Navigating the Venture World as a Black VC
&gt;  Some black people assimilate into white culture while others push toward perfectionism in order to overcome negative stereotypes. Others ignore the microaggressions, despite the sting believing the merit of their work is the most important metric of success.<p>This has been my experience, balancing everything that is happening with &quot;maybe these microaggressions had nothing to do with race, like all the people on hackernews and linkedin would say&quot; or maybe thats naivete as this is the exact experience other people that look like me are saying happens<p>&quot;Kind of odd how these mormon investors never look at me during this entire meeting of three people&quot;<p>&quot;Kind of odd how I keep finding out that my business partners wrote themselves large stakes of newly formed companies, and I have to perform an arbitrary set of work over an arbitrary set of time to maybe get diluted in later&quot;<p><i>maybe its just me [and a predictable experience echoed by people that look like me]</i><p>On another note, which I think this article gets wrong or doesn&#x27;t factor in well with the acknowledgement of assimilation, it assumes people of color in the space are trying to service &quot;communities of color&quot;. It isn&#x27;t factoring in the idea that they are playing the same world-changing moonshot game as everyone else, a game that doesn&#x27;t care about nuances of any particular country&#x27;s demographics. People are the same and want the spoils of this industry, thats the key thing to remember. Some people have their own idea of addressing underserved communities or paying it forward to people that look like them, but most people are aiming to perpetuate the industry itself.