our most important episodes yet. So grab those airpods, settle down with a nice cup of tea and get listening!

Resources

This week’s Joy: 

Reluctantly, Daisy admits her joy these days is TikTok (hey, it’s our guilty pleasure too!). She likens it to those rare parties where every room feels like its own universe. She learns a lot and laughs more than she expected to during these times.

This week’s Hustle: 

One word - Zapier. 

Daisy doesn’t particularly enjoy the mundane day-to-day tasks, which is why she gets excited about building automations that’ll take those off of her plate (and give her more time to go on TikTok). 

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