What is Transparent Collective?
Transparent Collective is a non-profit breaking down the barriers that acutely affect the success of minority founders at the early stages of their startups. The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial dream is fraught with challenges when you come from a different racial, ethnic, gender, or location-based background. Most significantly, you lack connections to investors and resources that are more easily accessible to those that grew up in or share similar circumstances. As a result, underrepresented founders struggle to raise venture capital funding, as depicted in the below graphic:
Transparent Collective is on a mission to change these dismal statistics. To do so, we focus on tackling 3 areas where we see underrepresented founders encounter the most challenges in building successful technology companies and raising venture funding:
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TC Team
The Transparent Collective story
TC started with James Norman and Adrian Walker, who were childhood friends and attended the University of Michigan School of Engineering together. They both eventually ended up in the Bay Area building their own tech companies. Despite their hard work, extensive network, and ability to pitch their products, they experienced the harsh reality that raising money to grow their startups as non-white males in Silicon Valley was near impossible. Considering that they both had a similar journey and the same results, this wasn't a happenstance, this was a problem. So, they decided to team up with more friends in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, Clayton Bryan and Rohini Pandhi, to gather people together and have candid conversions about difficult challenges and potential fundraising strategies that would help more founders of all backgrounds succeed; hence the nameTransparent Collective.
Our first batch of founders came through the program in early 2016, and soon after Lara Jordan joined the TC team. What started as a 24 hour event to fine tune startup pitches for a demo day (the TC Startup Showcase) has now turned into a comprehensive week-long program that touches on all the key aspects of founding and running an early stage company.
Adrian now invests in great founders through his fund, Telescopic Ventures. Clayton leads investments at 500 startups and advises. James, Rohini, Decarlos, and Lara continue to run Transparent Collective as a 501(c)3 nonprofit focused on providing resources to remarkable, underrepresented founders.
TC started with James Norman and Adrian Walker, who were childhood friends and attended the University of Michigan School of Engineering together. They both eventually ended up in the Bay Area building their own tech companies. Despite their hard work, extensive network, and ability to pitch their products, they experienced the harsh reality that raising money to grow their startups as non-white males in Silicon Valley was near impossible. Considering that they both had a similar journey and the same results, this wasn't a happenstance, this was a problem. So, they decided to team up with more friends in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, Clayton Bryan and Rohini Pandhi, to gather people together and have candid conversions about difficult challenges and potential fundraising strategies that would help more founders of all backgrounds succeed; hence the nameTransparent Collective.
Our first batch of founders came through the program in early 2016, and soon after Lara Jordan joined the TC team. What started as a 24 hour event to fine tune startup pitches for a demo day (the TC Startup Showcase) has now turned into a comprehensive week-long program that touches on all the key aspects of founding and running an early stage company.
Adrian now invests in great founders through his fund, Telescopic Ventures. Clayton leads investments at 500 startups and advises. James, Rohini, Decarlos, and Lara continue to run Transparent Collective as a 501(c)3 nonprofit focused on providing resources to remarkable, underrepresented founders.
JAMES NORMAN
Co-Founder @Pilotly
Founded Ubi Video, F1RST Motoring, and Pilotly. Managing Partner at Black Ops VC. EECS BS @University of Michigan. |
ROHINI PANDHIProduct @Mercury.
Previously Product @Square / @Block. Active angel investor. Computer Engineering @University of Michigan, MBA @University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business. |
LARA JORDANProgram Director @TC
Digital strategist who specializes in working with early-stage D&I Impact. Founder @ Pericus, Previous content lead @ 500 startups, BA @ Washington&Lee University. |
ISAAC CABALLEROEvents Manager @ TC
Sr Manager @Hispanics in Philanthropy. Skilled in live & virtual events and project management. B.S. in Media, Culture, & Comms @ NYU. |
Manny SmithSales / GTM Support
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DeCarlos LoveA.I. / Product Support
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