Month: June 2020

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How has the agency’s stand against racism affected you?

It’s cool the company has publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement and the email from the CEO hit the points you would expect. But these are tiny steps in the right direction. There are still thinly-veiled everyday instances of racism. It’s easy to say you’re a not a racist, but the reason so many companies have been so tone-deaf on this issue to date is that they’re not anti-racist. These micro-aggressions aren’t really being discussed. And when they are it’s half-baked or in private.

What do you mean by anti-racist?

Even with all the rhetoric in the last few days, I’ve lost track of the number of video calls and WhatsApp Groups I’ve been brought into where I’m the only person of color there. The rest are all white. I know for a fact that some of my colleagues in those meetings are underqualified to be there, while there are others who look like me that should. It’s this covert stuff that no one wants to discuss. It’s not racist per se, but there’s an extreme prejudice in agencies that will be hard to shake until this generation of leaders retire.

So the biggest block to anti-racism at agencies is leadership? 

Take my team for example. There are four women, one is from Spain, another is from south-east Asia and the other two are from London, one is Nigerian and the other is from Essex, England. Then there are three men, one is white and from Essex, another is from Pakistan and I’m a Londoner. The team lead, however, is white. It’s like that across the agency and it’s been like that at other places I’ve worked. I’m not saying that white leaders are bad. But what this situation tells me is that leadership is reserved for a cohort of people who all come from the same place.

Have you tried to address this?

No. I don’t want to rock the boat — even now. I’m at a point in my career where I’m senior enough to have a few direct reports. The last thing I want to do is become known as the guy who plays the race card even if it is valid. It’s happened in the past at other agencies where I’ve raised certain things like why I’ve been passed over [for a] promotion for someone who hasn’t brought in half of the number of billings I have. People got defensive and wanted to silence me. Rather than let those responses get to me, I take those moments as a sign to move on. I can’t afford to have my career stall. Once I’m senior enough in this industry that’s when I’ll be able to bring more people like me through the agency. 

So the only way you get promoted is to move to a different agency?

Yes. As a minority, you have to work harder by default. Being constantly on the move is stressful, but I’m aided by friends throughout the industry who help me with job prospects when they can. Career progression is a real worry for me. There was a pitch a year ago that the agency had a lot riding on. I did everything on that pitch, from leading the economic analysis of the client’s business to ordering the food when the team worked through the night on it. I was involved in the presentation to the client alongside some execs our agency usually bring in specifically for that part. When we won it I expected to be promoted. Instead, the promotion went to the white woman who presented my plan but hadn’t worked on it. What’s worse is there was no real explanation as to why I wasn’t promoted. I left shortly after.

Are there any senior people in the agency who can help or mentor you?

If you look hard enough there are black and Asian people who are making moves at the top end of this industry. I’ve got a lot of respect for them. But in my experience, they either can’t relate to me or are out of reach. A lot of those people went to private school and count ski trips as hobbies and come into work wearing Jimmy Choo trainers. I’d rather go to the beach and that’s too much cash to be wearing on my feet. There’s a small group of white people who all look and sound very similar at the top of the agency business. And the few people of color that do mix in those circles have to conform to behaving in the same way. As smart as they are, they can’t really help me.

That solidarity shattered near immediately. By Monday morning, when the Zooms flicked on, it was evident that everyone’s experience during this time was not going to be the same. 

“I was sitting in my studio apartment in Kips Bay and I was looking at [my boss’s] view — she has these top-to-bottom windows all looking directly out at the ocean,” said one copywriter at a New York agency whose boss had apparently fled to Montauk over the weekend. “And I was like, wow, OK the next few months are not gonna be the same for us.”

Indeed, class warfare had arrived in the American workspace once staffers decamped to their home office settings, only to be socioeconomically outed, on both sides of the spectrum, by Zoom.

