A $30 million fund launched to bolster start-ups led by founders of Asian descent

Having impacted Hollywood since it was founded four years ago, Gold House is turning its attention to Silicon Valley.

Gold House, the premier collective of Asian and Pacific Islander leaders, launched  its $30 million fund — Gold House Ventures — to deliver market-first social impact in corner offices. 

"Gold House was forged to rewrite a history that's been handed to us. It's time to ensure that what we believe is who we can become — not just for the API community but for all communities through equitable hiring, multicultural consumer engagement, and collective economic success," said Bing Chen, President of Gold House and General Partner of Gold House Ventures.

The fund invests in founders of API descent; corrals capital through its preeminent investor network; delivers industry-focused accelerators; provides extensive marketing and talent recruitment support; and contributes 100% of management fees and profits back to Gold House to further the nonprofit's history-making work.

Asians are among the least likely demographic to be promoted to management. In technology, Asians account for ~30% of the total workforce but are less than 14% of executive ranks and single digits in the C-Suite and boards. However, an estimated 16% of the top companies founded in the last decade have at least one API founder (despite being 7% of the nation's population) while nearly 42% of last year's Forbes Midas list was API — underscoring an opportunity to remove the ceiling by founding companies.

RELATED: 

• AAPI hit a bamboo ceiling in Silicon Valley
• AAPI women challenge culture of Silicon Valley
• Asian immigrants transforming Silicon valley

Gold House Ventures invests across industries and stages — always in lockstep with world-class investors. Investing partners include Accel, Alley Corp, Bain Capital, Basis Set, Bling Capital, CircleUp, Coatue, Decibel, Eniac, Floodgate, General Catalyst, GGV, Goodwater, Graph Ventures, Imaginary Ventures, Juxtapose, Lightspeed, Maveron, Mayfield, NEA, Northzone, Tribe, Trinity, Upfront, Wing VC, and Xfund.

"Many iconic companies are founded and run by API entrepreneurs. We want to back the next generation of great API founders and shine a spotlight on their success to inspire more to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams," said Eric Feng, GP of Gold House Ventures and former GP at Kleiner Perkins.

Gold House Ventures' investors include C-suite executives of major corporations; successful API founders (Binance Labs, YouTube, Twitch, DoorDash, Credit Karma, Zuora, Zola, FiscalNote, Honey, GOAT, and more); and cultural leaders with business success such as lifestyle icons Eva Chen, Michelle Phan, Padma Lakshmi, and Prabal Gurung; Grammy-winning musicians Anderson .Paak, Agnez Mo, Dumbfoundead, and Transparent Arts; artists Bowen Yang, Daniel Dae Kim, Gemma Chan, and Ronny Chieng.

Gold House has a long history of supporting diverse entrepreneurs through the leading API founder network, marketing benefits via extensive media and entertainment partnerships, and accelerators like Gold Rush (the preeminent API founder accelerator), — whose new, biannual class also debuts today.

"Since Gold Rush launched three years ago, alums have raised over $370 million in follow-on funding, with women representing over half of our participants and the ethnic diversity of each cohort reflecting API representation in the U.S.," said Megan Ruan, GP of Gold House Ventures.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AAPI perspective, follow @DioknoEd on Twitter.

WTF?*: Poll says most believe Asian Americans don't face discrimination

By Louis Chan

ASAM NEWS
A new poll out finds while a significant number of people acknowledge discrimination against Asian Americans, more people feel Whites face more discrimination than Asian Americans.

The Hill-HarrisX Poll released late last week found 13 percent of registered voters poll feel Whites face lots of discrimination, but only nine percent feel the same way about Asian Americans.

The result does not surprise Janelle Wong, a researcher in both Asian American Studies and American Studies at the University of Maryland.

“The dominant stereotype of Asian Americans is that they are high-achieving and face few economic barriers.,” she said to AsAmNews. This idea of Asian Americans as a uniformly successful “Model Minority” is so tenacious, that even some Asian Americans themselves have internalized the idea.”

The Hill-Harris survey of 1,000 registered voters does recognize that Asian American do face discrimination.

About 40 percent believe Asian American face some or a lot of discrimination. 31 percent believe the same thing about Whites.

Wong says the discrimination faced by some Asian American groups has been masked.

