Hi everyone I'm Hannah Williams I'm a staff writer here at Tech wells also
right across computer wad UK and CIA UK today we are going to be going through
the tech venture capitals female specifically how the industry is
developing and we have with us here Sookie fuller who is a pioneer a great
woman in that industry so please introduce yourself Sookie so hi my name
is Sookie fuller I am the CEO and co-founder of salon ventures and I call
myself an analytical storyteller because I'm also by profession and intelligence
specialists it's great lovely to have you here with us so firstly can you just
tell me a bit about your career today and how it exactly you ended up in
venture capital so I don't think anybody's career is linear so mine is
very much nonlinear and very much not your typical person that gets into
venture so originally started out in chemical engineering it did not do very
well in that have a thing about closed windows and rooms which is why I like
this room lots of windows but didn't do very well academically in staying in
that industry worked for a little bit but not so much then I moved into
intelligence so I became an intelligence practitioner across national security in
law enforcement and corporate and then just by way of chance I fell into
venture and while I'd still do competitive intelligence I do also do
venture and that was quite an accident just knowing lots of people that works
within the social media space in the early early days of Twitter and blog
worlds and all sorts of thing that we're going on in the US around the late to
the mid to late night mid to late Oh what was that
2006 so it's early 2006 seven when Twitter start is really when
I jumped into more of the tech sector that's great roughly so how would you
say the industry's changed since the beginning of your career mmm I would say
technology is very much fuelling what's going on within the business world
everybody to some degree can say their company is a tech company because if you
have a business online or you're doing e-commerce everybody is now claiming
they're a tech company and I would say that while there is a lot more
acceptance of tech there is still sort of this pie in the sky looking at it as
though it can fix and change everything in the world when in fact it comes out
to the people really is about what the people are doing and how they're
designing the tech whether or not it solves a real problem that's really
interesting and going back from what you've mentioned so you've been in
technology industry for quite some years and also now developed into venture
capital so how would you say that what's the importance of diversity and
inclusion in the industry and that's not just on moral grounds that's like for
the success of the business okay so I always try not to use the word diversity
anymore I really do try to use the word variety and that is mainly because the
majority of people that have we can say the power have a tendency to kind of
close your eyes and roll their eyes with a minute you say diversity and diversity
itself the word has become very diluted so you have people that when you say
diversity they just think gender and for me I always think of the threes I have
threes I like the number three apparently and I always think of
equality as being gender and while we know there are people that don't really
identify with any gender that are non-binary I was just in order to
explain it to people in a very simplistic manner
I say equality is men and women it's what you're born and while you can
change that after the fact that's you know just your biological state when
you're born then diversity or varieties I like to
call it is the things that are attributed to you so there are you know
your race that's diversity that's variety because
they're everybody's human just different types of us and then inclusion are the
things that anybody can have anybody can be blind anybody can be deaf anybody can
have any sort of mental disorder you know we're not those are the most
simplistic terms and that's how I explained it so that people can
understand the basic level and also I think it helps with explaining it to
young children when they are coming into that age of awareness that there are
things that are different so whenever we're speaking to children and we're
talking about getting into tech we we put it on that baseline and then they
really have some sort of cognitive understanding of what those differences
are it's really interesting so what more could be done to improve that then I
know you've really gone into in depth and said that there is more to it than
just the diversity there's more that means that I but what more can be done
to improve we know and I'm sure you do very well as well there is not enough
female founders being invested in and they were also is not enough females
noticed as VC investors so what more can be done and are things getting better
that's an inflammatory question because I mean it depends on the day I mean
sometimes you wake up and you think oh this is really bad you know they're
nothing's changing you know it's it's point two percent not even point I think
it's point zero two for women of color and it's 2 percent just for women in
general and it's like that hasn't changed it actually kind of got a little
worse but at the same time once again back to my threes well I run this thing
called the 50/50 pledge with a friend of mine who Chris taught him from notion
and he is a white 50 year old male VC and we run this initiative and it's
about getting more women into VC it's about you know making the numbers more
equal and one of the things that we have is
it's called awareness the advocacy in the action and that also ties in with
tech London advocates women in tech initiative and those are our three A's
so that's worked across board because awareness is once you raise the
awareness of somebody they can't say they didn't know and there's enough
publicity out there there's enough initiatives by governments by nonprofits
by global organizations talking about women female entrepreneurship how we
improve those numbers that there are more women in the world than there are
men so why are we not having more capital and so people know there's an
awareness if you choose not to be aware you're basically just putting your
blinders on to keep your power and then you have the advocacy and once you're
aware you either go two ways either well there's maybe three ways either gonna be
somebody who just doesn't care so you're not gonna advocate for change because
you have too much power you don't want to give it up or there's people in the
middle that just sort of go either way depending on the day and usually for men
in general for men it usually is once they become fathers or they have a
significant female in their lives as an adult other than their mother all of a
sudden they become very much aware and they start advocating because they
realize they see it within their own family then you have those that are you
know always advocates since since birth they've always been like I've had a
strong mother or I've had a mother and I've seen how hard she works I have
sisters I've seen the struggle that they've gone through and so you have
those three types of people that are in that middle where they're advocating
maybe they there are they aren't or they're just kind of met I'll do it
whenever it's appropriate for me and then you have action an action comes
down to the people that have said I'm aware I'm advocating and I'm gonna help
take action because this is not right and that's where I think we are right
