Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Bumble makes its first acquisition, Jill Biden’s signature legislation gets cut from Democrats’ agenda, and there are more women and people of color running VC and PE firms than ever before. Make the most of your Tuesday.
Today’s guest essay comes to us from Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan:
– New record. Reporting on the massively inequitable VC-backed startup ecosystem is all too often an exercise in grim percentages. So it’s a welcome change to have some good numbers to report: There are more women and people of color running venture capital and private equity funds than ever before.
In 2021, there were at least 627 U.S. PE and VC firms majority-owned by women and/or ethnic minorities, up 25% from a year earlier and an all-time high, according to a new annual report from Fairview Capital Partners. When the firm started publishing this data in 2014, Fairview found only about 100 investment firms that were majority-owned by underrepresented fund managers.
Of course, these investors only account for a single-digit sliver of total private equity raised last year. But as record amounts of money continue sloshing around the venture capital world, it’s promising to see more women and people of color in a position to share in the resulting wealth generated by billion-dollar IPOs and sales of VC-backed companies.
This “moment is going to be with us—and either you get on board, or get left behind,” JoAnn Price, cofounder and managing partner of Fairview, told me.
Price herself has played an influential role in getting others on board—for at least three decades—although she’s still somewhat of a hidden figure. A Black woman who launched Fairview in the early 1990s with cofounder Laurence C. Morse, Price now co-leads the second-largest Black-owned PE firm in the United States, according to Black Enterprise.
As a fund of funds, Fairview plays a more behind-the-scenes role in the industry than many VC and PE firms: It raises money from pension funds and other big, institutional investors, which it invests mostly in other VC and PE funds—including those run by newer and underrepresented managers, who might otherwise struggle to woo LPs of such scale.
The work has given Fairview a more muted reputation than that of its glamorous peers on Sand Hill Road. But several fund managers I spoke to last week argued that Price and her firm have more than earned their place in that VC pantheon.
“They’re the unsung heroes,” says Miriam Rivera, the former deputy general counsel at Google who’s now the CEO and cofounder of seed-stage tech fund Ulu Ventures, in which Fairview has invested. “Every person of color in the industry probably knows Fairview Capital.”
Read the full story here.
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
@mariaaspan
The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
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