“People tend to lump all Asian Americans together,” said Wong, demonstrating the importance of disaggregate data to distinguish between the various ethnic and nationality groups.

Wong’s research with her colleagues at AAPI Data released in 2017 found Asian Americans report a higher level of discrimination than some might assume. Nearly two out of ten Filipino Americans say they’ve been denied a promotion because of their race. 17 percent of Indian Americans say they have been unfairly denied a promotion.

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Study: Bamboo ceiling at work is real for Asian Americans

ASAM NEWS

Despite high achievement in education, Asian Americans are no more likely to advance to management or professional jobs, found a new study published in Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The Business Standard reports the study of 60,000 households found Asian Americans are less likely to secure top tiered jobs than Whites with similar qualifications. Second generation Chinese graduates are the exception to that and are one-and-a-half times more likely than Whites to be in a management job.

The study focused on the five biggest Asian groups in the United States-
Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Koreans. All are more likely to have graduated from college than Whites.

“To be clear, Asians are not under-represented in the managerial and professional occupations—three quarters of second-generation Chinese and Indians report being in a managerial and professional occupation,” said Van Tran, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, said to Phys.org. 

“However, second-generation Asians are significantly under-represented in senior-level leadership positions, considering how well-credentialed they are, even after accounting for many demographic factors.”

The study’s authors believe that stereotypes play a role in hurting the career opportunities for Asian Americans.

“The same stereotypes that help Asians succeed in the educational domain (i.e. being smart, competent and hardworking) may actually hurt them in the labor market, where Asian Americans are sometimes perceived to be less vocal, less assertive, lacking in social skills and leadership potential,” says Professor Jennifer Lee to Phys.org.

“Asian American professionals are also often excluded from the informal power networks in the workplace, which sometimes matter more than competency when it comes to being promoted into the leadership ranks,” said Lee.

The lack of role models and mentors may also play a factor.

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Study: Asian Americans are the least likely to be promoted

Asian Americans often encounter a 'bamboo ceiling" that prevents them from advancing into board rooms.

ASAM NEWS

THOUGH ASIAN AMERICANS make up a larger proportion of the professional workforce than the demographic’s overall population share, it seems their odds of climbing the ladder are slimmest.

A recent op-ed in Harvard Business Review analyzed national workforce data to show that white professionals are twice as likely to be promoted into manager roles than Asian American colleagues. Asian employees were the least likely to be promoted out of any race, including blacks and Latinos.

Researchers have spotted this trend in a number of private industries, including technology, accounting and corporate law.

The public sector might also play a role. In 2016, Asian Americans made up nearly 10 percent of all federal professionals but only 4.4 percent of workers at the highest level.

RELATED: Silicon Valley Asian American workers bump into a 'bamboo ceiling'

The op-ed authors, Buck Gee and Denise Peck, recommended three key steps for corporations to fix the “Asian glass ceiling:”

1. Be data-driven in looking at retention and promotion rates of Asian Americans, including both race and gender, to identify specific barriers to progression.
2. Encourage CEOs and C-suite executives to visibly and proactively show their support for the advancement of minorities by shifting priorities and budgets to fund new programs.
3. Institutionalize the importance of diverse leadership, including Asian Americans, in the company’s leadership development process.

Gee is a former Silicon Valley executive and Peck is a former executive at Cisco and Sun Microsystems.

“Asian Americans are the forgotten minority in the glass ceiling conversation,” they wrote. 

The study reinforces earlier studies that showed the existence of a "bamboo ceiling" in American corporations that keeps AAPI workers from advancing beyond middle management.

"AAPIs make up almost 6% of the U.S. population, but they hold a meager 2.6% of the Fortune 500 board seats, according to Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics," wrote Rep. Grace Meng, D-NY, in an oped for The Hill.

"Astonishingly, 77.2% of Fortune 500 companies have no AAPI board representation whatsoever," Meng cites. "Even in industries where AAPIs are highly represented, like in Silicon Valley technology companies, they comprise a disproportionately small percentage of leadership. Ascend Foundation reports that AAPIs account for 27.2% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but only 13.9% of the executive and board positions. Corporations bear a responsibility for addressing this disparity and cultivating a pipeline to leadership that allows AAPIs to succeed."

Views From the Edge contributed to this report.