now in society I think looking back over the last few years there was definitely
more of an awareness around women female
entrepreneurs about how things were changing how the changes need to come
about and in the u.s. I would say that was more round in the area of
politicians you could see it happening with Hillary Clinton's campaign even
though there are other people before her that you know campaigned for the
presidency but it was the fact that her sort of visibility was a lot higher and
so that raised really very much more awareness and then in the UK you see it
with even though we had always have we've had a British prime minister we
had Margaret Thatcher it was sort of always there but it was always very much
more class driven but you see it now in business and we had our own little drama
about the BBC the pay differential so you've seen the changes and just
probably in the last year you see more advocacy more female networks rolling up
more people talking about wire and women not getting investing and then also this
last year end of last year and this year you see more action people are saying
especially yesterday more saying that's great you have a report that's great you
have an initiative we're still not getting money you still have the same
people sitting in the boardroom and it really needs to be the people that are
writing the checks that are deciding who gets the money it needs to be more
inclusive it needs to have women needs to have people of color it needs to have
people that have disabilities it needs to have people that are different in the
way that they think that a neurodiverse that needs to happen yeah that's really
interesting and I really particularly like what you mentioned about the
awareness as well I was recently talking to a founder of a start-up venture
company called fuel ventures and they mentioned how they've decided to go
through anonymous pitch decks so that basically just scratching out completely
unconscious bias so they will not come they wouldn't even see the image or the
name of the founder that comes into the company until they actually come get
through to the stage of coming in for the meeting but the question I was
asking I was thinking they actually have to get to that stage
the fact that fine is you're doing something positive you're you've
realized that there could be that unconscious bias but why should we have
to even get to that why can we not say okay wherever you are male or female
whether you're a black female or or white male we just like your business
idea so we just want to vincit invest in your company so what do you think about
that do you think that that action that you mentioned rightfully as well it's
happening and it's a good it's taken a good turn or can't we just carry on
being traditional and I don't know when you say traditional the the thing is
tradition has always been dictated by the person or the people that have power
and so it hasn't been inclusive from the beginning but that's in any structure it
doesn't matter where you are in the world I always look at it like this if
you go to China which is a very homogeneous society people that are
different so if you're a white female with blonde hair you are considered as
like kind of people stare at you if you're a black female people will stare
at you and if you are in you know in Tanzania and you're a white male people
are gonna stare at you maybe not so much but people will stare at you because you
are different and in those in those societies you're actually seen as the
minority whereas when you're in more of the Western countries like the u.s. like
Canada UK as a person of color you are viewed as the minority so it really is
about those societal norms in those sort of different cultures but at the same
time unconscious bias I hate that phrase it's and I while I understand why people
blind I don't think it's very effective because if an idea is good it doesn't
matter who pitches it as and I'm like there are nuances in a business that are
that are there because of the experience of the person that built the company and
so you can have somebody come along and pitch a really great idea and go
it's really good but there's something missing here because it really is also
about the person I don't know I'm still a little bit on the line about blinding
of because I can understand taking out somebody's name if they're applying for
a job when it comes down to a company there is something about the ethics
behind the person there is also something about how they came to find it
fund that company how they came to found that company how it's about their life
experience and that goes into giving you more insights of how that company is
going to grow whereas if you don't know anything you can it can always look
perfect on paper that's very interesting so from your for yourself and for the
company what what sort of companies do you guys like to investing and what's
your strategy for this for the airhead so we're really early-stage I'd say
we're more angels than anything and we're more connectors so because we
don't have very we don't have big pockets we haven't raised around
ourselves we're trying to avoid that because then we're beholden to other
people but we have a tendency to focus on health mainly because that's probably
one of the areas where people don't fund as much they do but not not early-stage
because it is one of those where so we do health tech we've done uni but
usually all natural beauty like my lipstick this cosmetics shout out and
food healthy food we have a tendency to sort of focus on more of the natural
side of things and of course I have a love for deep tech and so I really am
working more we're looking at AI learning machine learning really the
things that are driving technology the ethics behind that making sure that it's
more empathetic making sure that it's more inclusive we don't need any more
soap dispensers that don't recognize people of colors hands you know we
need to make sure those are inclusive from the beginning that you know your
app on your phone is good for somebody who has vision problems that you know
that so a device has Braille on it you know
all those things that really people don't think about you know the next
Google glass is actually developed for people with was it eye impairment versus
just somebody who wants to look cool you know those are things that we're really
looking at that's really really good and in that sense as well so is there a
criteria that you guys have for the founding team or how do you are you
pretty open with that we're pretty open we we do like to have more inclusive
team so we have if you have an all-male team the first question is going to be
why don't you have any other members on your team that are not male because when
you're developing something for any any industry you should have a more
inclusive team because you're gonna get insights that you won't get as a male
founder even if you're developing a razor for a guy you know this they have
females on that team why because sometimes as a woman you use the guys
razor sometimes actually it can give you more insight on people that have more
sensitive skin because there are men that have sensitive skin so you know if
a woman uses it and be like this doesn't really work too well for people with
sensitive skin just more just more insight yeah that's really really good
thank you very much you've definitely answered all my questions and I mean
given me a great great insight so thank you very much for your time you're quite
welcome thank you very much for having me
you