After all, the office and its trapping were great (superficial) equalizers, with everyone getting the same amount of desk space and the same snacks available for more. Yes, you may be getting paid less than your boss, but you were all taking the same subway in, complaining about the same office minutiae, subject to the same vagaries of office airconditioning. 

Class warfare at work isn’t new, but it’s certainly accelerated. The big difference now is that the professional-managerial class, the term coined by Barbara and John Eirenreich back in the 1970s, is now leading the uprising. 

As Jacobin assistant editor Alex Press notes, media, and many other professions like it, are classic examples of the PMC: they have more autonomy and freedom than the working class, but also work for someone. They’re in the middle: They’re neither proletariats, not bourgeois. The choice most of these professionals have is that they can either side with the bosses, or side with the working class. 

“What we’re seeing is that they’re picking a side,” said Press. 

It’s appeared in many different forms. Beyond it hitting you in the face every Zoom call, the coronavirus, the resulting economic crisis, and in more recent weeks, the wave of protests across the U.S. shedding light on system racism and toxic work cultures have all underscored a basic truth: The workplace, like society, is not equal.

At Conde Nast, where 100 people were laid off due to the coronavirus, the editorial union at Wired blasted the company for the meager severance packages offered by the company, which happens to be owned by the billionaire Newhouse family. At the Atlantic, another billionaire-owned publisher, 17% of its employees were laid off. 

In general, there has been a backlash against the perceived elites, those in power, who have had enviable quarantines — and lives. It’s come into sharper contrast in the past two weeks, since George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, and the conversation around racial justice and systemic racism that’s emerged. While it’s been about police brutality, it’s also been about Black (and minority) experiences in the workplace, workplaces that have until now been led — 92% of them — by white men. 

At Bon Appetit, staffers came out with stories of toxic racism that led to the resignation of editor in chief Adam Rapoport. At Refinery29, editor in chief Christene Barberich stepped down after Black employees told personal stories of racism and their experiences within the company, collected by a #BlackatR29 hashtag. At the Wing, CEO Audrey Gelman is resigning, months after reports emerged about mistreatment of Black employees at work. Leandra Medine is “stepping back” from Man Repeller.

It’s the same feeling the agency copywriter had: “I just have this sudden realization of what I do and the money I make and my place,” she said. “And it’s all happening at once, and I don’t really like it.” (Underscoring this too is that without her office, the free food, the parties, drinks and perks, her work itself is far more stripped down to its basics.)

After all, modern class warfare was already on display even a few months ago. Private Slack channels were the scenes of employee activism, used for organization and information gathering. Labor unions came to digital publishing. Even just politics — long considered among taboo water cooler topics, along with religion — entered the workplace with a vengeance over the past few years.

At Whole Foods, the whole worker movement asked for better conditions at work, while at Microsoft, there were employee protests over ICE contracts. Walmart workers walked out in August last year, asking the company to stop gun sales. SHRM’s own data found that 75% of workers think they have the right to speak up against their employer. (That number climbs to 82% for millennials.) Four in 10 American workers consider themselves activists.

This wasn’t just in the office, of course: Writing in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan appropriately describes how social distancing was possible for the rich, while for the many delivery drivers and grocery stork clerks out there, it wasn’t possible at all — the essential workers happened to also be some of our poorest ones.

There is an accompanying cultural schadenfreude, the side dish to “cancel culture,” which sought to boycott any person, phrase, brand or company for making a mistake. That mistake can be small or big, but the boycott is real. Some of the cancelation is a bit of a comeuppance of the elite—a way of readdressing a balance between rich and poor, have and have not. 

The uprising, in many ways, is already here.

Venture capital is known for being insular. Firms sometimes don’t publish job openings at their firms, instead relying on recommendations from within their own network when looking for someone new to hire. For more junior-level roles, like analysts or associates, some venture capital firms only recruit from a select number of Ivy League schools for these roles.

