The Current and Future State of a Diverse Workforce

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Andrea Palten: Today we’re talking to Vanessa Liu about the importance of having a diverse workplace. Now you’re going to hand to Vanessa. I could not write down all the things that she’s doing so I’m just going to summarize it. She’s an entrepreneur. She serves on multiple boards, she’s an investor, she’s an advisor, she’s an executive and there’s actually a lot more plus she’s a mother of two. Vanessa, you sure wear a lot of hats, can you tell us a little bit about what you’re currently doing.

Vanessa Liu: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, I am actually now back to business building so in the course of my career I’ve always ebbed and flowed between advising companies and then building them and now I’m back into the cycle where I’m building companies again. I just most recently stepped down off a post that I had at SAP running. SAPs early-stage accelerators in North America so that I can found businesses in what I’m calling silver tech, so technology to help older adults, I think it’s a space that is incredibly important and significant, especially in these coming years with changing demographics and also the potential for impact on a societal level is huge and so I’m really excited about diving in there and building businesses to serve adults who are older, with technology that could help them age in place.

Andrea Palten: Wow, that’s so amazing I love it. Yeah, my mom just learned how to use the iPhone about four years ago.

Vanessa Liu: I’m sure she’s pro at it now too.

Andrea Palten: Oh, I know and she’s very proud. She’s the only one of her age group that is doing coffee and she’s the only one texting while everybody else is like woo, look at her she’s texting. I love that you’re doing that. Before you got into helping seniors in tech you’ve always been in the diversity space, one way or another. Can you tell us a little bit about your history, and how did it all begin to work to help with diverse workforces and organizations?

Vanessa Liu: It was more something that crept up on me over time. So, when I first started my career, I was in management consulting. That’s not necessarily known for being diverse. In fact, I started at McKinsey’s Amsterdam office where only 10% of the consultants were women. I remember going in there and I was already an oddball because I’m Chinese American and going in there, I was a Chinese American woman and so I was just very, very odd on multiple dimensions. I remember being in the first project with other women on the team as well, and I just thought wow, this is such a great experience, it’s so different. But for the first 10 years of my career when I was at McKinsey it was just something I just realized that was just very much nothing normal to have other women and also diverse women around me, but it was also a place where at least I felt that I was being recognized for the work that I did.

So, I just felt that, as long as I did great work, and I was able to just work my way up and become senior that it was fine. Fast forward to after I left McKinsey and I joined up with a business partner and we launched a venture startup studio. I remember when he was the one who raised most of our funds and he showed me the list of 57 investors and I went to him and said, did you realize that only three of the 57 investors are women. He had not thought about it at all. It was just shocking to me just in terms of the disparity and not just that. When it came to companies pitching us, even though we were starting our own businesses, we always had entrepreneurs coming to us. I noticed that I had a lot of women and diverse entrepreneurs, like people of color coming to me asking for advice seeing if we could help them with fundraising. It was just such a stark difference and that was really what opened up my eyes. I just felt like I just can’t just sit by the sidelines and think if I just do a good job with this, this will be fine. This is something I had to play an active role in, in just changing the landscape. We all know the disparity when it comes to startups being founded by women and diverse entrepreneurs being underfunded. We know that when it comes to those companies that do succeed, how many of them are also not underrepresented.

So, this was something that became almost an obsession of mine. So, during the course of my time at Trigger Media, I just thought the next stage of my career I wanted to 100% focus on that. So, luckily enough I got recruited by SAP to run our early-stage accelerators in New York and San Francisco. There was this deep commitment to diversity and actually, we came up with the mandate where at least 40% of the companies we funded or accelerated were run by women and people of color. I’m proud to say that over the 12 cohorts I ran and over 87 startups that we worked with almost 80% of the companies that we worked with were founded by women or diverse founders. It’s something I’m incredibly proud of because what’s interesting is that our customers didn’t realize that that was our mandate. They just thought oh, these are all great companies. I pointed out to them like you know what we made it a point so that you can see all these different types of startups that we are working with are, number one quality companies and number two guess what they’re led by women and people of color. They were just like this is so great, this is so impactful

This is very different from other companies that we work with where we see almost a homogeneous type of founder coming to us. It’s really just about the access to networks that you are providing and being able to make sure that you provide an avenue for these founders to come to you. It’s not a pipeline issue it’s an access issue. So, this is something that I’ve been so proud of, and you know in the next phase of my career, I feel like I’m tackling the last bastion of accepted discrimination which is ageism. I think it’s so accepted in society that once you reach a certain age, you’re considered no longer useful which I think is just horrible and also not just that it’s just bad for society. If you are basically asking people who have years and years and years of knowledge to step down, you lose that. You lose that type of institutional knowledge and the experience and not just that. There’s going to be a labor shortage, looking at the demographic trends that we have not just here in the US but around the world. So, I feel like now it’s time to tackle that last bastion of discrimination which is why I’m really focused on older adults.

