Lady Business: Rare good news for VC diversity, and the Black ‘unsung hero’ investors behind it

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 138th issue, published February 20, 2022.
 

Hidden Figures

Sometimes I worry that reporting on venture capital and startups has made me inured to outrageous numbers about the industry’s lack of diversity. They’re so bloody persistent: Last year, only 2% of all venture capital dollars went to female founders, a slight decrease from the year before. Black and Latina women together get less than 0.5% of those dollars. 
 
And yet these percentages tend to recede in most discussions of the venture-backed startup ecosystem, and the record-breaking amounts of money churning around it. (Are you raising money to fund something something crypto something? How many billions of dollars would you like to raise?)
 
So it was good to have some more optimistic numbers to report recently: There are more private-equity and venture-capital firms majority-owned by women and people of color than ever before, according to a new report from Fairview Capital Partners. Fairview, a pioneer of diversity-focused investing, started publishing this data in 2014, when it found only about 100 firms that were majority-owned by underrepresented fund managers. Last year, it found 627 such firms—up 25% from a year earlier, and an all-time high.
 
Reporting this story for Fortune also allowed me to interview JoAnn Price, Fairview’s influential cofounder and managing partner. A Black woman who launched Fairview in the early 1990s with cofounder Laurence C. Morse, Price now co-leads the second-largest Black-owned PE firm in the United States, according to Black Enterprise. (Price managed this feat despite, of course, not being the first pick for her job: “Of course, they were looking for a man,” she told me. “But at the end of the day, all of those super-duper men were not willing to take that level of risk.”)
 
Because Fairview is lesser-known than many big Silicon Valley investors, this was one of those articles where I interviewed more outside experts than I could quote, to confirm both the authority of Fairview’s data and the place that it occupies in the industry. When a private company hasn’t shared much data about itself and hasn’t been well-covered (or much-scrutinized) by the business press, there’s always a risk that its claims to authority are more marketing than reality. But every single VC I spoke to, including some who compete with Fairview, called the firm “market leading” and “instrumental,” especially for underrepresented investors. This was the best, but by no means the only, quote along the same lines:
 
“They’re the unsung heroes,” says Miriam Rivera, the former deputy general counsel at Google who’s now the CEO and cofounder of seed-stage tech fund Ulu Ventures, in which Fairview has invested. “Every person of color in the industry probably knows Fairview Capital.”
 

Lady Bits

–I can’t believe it’s been four years since the last Winter Olympics and my last casual interest in figure skating! Unfortunately, this time it turned into “watch the abusive trainwreck through fingertips” viewing.
 
–Speaking of watching through fingertips... I loved the novel Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s eerily prescient 2014 book about an even-worse-than-reality global pandemic and the resulting endurance of love, art, and basic humanity. But I did not love the recent, and critically-adored, HBO adaptation! 
 
Part of this is just pandemic fatigue: Like sagas about September 11, another big disaster that I have vivid memories of living through, watching the onset of a fictional pandemic now feels unnecessary and somewhat exploitative, rather than cathartic. But even putting that aside, I also hated many of this adaptation’s choices! Like the one-episode whiplash from “This menacing cult leader is a terrorist who arms children with suicide bombs!” to “Oops, actually that suicide-bomber thing was a misunderstanding! And the cult leader is a Nice Guy, actually.” 
 
I especially hated the decision to make Miranda–who in the book outgrows her vain, philandering husband and carves out a happier life–into a workaholic Bad Wife who’s too preoccupied with her art to pay attention to her marriage. This review pinpointed exactly why I found this choice so annoying, and the larger problem with this adaptation, which filters the book’s stories “through shoddy prestige TV tropes.”
 
–On the other hand: I have so enjoyed the second season of All Creatures Great and Small, the updated British series about 1930s farm animals and the veterinarians who take care of them in the Yorkshire countryside. Somehow it manages to be quietly romantic, despite spending way too much screen time on men with their arms up animal cavities, and also soothingly low-drama, despite all that “encroaching World War II” stuff.  
 
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