Last July we decided to create a podcast that would highlight the phenomenal and diverse talent amongst the more junior ranks of the venture capital industry. We wanted to give everyone access to the stories of how they broke into the space, what they work on, and their tips on looking for a role. Too often these conversations are reserved for people who already have connections, but our podcast makes them available to anyone.

The lack of diversity in VC, and the wider tech ecosystem, is well known and there are a number of incredible initiatives reporting on and addressing the problem. We take inspiration from all of them, and were particularly energised by the findings of DiversityVC, which show an encouraging improvement in diversity amongst junior employees. This confirmed what we already knew from our networks; that there’d be a whole lot of fascinating, intelligent people to take part in our podcast and show listeners that folks from all walks of life can be investors.

That bit has proven 100% true - we’ve been lucky enough to have an array of people with powerful and varied experiences agree to be guests. We’ve produced three seasons so far and our fourth season’s guest list is already shaping up nicely! We’ve been astounded by the number of listeners and encouraging feedback from people all over the world - the podcast has truly exceeded our expectations.

But we’re failing in a crucial part of our mission.

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Our listenership statistics show that, in at least one way, we’re not attracting as diverse a set of listeners as we’d like; a sizeable 69% of our listeners are male. Funnily enough, it's the same gender split that the aforementioned Diversity in VC report found; "on average women represent 30% of the VC labour force" (DiversityVC analysis [2019]). We're so very grateful for the support of every single person who listens to the podcast, but we’re disappointed not to be attracting more women and non-binary folks, and are particularly conscious that there are other identifiers we can’t track. It means that, although we're producing the content to achieve our aim of broadening access to VC, we're not getting it to places where it can be most impactful.

We’re taking this seriously and are planning steps to get the info in our podcast to a more diverse audience, but we’d also value further input. If you have suggestions for us we’re entirely open to feedback - you can contact us on Twitter @associated_pod or via email at [email protected].

Thanks for all the support so far, and we'll see you soon for season 4!

The Associated Team x