What this means, is that venture capital firms end up being largely male and white. The Information’s annual diversity report found that in 2018, 84.6% of senior investment leadership at Silicon Valley venture capital firms were male. Only 1% of decision makers at these same venture capital firms are black. Consumer venture capital firms do fare better at employing more women. One of the foremost venture capital firm in the DTC space is Forerunner Ventures, founded by Kirsten Green.

But the entire venture capital industry as a whole has long struggled to employ more black investors, and fund more black companies, and there’s no indication that venture capital firms that largely focus on consumer companies fare much better. Just 1% of venture capital dollars went to black startup founders in 2018, according to a study from Silicon Valley Bank. And the founders who do get funding, often receive less of it. Harlem Capital conducted a study in 2018, which identified just 105 startups led by black and latino founders that have raised more than $1 million in funding.

As a result, the companies they end up backing create products to serve the needs of white and affluent consumers. Consumer venture capitalists acknowledge this, but they are still struggling to figure out what decisions to take to course-correct their systemic diversity issues.

“If I had to guess, we are going to see a lot more funds partner up with some of these VC funds that focus on black founders,” said the consumer investor who spoke on background, citing funds like Backstage Capital, Harlem Capital, and Precursor Ventures.”  The investor has also pushing their firm to starting recruiting from historically black colleges and universities like Morehouse, Spelman and Howard University for its analyst program.

“The one thing I worry about is…that it’s going to be a poaching game, and not an expanding the talent pool game,” said the consumer investor, and implored other funds to not just consider hiring black investors or associates with experience at other venture capital firms.

Two of the consumer venture funds that have issued statements over the past two weeks about how they seek to do a better job of promoting diversity are Forerunner and Maveron. Forerunner tweeted on June 2 that, “Diversity is foundational to our narrative, & while we are proud of the way we’ve constructed our team to reflect this value, we acknowledge that we must do much more to promote it in the venture ecosystem and beyond, namely with regards to systemic Black inequality.”

“We are actively listening to our team members and outside voices to educate ourselves to best implement change. We are putting real consideration into this effort as the change needed is herculean, and these discussions range from financing Black-owned businesses to healthcare to education, and we want to be sure to act with intention in the areas where we can have the most impact,” Green said in a follow-up email to Modern Retail.

“To be successful consumer investor, you need to have people around the table who understand where the consumer is, and where the consumer is going” said Jason Stoffer, partner at Maveron, which has invested in Allbirds, Imperfect Foods and Everlane among other DTC startups. Stoffer thinks that Maveron has done better on some measures of diversity than other venture capital firms — of the five people at Maveron who are writing checks, two are women, and three are people of color. However, Stoffer acknowledged that Maveron has only backed 11 companies with a black founder or CEO in its more than twenty year history.

One of the immediate steps that Maveron is taking to improve diversity within its ranks is putting out an open hiring call for an investment associate. Historically, Stoffer said that Maveron has hired by word-of-mouth. The firm was also already in the process of converting to a certified B corporation, and as part of that process will be donating 1% of its carry profits to nonprofits, starting with those addressing racial injustice. Stoffer said it’s a starting point, while acknowledging that Maveron is still trying to figure out how to do a better job of finding and funding more diverse founders “who want to build iconic brands.” He added, “I don’t have any answers right now.”

Jaime Schmidt, the co-founder of early and seed stage firm Color encouraged other, larger venture capital funds to “look outside your usual networks and industry sources to discover new brands and founders,” and echoed the need for funds to up with syndicate funds that focus on backing underrepresented founders. Schmidt is also the founder of natural deodorant brand Schmidt’s Naturals, which was acquired by Unilever in 2017. Schmidt said that 83% of the founders backed by Color have a founder that’s a woman or person of Color. 

One of the best pieces of advice Schmidt shared was also the simplest: “we share publicly about our mission for supporting underrepresented founders, which results in a lot of incoming deal flow.” So while venture capitalists’ first instinct may be to stay quiet right now, lest they be criticized for a picture featuring all white guys on their website, the best thing they can do is to speak up.