BLCK VC Launches Scout Program With Lightspeed, Sequoia To Support More Black Investors
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BLCK VC members including co-founders Frederik Groce and the scout program s mastermind, Sydney Sykes, at center.
BLCK VC
For all the high-speed growth and innovation that venture capital is supposed to fuel, the industry itself isn’t structured for quick change. BLCK VC co-founder Sydney Sykes knows it first-hand. Since last summer, firms have reached out to Sykes for advice on changes they can make fast.
Increasingly, her answer has been a program growing in popularity in VC: the scout. “Firms will hire a partner once or twice a year max, or an investment professional. But scout programs can be as large as you want,” Sykes says. “This seems like a really obvious solution to get more dollars in the hands of Black investors.”
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Mercedes Bent first connected with a Lightspeed partner over LinkedIn, more than a year before she interviewed for a role at the firm.
In the following months, she impressed Lightspeed s investors over coffee chats with her specific investment theses in the edtech and multicultural consumer products markets.
During her formal interview, she impressed partners by showing them how she narrowed down a list of 60 startups into three companies she wanted to invest in.
Bent, a Black woman from North Carolina, hopes to use her position to bring more minority investors into the venture world.