Venture capitalist stopped board meeting with a cultured meat startup

Memphis
Meats founder Uma Valeti and Chef Derek Sarno present some of
their first meals made from cultured meat.

Memphis
Meats/Facebok

• Heidi Roizen, a partner at Silicon Valley venture
  capital firm DFJ, had to stop a board meeting with
  cultured meat startup Memphis Meats when the founder showed
  a slide of five recent hires, all of whom were women.
• That kind of commitment to inclusion is
  rare in Silicon Valley. 
• At Memphis Meats, more than half of the company’s team
  identify as women; 40% of them are in leadership
  roles.

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The moment Heidi Roizen knew she’d backed the right startup
happened in the middle of a board room meeting. After 20 years
working as a venture capitalist, she had never seen a slide like
the one presented to her by Uma Valeti, the founder of
cultured meat startup Memphis Meats.

Before her were photos of five of the company’s most recent hires
— all of whom were scientists or managers by training, and all of
whom also happened to be women.

“I stopped [him] right at that moment to tell him I had never
seen a slide like that,” Roizen
wrote on her blog this week. “And that in turn surprised him,
which probably explains in part why Memphis Meats is such a
leader when it comes to diversity.”

Based in Silicon Valley, Memphis Meats kicked off with
funding from leading biotech hub IndieBio in 2015. Today,
it’s backed by investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Twitch
cofounder Kyle Vogt, and Kimbal Musk (Elon Musk’s brother). Two
food giants — Tyson Foods and Cargill — are other notable
investors.

Like a handful of
other enterprising startups in the meat alternative space,
Memphis Meats’ mission is to
grow real meat from animal cells to minimize the
environmental waste and ethical problems linked with factory
farming.

But unlike the majority of the startup world, more than half of
the company’s team identify as women; 40% of them are in
leadership roles.

The reason that is significant isn’t merely because it’s novel.
It’s also a key indicator of the company’s core values, Roizen
said.

‘Great resumes are the price of admission, not the focus of our
hiring process’

Memphis Meats is committed to hiring a diverse team of people who
hail from a variety of backgrounds, Megan Pittman, Memphis Meats’
director of people operations, told Roizen in an interview for
her post.

To do that, they look beyond traditional hiring practices that
focus exclusively on things like resumes, which can be biased
toward white men because of institutional racism and sexism. For
decades, policies like redlining (the process by which banks
refuse loans or insurance to people of color because an area is
determined to be too financially risky) and immigration practices
favoring European countries have limited the resources available
to women and people of color.

The Memphis Meats
team.
Courtesy of Memphis
Meats

Those policies and behaviors also contribute to limiting the
amount of money that goes to women and people of color. Last
year, all-female startup teams got
just 2% of all venture capital investment dollars. Fewer than

1% of American venture capital-backed founders are black.

Instead of sitting down to a traditional interview, hiring
managers at Memphis Meats ask all job candidates to begin by
giving a 30-minute talk focused on an accomplishment or a topic
they’re familiar with.

Hiring managers at Memphis do other things that help to make
diversity an entrenched part of the process. They all ask one
question, for example, when looking for a new hire: “What do we
need our next person to bring that our team doesn’t already
have?,” Pittman said.

That question assumes that what they need at the company is not
more of the same, but instead a variety of perspectives from a
variety of backgrounds. The practice has paid off, Pittman said.

“We’ve seen plenty of data showing that companies that hire based
on resumes and checkboxes end up with homogenous workforces,”
said Pittman. “Don’t get me wrong — great resumes and hard skills
are requirements at Memphis Meats, but they’re the price of
admission and not the focus of our hiring process.”