Andrea Palten: I love the shift and you said earlier that you’re really proud of your work as you should be I love that you said that. I want to go back to some of the work that you did where you had all these female founders. Did you stay in touch with any of them? Because my curiosity is with the female founders of startups versus the male founders were there any trends that you saw after three years, after five years, after 10 years. Were there any different successes and either type of business with whoever ran the actual organization?

Vanessa Liu: Well, I think, like, for me… So, the founders that I just worked with over the last three and a half years at SAP I keep in touch with a lot of them. Actually, in fact, last week. Someone was asking me if any of the founders that I knew were interested in some type of program, a pro bono program that a consulting company was providing. I said yes, I pinged a bunch of the founders that I know. So, once I work with a company it’s a relationship, it’s a friendship, it’s something that I want to hold on to for a time. What I’ve noticed over the years I think it’s less so male versus female like men versus women more if you are underrepresented, because I do also put in people like black entrepreneurs into that group as well. If you don’t have the access, usually what happens is that you don’t raise as much money, you are just like heads down so much more trying to get the business off the ground when other people can get that money and scale incredibly easily.

There’s a really big difference when it comes to the ability to grow and the ability to focus strategically on those big moves that could help you grow. So, that is what I found more than anything. I think that you almost get used to just trying to work really hard to make things work rather than some of the other founders that I do know who is extremely well connected, and you know happened to be the type of entrepreneurs that are the Silicon Valley type. They raise money at the drop of a hat. They can just keep on doing that, again and again, and again. People just flock to them because they have the right network. So, I see that it’s really a difference when it comes to access, a difference in also how you manage these types of relationships so that they can bear the fruit that you’re looking for.

Andrea Palten: Yeah, yeah for sure. So, why is it so important to have diverse staff? So, we’re not talking about founders now. Let’s go over a little bit about employees. So, as we know, DEI, diversity equity, and inclusion have become mainstream now while five years and long ago people didn’t really know what that was. So, why is it so important to have organizations that are inclusive?

Vanessa Liu: So, I always tried to break it down to examples of what happens if you don’t have a diverse organization. So, there’s this one startup that I worked with called Atipica a few years ago where they had an AI technology that could help people screen resumes so that they could have more diverse staff in their companies. They told me that one of their customers was Netflix and think about Netflix. Think about the content that they go out and generate or they acquire and think about the types of customers if they have. If they were only represented, you know with one type of person. one type of ethnicity, you wouldn’t have that richness of content that people are looking for. That was a very concrete example where Netflix as a company that said we have to have a diverse workforce so that we can truly represent our customer base and serve them the best way possible with the type of content that’s really going to pique their minds.

So, that’s very much purpose-driven because the business needs to have that diversity That’s one example. You have also other examples of the importance of having different perspectives when it comes to creating the content at hand. So, I mention AI again, so I happen to just sit on the board of a company called Appen and so it’s an Australian company that provides training data to many companies out there, many of the large tech-based companies that you could think of. They provide the training data so that they could train their AI models. There are companies that, for instance, are trying to make sure that you can use computer vision to scan, for instance, your skin tone. If you don’t have an engineering team that is thinking in that way guess what?

There have been instances where there’s a technology created where yes, they recognize a hand that is from somebody who is Caucasian, but if you have suddenly basically a skin tone that is darker it’s not even recognized. So, that’s the danger of what happens when you are in an organization. They don’t even think of it. It’s not that there is the intent to overlook, it’s just that it’s, not even in the solution space. So, that is something where I feel again and again as we are becoming more and more dependent on technology, we have to think about basically everybody that is out there in terms of the work that we do. This is on an enterprise-level; this is on a consumer level and also to be able to surface the best ideas possible.

Andrea Palten: Yeah, yeah, I love that example that you gave, and then if you don’t have people who are actually thinking about it, the different skin tones for that type of technology it’s also you don’t have testers. You don’t have a Q&A team that is a diverse team that would even you know see that it doesn’t work. So, such a great example. So, obviously, when we talk about diversity in the workplace there are just so many ways to look at this. We have race, we have ethnicity, age, citizen status, education, income, skills, beliefs, physical abilities, upbringing and so much more.

Vanessa Liu: Yeah, neurodiversity.

Andrea Palten: How do organizations prioritize? What should companies do to prioritize to not leave any of these folks behind?

Vanessa Liu: You know it’s so interesting to see how companies have been prioritizing at least the ones that I work with. It’s almost like gender comes up first and then next comes racial diversity and then next comes areas such as disabilities and so it’s almost like a spectrum. It’s almost like a lot of organizations can only handle one type of diversity, at a time, which, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they’re just trying to wrap their hands and arms around what does this all mean and what do you do and the processes that you need to have, I think companies need to take a step back and think about well what type of company, do we want to build at the get-go that would really just make us attract the best people basically for the types of work that we do and if you look at that and in terms of the skills that you need. So, for instance, let’s go to neurodiversity because that’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time too. You think about people who need to, for instance, tag images. It’s a very specific process where you do it again and again, again. You have to be very accurate.

