Transparent Collective
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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:
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​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:

​1
PREPARING
​UNDERREPRESENTED FOUNDERS TO FUNDRAISE.

​Through our 4 day “Showcase” program and our online workshops, we focus on preparing underrepresented founders for fundraising, helping them thoroughly understand the process, strengthen their pitch mechanics, and improve storytelling around metrics. Each founder is given ample guidance through 1:1 and group mentorship, giving them tactics to succeed when going out to fundraise with investors. 

2
CONNECTING
​INVESTORS TO HIGH-CALIBER ENTREPRENEURS, AND FOUNDERS TO THE RIGHT INVESTORS.

​Many investors are seeking a diverse portfolio, but may not have the personal network connections to find high caliber minority founders. Transparent Collective provides investors with high-qualified deal flow, thoroughly vetting our founders to ensure they have strong performance indicators of future success.

For founders, we help them build their investor pipeline, identifying the right investors for their startup and finding the targeted people to make meaningful connections. 

​3
CONTRIBUTING
​TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ECOSYSTEM WHERE MINORITY ENTREPRENEURS CAN FLOURISH.

​We aren’t a competition or “Shark Tank” type of environment. Our collective is a network of seasoned founders, investors, and mentors paying it forward and helping the next batch of remarkable founders. We don’t take any money or equity from our founders - we’re here simply to see them succeed.

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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.

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JAMES NORMAN

Co-Founder @Pilotly
Founded Ubi Video, F1RST Motoring, and Pilotly.  Managing Partner at
​Black Ops VC. EECS BS @University of Michigan.
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ROHINI PANDHI

Product @Mercury.
Previously Product @Square / @Block. Active angel investor. Computer Engineering @University of Michigan, MBA @University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business.
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LARA JORDAN

Program 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.
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ISAAC CABALLERO

Events Manager @ TC
Sr Manager @Hispanics in Philanthropy. Skilled in live & virtual events and project management. B.S. in Media, Culture, & Comms @ NYU.
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Manny Smith

Sales / GTM Support
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DeCarlos Love

A.I. / Product Support
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