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Silicon Valley: Race trumps gender; Asians bump into bamboo ceiling

Asians find it difficult to move into leadership positions in Silicon Valley.

A NEW REPORT concludes that Silicon Valley high tech companies have a long way to go to reflect the workforce of the San Francisco Bay area, one of the most diverse regions in the country and Asians consistently bump up against the proverbial bamboo ceiling.

Although a large percentage of Silicon Valley workers are Asian, they are the least likely to be promoted to managerial or executive positions, in spite of being the largest minority group of professionals and the most likely to be hired.

The Illusion of Asian Success, a new report from the Ascend Foundation, a nonprofit Pan-Asian career lifecycle organization, spotlights the evolving challenges for Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and minority women in climbing the professional ladder to success.

While the Bay Area is home to one of the most diverse populations in the U.S., researchers found that diversity in technology leadership roles has generally stagnated over the last decade. 

RELATED: The Old Boys Club still rules Silicon Valley

The Ascend study finds that "it was clear that that efforts to promote more Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics have made no meaningful impact to the minority glass ceiling," said Buck Gee, a former vice president and general manager at Cisco Systems who is an Ascend executive advisor and a study co-author. "That said, we saw progress made by white women, so we know tech companies can change. Now it's time to do the same for minority men and women."

Other key findings in The Illusion of Asian Success:

• Race is an increasingly more significant impediment than gender to climbing the management ladder, with Asian women and Hispanic women most affected.
• Asians are the least likely to be promoted to managerial or executive positions, in spite of being the largest minority group of professionals and the most likely to be hired. In particular, Asian women are the least represented group as executives, at 66% underrepresentation.
• White men and women are twice as likely as Asians to become executives and hold almost three times the number of executive jobs.
• Even though white women are now substantially more successful in reaching the executive level than ALL minority men or women, white men are still 47% more likely than white women to be executives.
• Both Blacks and Hispanics have declined in their percentage share of the professional workforce despite efforts to hire more underrepresented minorities.

Co-author and Ascend executive advisor Denise Peck, a former vice president at Cisco, stated, "Minority women continue to bump against a double-paned glass ceiling. The data show that a general focus on developing women leaders has not addressed the distinct challenges for Asian, Black, or Hispanic women. This has been an unspoken truth in the minority community, and we hope that our report opens a long overdue dialogue. We encourage all companies to take a hard look at their minority pipeline and ask how they can do better."

READ: The Illusion of Asian Success

It’s part of a larger problem with diversity programs, said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity solutions firm in Oakland.

“Because they are not thinking of women of color, they are not addressing the problems they face,” she said. “Disproportionately, the beneficiaries of these initiatives tend to be white women.”

Among the authors' recommended solutions are:

• Company programs to attract and retain talent should focus on black, Hispanic, and white women. Special emphasis should be given to retaining black women.
• Company programs to develop and promote leaders should focus on both men and women in the black, Hispanic, and Asian workforce. Special emphasis should focus on Hispanic and Asian women.
• Having previously analyzed national EEO-1 reports from 2014, 2015, and 2016 made public by individual Bay Area technology companies, we determined that our analysis of pipeline diversity at the Bay Area aggregated technology sector level in this report is entirely consistent with what we saw at individual company levels. The consistency, along with the scant progress for women and minorities in the Bay Area sector, suggests that the diversity challenge is a region-wide sector problem that should be addressed by the leading companies working collectively rather than each technology company working individually.
• The need for a collective effort has recently been recognized at the national level with the recent announcement of Fortune 500 CEO-led alliance “CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion” as a forum for sharing best practices. Many in the Bay Area have already joined the alliance, including CEOs from Adobe, AMD, HPE, Cisco, Netapp, and Salesforce. But as the next step, our clarion call is for the leading technology companies to join together in a cooperative effort to aggregate and analyze their internal data by race and gender; proactively enlist their minority leadership and employee community involvement; and develop joint and individual metrics to bend the curve in the Bay Area’s ability to attract, retain, and promote talented women and minorities. 

"In spite of companies investing in their recruiting and hiring of Asians, Blacks and Hispanics, advancement to senior corporate ranks and corporate boards is still highly limited," said Anna Mok, executive vice president and national board member of Ascend. "To make the systemic changes that positively impact and advance results, CEOs, their executive teams, and corporate boards need to actively lead change and drive solutions."

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