Three simple rules to create a better, more equal venture capital fundraising process.
Join the Waitlist
Sunlight's Rules are designed to ensure that every startup, venture capital firm, founder and investor has an equal chance of success no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability identity, age or socio-economic status. They're based on extensive research, interviews and Sunlight's Investor and Founder survey data.
To better understand the driving force behind these rules and why we believe that they are necessary, please read The Diversity Problem.
To join Sunlight, all startups and venture capital firms must:
On Sunlight, there are no gatekeepers or barriers to entry for less-connected teams. As long as there is an investment criteria match, any startup can contact any venture capital firm (and vice versa).
Wait, Wait... Don't Leave Till We've Explained!
Wild guess: founders are loving this, VCs are freaking out?! If you're an investor, don't panic... not just anyone can pitch you.
To use Sunlight's Watchlist & Pitch features, you must have:
To see how this works in action, please check out our Startup and Investor guides to Sunlight.
Sadly, there's no quick fix to the diversity problem in venture capital. The good news, however, is that there is a collective desire from both startups and VCs to create a more egalitarian and diverse ecosystem.
Sunlight will embrace this collective desire for progress by asking startups and venture capital firms to make a bold gesture: to lead by example and publicly disclose diversity data on an ongoing basis, so that they can hold themselves accountable over time and help build a better, more equal future.
All diversity data will be benchmarked against data for your company's location and sector (if available). A New York-based startup should not be compared with one based in Helsinki, but instead with demographic data for the city and its local peers. Adjustments will also be made to account for the percentage of remote workers in your team and other factors.
Don't Worry How Your Data Looks!
It's not important what your data looks like now — we realise it will be extremely unflattering for the vast majority of you — what matters is how your data looks one, two, three years from now. The actions you take today will determine how our industry looks in the future, and we believe data and transparency will help us build a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
The Sunlight Diversity and Inclusion Pledge (DIP) is a commitment from all startups, venture capital firms, founders and investors to promote diversity, equity and inclusion measures at the organisations they lead, work for and invest in.
Think of it like Terms & Conditions, but instead of committing to give up your privacy you will be committing to create a more diverse and egalitarian VC-Startup ecosystem.
The Sunlight DIP will be written by a collective of founders, investors and organisations with a long track record of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in the technology industry.
Coming Soon...
To learn more about the Sunlight Diversity & Inclusion Pledge, recommend contributors and read the pledge on release, please visit our dedicated DIP page.
