YouSaid · the spoken record

Kimberly Bryant

lines on the record: 68
first: 2019-04-22
most recent: 2019-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As an angel investor, just to explain, you're investing your own money. And if you are an institutional venture capitalist, you're investing somebody else's money. Maybe you can't take the same moral stand for righteousness and for equality as, you know, sometimes it could threaten to lose you money, right? So there's a lot of, I know you'll disagree from impact from impacting investing standpoint, but that's the concern, right?”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. He was a partner at Excel. Okay. and hated being an institutional VC, had already been an angel investor, but really. I think loves mentoring entrepreneurs. And there is more of a tug about a VC, about who you're responsible to. When you're an angel or as we are, having no LPs, we are responsible to our own.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, I'd been working on all these issues and I continued to work with lots and lots of tech companies. And one thing that was true back at Lotus that's true to this day, people leave those kind of high growth successful startups and they sometimes they're lucky enough to have made some money and they go start their own companies. And so they would contact Mitch for certain kinds of tech advice. They'd contact me for certain kinds of people advice. So each of us had our network that went on continuously with startups. Mitch was an institutional VC for a moment. And didn't.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And did you feel like there was a, I mean, you wanted to be in Silicon Valley because you wanted, obviously you're part of the tech world, but you wanted to be, you feel like this was a place where these issues were not being talked about enough in general? Were you that intentional at the beginning about kind of, I want to make sure that the tech industry has this conversation, or was just something you sort of fell into?”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so first of all, Mitch and I didn't get together as a couple until 12 years after we met at Lotus. Got it. So we weren't in office romance. He was married to somebody else, and he's a smart guy, and he was not going to hit on as a married man and CEO. He was not going to hit on the woman who started the first group on sexual harassment in the U.S. There you go. Okay. There we go. So we remet when we were both single. 1996.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, some was being more outside the line and being able to work with a lot of different organizations. But it was also the person who followed Bitch in the CEO chair was nowhere near as committed. And that's a lesson that I think we try to talk to our K-port capital founders about. And I think VCs need to be talking to their founders and founders need to think about values when they're choosing their investors if they have a choice, which is that values alignment is critical.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Everything in the company that had changed because people wrote and said, hey, how about this? Or we have a problem with that, or we need guidance on this. So it was sort of the high growth company of the 80s and a really incredibly fun and exciting place to be. And I left to go start my own business. What was that? Why?”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group or the productivity or whatever. We had an anonymous and or confidential employee complaint problem solving mechanism way back when. And Mitch used to do an annual, it was called the grapevine, as in herd it through the grapevine. And we used to do an annual State of the Grapes report on everything in the company that had changed.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's certain elements of that that are now part of maybe an upward review of a performance review system, but actually living the values is really different than measuring things like the turnover in your.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End up Your husband there. I did meet Mitch there. Mitch was the founder. Yes. We used to meet on a weekly basis on what he called the pulse of employee morale. So there's all kinds of things that we did. For instance, in the mid 80s, we did employee surveys. Everybody does employee surveys now. We had employees rate their immediate manager and their senior manager who reported to Mitch on the degree to which they lived the company's values on a day-to-day basis. We'd roll those up and that informed part of their variable compensation. You didn't get your bonus if you didn't live the values. And you might have gotten something worse than that depending on what the degree was. I tell that story. And I've yet to run across anybody who uses the data from their employee surveys. In that way”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We named the group the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion, which I actually think is a more apt descriptor because harassment, we think about like street harassment. Coercion has the implicit dimension of a power difference. Got it. And so I think that it speaks to the workplace dynamic and distinguishes it from street harassment and other kinds of harassment that obviously still do have power dynamics of gender and many other kinds of power dynamics. But I think the coercion is the workplace piece most people don't understand.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an incredibly lonely place, and what's sad is that it's still a lonely place to be talking about sexual harassment in certain pockets of tech and in certain pockets of VC in particular. People didn't have a clue what it was about. It got all confused with what's consensual, what's not consensual. What's interesting is back then.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I co founded the first group on sexual harassment in the US in 1976 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I've been an activist of some sort or another my whole life. I used to cut junior high school. They can't take my degree away from me now, right? So I cut junior high school to go pick it for the farm workers. It was during the Caesar Chavez boycotts. I was an activist in high school. I was in a feminist consciousness raising group with a bunch of college women when I was in high school. I applied to two colleges. I'm a public school kid through and through. I applied to two colleges based on the strength of their political movements. Isn't that how everybody chooses college? So UC Berkeley and Madison, Wisconsin. So I have been focused on issues of social and racial justice forever. That's what I find most. Compelling”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The really sad thing is that in the mid 1980s, we did things at Lotus that still most tech companies aren't doing. So, you know, the whole industry and technology and everything has moved light years ahead, but the practices around people have moved at a glacial pace. And maybe glacial pace means climate change these days, so maybe that's quicker than it used to be.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I started in tech, and you're right, I'm probably older than, I started in tech before most of your listeners were born, right? So I started in tech at Lotus Development Corporation in 1984. And I had just finished my PhD and I had written a dissertation on... Yeah, I'd written a dissertation on sexual harassment. I'm trained as a researcher. My degree is social policy with a focus on employment policy. I had 20,000 research subjects in my dissertation, 10,000 men, 10,000 women. And Lotus aggressively recruited me. And the job description was make Lotus the most progressive employer in the US. And I thought, well, that's interesting.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't matter if it's a product, if it's an education product, or a fintech product or a healthcare product, what we're doing is backing businesses in that model that says we want to widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Not only am I not interested, I am worried about where that trend goes.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went public because we felt like we had tried many times in many ways and that that was just falling on completely unreceptive years and that it had reached a crisis point. At the end of the day, living our values is more important than making money.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listening to Rico Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network, I'm Teddy Schleiffer, finance editor here at Recode and today for Kara Swisher. Today in the red share is Frida Kapra Klein, the founder of Caper Capital and a co-chair of the Caper Center. She's also a founding team member at Project Include, which advises tech companies on how to be more diverse and inclusive. She and her husband, Mitch Caper, were seed stage investors in Uber, which you may have heard of. And when the company's culture was accused of fostering discrimination in 2017, Frida and Mitch did something very unusual. They publicly shared their objections to how then CEO Travis Kalinik was running things.”
2019-04-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Why tech is "flunking" the diversity test · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT