The lack of diversity in the tech sector has at least now been acknowledged, if not successfully addressed. But an even greater lack of diversity amongst VCs presents Black founders with their most fundamental challenge.
VCs invest in people as much as ideas, and tend to invest in people who look, talk and attended the same schools as them. It’s not complicated—but it is pernicious. In 2020, less than 0.25 per cent of VC funding went to Black-led startups in the UK, and that disparity in support is seen across Europe and the US.
These are challenges Bruno Mendes Da Silva, founder of Paris-based startup Heex Technologies, understands all too well. “We know that people labeled as minorities have a harder time raising capital,” he says. “There's no bias in the capital itself. It’s the people that are biased. And today, if we want to make investment more inclusive, we have to fight these biases.”
That lack of diversity in VCs cuts off not only access to funding, but also, as Da Silva argues, support and trustable, actionable feedback. “Sometimes, you really don’t know if people are telling you you suck because you really do suck, or because they are not taking you seriously because you’re Black.”
Heex Technologies, as Da Silva explains, “offers data measurement services for engineers working on complex AI.” At the moment, it is helping engineers developing self-driving cars, but Da Silva’s fundamental vision that you can build and run sustainable and capable AI with much less data—smart data, rather than simply big data—has far wider applications. Da Silva’s startup now has large clients and is generating serious interest—but his success has been hard won.
Now 32, Da Silva was born in Lisbon to African parents, but his family moved to France when he was three. He became a promising young basketball player and, by 16, he was playing professionally for a team in Roanne. But he was also academic and an embryonic entrepreneur. “Growing up I had so many ideas about how we can improve products, services, the world itself. I really wanted to make it work.”
Da Silva says watching a documentary about LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault was a turning point. “I found out there are Michael Jordans of the business world.” (Da Silva insists, though, that a lot of the values learned playing sport can and should be applied to entrepreneurship: “You have a team, you have a goal, you have challenges, and you have to stay focused on your goals to reach them,” he says.)
He secured a place at ESSEC, a leading French business school, and spent time in Shanghai as part of his studies. The city’s pollution was a more negative kind of inspiration: He returned to France in 2013 and set about starting an electric-car rental business before even graduating, managing to arrange the long-term lease of a small fleet of Teslas. Da Silva admits he was a little ahead of the demand curve, though he did find some success with a chauffeured Tesla service—ironically with LVMH as a client.
Three years later, he decided to try out his idea in San Francisco, AKA startup central. There were some successes—he had meetings with the Uber’s VP of corporate development, as well as senior executives at Volkswagen.
Da Silva admits though that he struggled to navigate the city’s advanced but oddly closed startup ecosystem. “I didn’t have the codes,” he says. “In every industry you have codes—in fashion, media and in investment. There’s a way to contact people, there’s a way to ask them things. There’s a way to behave in front of them. I didn’t have a mentor, someone that could guide me in what those codes were.”
You have to imagine that there was more to his struggles than de-coding. Da Silva is whip-smart with super-charged charisma and a bucketful of bright ideas and good intentions.
Da Silva returned to France—but was now armed with an idea and a plan. In San Francisco he got into to a conversation with an engineer at a company working on autonomous driving, who explained that a key problem with advancing autonomous vehicles was dealing with working through the huge amounts of data produced during tests, when only a tiny percentage of that data was actually useful.
Da Silva understood that there was good and bad business to be had in the “mining of relevant information”, as he puts it. In a reversal of the usual tech-industry MO, Da Silva didn’t develop a technology and then try and find applications for it—he saw the value in solving a problem and went out to fix it. He made a business case for a technology before he actually had the technology. Now he had to assemble the right team to make that happen.
As a leader, you need to bring people together. He approached Arnaud de La Fortelle, then director of the Center for Robotics at Mines ParisTech – PSL, and France’s leading researcher into autonomous vehicles. Da Silva pulled out all the rhetorical stops to persuade to de La Fortelle to leave his research lab. “You’re 50 years old and maybe this is your last shot at having someone like me try to pull you out of your ecosystem and your comfort zone to build a company that could actually have an impact all over the world,” Da Silva told him. The rallying cry worked.
In 2021, Heex was one of 30 European startups, chosen from 800 applications, to receive backing from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. (Da Silva later found out that the Google team put in a call to executives at Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary. They reported back that they had already spoken to Da Silva and that he was on to something big and clever.)
The Google for Startups Black Founders Fund program aims to address and alert people to the funding deficit for Black founders. It offers up $100,000 in cash, with no claims on equity, as well as up to $220,000 in Google Ad grants and Cloud credits. The chosen cohort also become part of an acceleration program that includes training, mentoring, and entry into a community of fellow Black founders.
“The program is amazing,’ says Da Silva. “And this isn't a charity. They don’t just give away money and support, you have to be up to their standards and understand what they are looking for.”
That validation, based on clear-sighted, hard-headed scrutiny of his pitch and potential, was vital—but so, Da Silva says, was the support of mentors and other founders. “I met people who are really engaged with moving the needle for founders like me. We had mentors to support us, taking us on roadshows to meet different investors,” he says. And advice from fellow Black founders, some starting out and others further along their journey, helped him map out a route forward.
“Being part of a community that looks like you was great for me to be inspired. Some of the founders were a little bit ahead of me, so it helped me really envision my next steps. But I also had the chance to share knowledge with founders who were just getting started. We connected, shared similarities, shared our differences.”
Da Silva admits that the last ten years—the roller coaster entrepreneurial ride—has shifted his ideas of success and failure. “I envisioned success as getting rich and having money,” he says. “But as you grow older and have more experience, you find out that success is so much more than that. It’s the people you connect with, the high and the lows, the experience you go through and the professional journey and how you stay grounded in your goals.”
In 2022, he was invited to London to speak to Google’s second cohort of Black founders. He now feels a responsibility to pay it forward and provide a useful model for others. As he puts it, “to be an example for people who look like you to believe that it’s possible. And every success, you share with them, incorporate them into your journey.”
Learn more about Heex Technologies at Heex.io. For more information about Google for Startups' offering, visit startup.google.com.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
