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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.”
Storm Ventures promotes Pascale Diaine and Frederik Groce to partners
Storm Ventures, a venture firm that focuses on early-stage B2B enterprise startups, announced this week that it has promoted Pascale Diaine and Frederik Groce to partners at the firm.
The two new partners have worked their way up over the last several years. Groce joined Storm in 2016 and has invested in enterprise SaaS startups like Workato, Splashtop, NextRequest and Camino. Diaine joined a year later and has invested in firms like Sendoso, German Bionic, InEvent and Talkdesk.
Groce, who is also a founder at BLCK VC and helped organize the Black Venture Institute to create a network of Black investors, says that these promotions show that venture needs to be more diverse, and Storm recognizes this. “If you think about the way our team works, that’s the way I think venture teams will need to work to be able to be successful in the next 40 years. And so the hope is that over time everyone does this and we’