Our Diversity Pledge
Invest alongside AirTree
First things first, thank you so much to all the readers who sent such kind responses to my newsletter a few weeks ago, it means the world to know you enjoy the newsletter and want it to keep going.
AirTree’s Diversity Pledge
Last September, I described how at AirTree we’re trying to open up access to angel investing to aspiring investors who may have the network but don’t have the capital to invest. That is our Explorer program and the dynamism and spirit of collaboration in the first cohort are beyond our wildest dreams.
When we announced the Explorer program we also tagged a paragraph at the end about our Diversity Pledge - for every investment we lead, we will bring at least one investor from an underrepresented group on to the cap table, provided the founder is ok with it.
Since we made that pledge, we’ve brought an investor from an under-represented group into every investment we’ve led and it’s becoming clear that this effort could have a meaningful impact on the angel investing landscape in Aus & NZ long term.
We’d love to match every founder with an investor who has relevant sector, go-to-market, or technology expertise, and who can add considerable value to the company when they join the cap table.
So we need to build out our database of angel investors from under-represented groups who want to invest alongside us in deals - if that’s you apply here and we’ll be in touch!
Where the Explorer program is for those with the network but not necessarily the capital, the Diversity Pledge is for those with the capital and skills but not necessarily the network.
Links I loved
“Well, it had been a close one! What if Grant Gale hadn't gone to school with John Bardeen, and what if Oliver Buckley hadn't been a Grinnell alumnus? And what if Gale hadn't bothered to get in touch with the two of them after he read the little squib about the transistor in the newspaper? What if he hadn't gone to bat for Bob Noyce after the Night of the Luau Pig and the boy had been thrown out of college and that had been that? After all, if Bob hadn't been able to finish at Grinnell, he probably never would have been introduced to the transistor. He certainly wouldn't have come across it at MIT in 1948. Given what Bob Noyce did over the next twenty years, one couldn't help but wonder about the fortuitous chain of events.”
“Everywhere the Fairchild émigrés went, they took the Noyce approach with them. It wasn't enough to start up a company; you had to start up a community, a community in which there were no social distinctions, and it was first come, first served, in the parking lot, and everyone was supposed to internalize the common goals. The atmosphere of the new companies was so democratic, it startled businessmen from the East.”
“Noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options. He had learned at Fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. People sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it were successful. But people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs. The news would send a semiconductor company's stock up immediately, regardless of profits.”
“What Jeff understood was the power of rhetoric. Time spent coming up with the right words to package a key concept in a memorable way was time well spent. People fret about what others say about them when they're not in the room, but Jeff was solving the issue of getting people to say what he'd say when he wasn't in the room.”
and related…
Homesteading Mental Models - Byrne Hobart
"if any of the output of your work could involve public writing, it's worth it to apply a short and ideally catchy name to a concept that you find yourself using more often than anyone else. It's not an asset in accounting terms, but it's very much like digital real estate: a claim on future attention. And, as in real estate, if you can identify an undervalued concept before it's about to get a lot of intellectual foot traffic, you'll own a very valuable asset indeed."
Handwritten Outlines of Famous Authors
Changing health behaviors using financial incentives: a review from behavioral economics
Policy makers across the world are increasingly taking note of lessons from behavioural economics and this paper explores how key principles could help public health practitioners design effective interventions both in relation to incentive designs and more widely.
Books I’m Enjoying
Atul Gawande addresses the difference between health and wellbeing as people approach the end of their lives and wrote this book to encourage doctors to summon the courage to have the difficult conversations with the old and the dying about what their options are and help them prepare for what is to come. By allowing people to end their lives on their own terms rather than prolonging life as long as possible regardless of the consequences for wellbeing, we can help those at the end of their lives enjoy every day they have left.
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
I’m rereading this because I enjoyed it so much the first time. If you enjoy the “science for laypeople” genre, this is one of the best.