An overview of Founders Factory initiatives

Beyond tracking our hiring and investment data, we’ve launched and continued running a number of initiatives and work streams across the organisation with the explicit goal of driving diversity, equity, and inclusion. These include:

Global working taskforce

We’re at an exciting point of expansion at Founders Factory. With new vehicles launched already in Germany and Southeast Asia, and new partnerships impending in other regions, our once-London focused team is now increasingly distributed. This is hugely important from a talent perspective: we’re no longer bound by hiring geographically, and instead can source from a much wider, more diverse pool of talent who bring novel experiences and backgrounds to the table.

We’re already enabling this new form of work through certain hybrid working policies:

• Employees can work remotely for up to three days a week (unless in pre-agreed circumstances or when roles are specifically outside the UK)

• Employees are entitled to work up to five weeks abroad 

• In certain circumstances, employees can request “digital nomad remote working”, to be based abroad for longer periods. This is currently under experimentation—so watch this space! 

At the same time, we’re aware of the challenges that come with a globally distributed team. That’s why we launched our Global Working Task Force—an employee-led initiative to ‘identify and implement best practices for creating an inclusive and empowering work environment for everyone, regardless of geography & timezone’.

Key outcomes of the task force so far include:

• Implementing the aforementioned extended working from abroad policy

• Creating hybrid meeting and event etiquette

• Experimenting with new tools and services (such as Gather)

Employee board

This year saw the launch of our Employee Board, comprised of individuals across different functions of the team who would act as cultural ambassadors for the organisation. The aim is twofold:

• To collect feedback from the team more regularly about people initiatives that we were rolling out for the team

• To empower the board to play a bigger role in our culture. We wanted to encourage the idea across the team that we’re building the FF culture together. 

The hope is that as a collective, we could drive more meaningful cultural change across the business. The board aims to meet monthly, usually in a hybrid format. Key discussion topics so far have included progression, employee-led initiatives, cultures of sharing, and team integration.

Multiverse partnership

We launched a partnership with edtech unicorn Multiverse. By helping our corporate partners allocate their apprenticeship levy (which as companies of a certain size, they’re obliged to contribute to), we’re helping provide fully-funded professional development opportunities to startups from our portfolio. 

For one, this is helping close the digital skills gap that is currently the source of billions of dollars in lost revenue around the world. Equally, we’re hoping to drive diversity in tech by providing these fully-funded opportunities to those who wouldn’t ordinarily have access to them.

We’re also offering this same opportunity to our Operations Team, launching four different programs for employees to upskill across topics including data literacy and project management. 

Power To Underrepresented Founders 

Ed Kandel and Michelle Wilk on our investment team continued their series of Power To Underrepresented Founders initiatives, with two editions held this year (four in total), focusing on supporting Black and LGBTQ+ founders. These events have resulted in over 500 meetings held between founders and VCs, and three term sheets issued so far.

On top of access to funding, all founders who applied to each edition received access to FF’s team of expert operators via a series of intimate masterclasses. This is a key differentiator to other events, recognising that supporting founders should start much earlier than at the point of fundraising—with support on marketing, product, data science, and commercial partnerships.

Going forward, we’re considering new formats for this initiative that can create opportunities for founders. Stay tuned for something in the new year…

Women Who Build—we launched this new community in partnership with firstminute capital, to bring together ambitious technical leaders and founders. Our first event was held in May, a panel featuring Livia van Strydonck (Chief Product Architect at Lendable), Catherine Nisson (co-founder of Renude), Cecilia De Conto (Lead Engineer/Venture CTO at BCG Digital Ventures), and Cat Jones (founder/CEO of Byway), hosted by Lynn Anderson Clark (CEO & co-founder of The Know)

Other:

• Introduction of quarterly updates—this gives employees across the company a chance to highlight what they’ve been working on over the past quarter, helping foster inclusion at all levels. This comes on top of a rotating topics format in our weekly meetings, where one team takes over the meeting to present a deep dive  

• International Women's Day lunch—to mark IWD, we hosted a roundtable with our CEO Henry Lane Fox with all employees who identify as women. This gave employees a chance to speak to their experiences as women in the organisation, and voice any concerns and challenges they faced. Actions from this were subsequently shared with the whole company.

• Gender neutral family leave policy—we continue to offer a gender neutral family leave policy, offering leave to primary and secondary caregivers, a shared parental leave policy, as well as policies for surrogacy and adoption. We’ve also codified return to work practices.

• Religious holiday leave—all employees are encouraged to take leave around religious holidays that aren’t covered by UK bank holidays

• Playfair’s Female Founder Office Hours—our Investment Team continues to take part in Playfair’s Female Founder Office Hours, providing female founders with support with pitching, funding and access to investors, no warm introductions needed

• Slack status update –we’ve introduced a new status update on Slack for those days any employee’s not feeling 100%—whether it be mental health, period pains, grief, or other reasons—allowing other team members to be conscious and sensitive to their situation

DEI Lunch & Learns

• Q1: How to build an inclusive culture

  
  
  (Intro to D&I, The business and moral case, The role of bias)

• Q2: The influence of unconscious bias

  
  
  (Defining bias, Understanding bias, Mitigating bias

• Q3: Creating fairness at work

  
  
  (Psychological safety, inappropriate behaviour in the workplace (harassment and bullying), How to tackle inappropriate behaviour)

These 60 min sessions will be hybrid, and are designed to raise awareness and equip our team with everyday tools to help mitigate bias and contribute towards an inclusive culture. We'll also be uploading the slides and follow-up material to Notion for anyone not able to attend in person.