Guess what? A lot of people are not good at it and there’s this one company that I worked with called Divergent and they actually work with people who are neurodiverse. The test that they give is that you have to go to this page on MLB from 1982 and find the person who batted the third-most home runs in that year and do it within 30 seconds. It was so interesting to see how basically people that they hired who are neurodiverse were able to get it just like that and basically people who aren’t, it took them about five minutes to be able to figure that out. So, think about the type of work that you do. Think about what would be the best type of person in there and then recruit accordingly and cast a wide net and you will realize that actually for different types of roles, you need differently skilled people and so diversity doesn’t also come in all of the labels that you mentioned, it also comes in the skill level as well.

Andrea Palten: Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah, neurodiversity it’s definitely something we’re talking about more and more too and we’re going to have some actual podcast episodes just neurodiversity because it’s so important and it’s such an important topic right now. So, I ask you something. This is probably more your personal opinion. What do companies, what should they do when huge events and tragic events happen, like the George Floyd murder, the Asian hate that crept up so horribly fast during COVID especially at the start of it? How do organizations and companies, how should they deal with it, how should they respond to something like that, or should they?

Vanessa Liu: I actually think they absolutely should respond to it. By responding to it, I mean having an open dialogue within the company recognizing that this has happened, recognizing that there are many people in the company who might be upset by it. Also, for those that aren’t to be able to show them actually this is something that you should care about. I could tell you companies that that that I worked with even on the startup level. I remember during all of last year, they decided actually as a result of this, it was just so upsetting. George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel’s back because unfortunately, this type of police brutality and discrimination has been happening for decades, decades, decades, decades. But this is because it was caught on camera because it was so visceral because there was just no doubt in terms of what had happened. That it was just so upsetting that a lot of the startups that I worked with actually had town halls and open houses.

It was very interesting to see how nimble they were versus larger companies which took them a little bit to decide should we do something, should we not. Oh, we see that for instance, Nike is putting out something so maybe we should do something too. I always feel like this is about being human, this is about making sure that you are checking in and checking in with your team, I could tell you when the Atlanta shootings happened in the beauty parlors a few months ago, where the eight people were killed, who are primarily Asian women how upsetting it was. You know what to be in a place where it was acknowledged, where you can talk about it, where you can share your experiences too it was extremely important.

I actually didn’t realize the weight of that type of tragedy that was like weighing on my shoulders and also the years of discrimination that I personally felt, and my family had felt over the years in a time when I was a child and people were telling us to go back to China to when I was in a business suit and. People were screaming at me down the street, to go back to China also or just saying things, making sounds like ching-chang-chung thinking that that is Chinese and laughing about it. You don’t realize just how hurtful those things are until there are sometimes these moments which kind of open up a whole flood of emotions. For companies to really take care of the mental health of their employees, to check in on them, it is incredibly important to play an active role in number one recognizing it. That’s the first step, but I think the second step is then to think about what do we do about it? What does this mean within our organization? Do we have the right people represented?

Are we actually promoting not just diversity but also inclusion? Inclusion and belonging are even harder than saying we want to bring people who are diverse because once you bring in people do, they feel like they can be in a place where they can truly be themselves. There’s a lot of work to be done around this and so that’s why I think if companies want to be workplaces that are going to continue to attract and retain and also excite the best people out there you have to create this type of environment. Look the average number of careers that people have nowadays is 11 to 12. It’s very easy to lose these people, so I think it’s incredibly important to play an active role and thinking about diversity on the whole, and inclusion.

Andrea Palten: Yeah. So, what do you think is the biggest challenge for companies when they’re trying to, or maybe they’re just getting started with creating a diverse and inclusive culture? What are the top me one, two, or three challenges that you see for these companies?

Vanessa Liu: I think the top two challenges I see is one is yes, it’s one thing to have a vision, but how do you go after it. How do you set the goals and determine that? I actually think a lot of companies struggle with that. They don’t know what the goal should be, and this is where I’m so excited to be a part of the Talking Talent team now because I think that. organizations like Talking Talent can help clarify that. But the second thing is then what are the action steps that you need to take, and how do you measure that? So, being very specific about what it is that you need to do and to do it in a measurable way.

That’s also something that is very tough because it’s one thing to say, for instance, yes, we want to recruit more people who are diverse but is that enough. What does that mean? At what level? Where do you go and do that? How do you make sure that your pipeline is going to be representative? Because if you’ve been fishing in one area, but you haven’t been able to get those results is it a matter of finding other fishing ponds, broadening that out? Do you use technology to help you? That type of action steps and clarifying that and measuring it because I think that if you can’t measure it then you can’t really show your results. So, I think that’s the second part, that is incredibly important, and then that a lot of companies struggle with.

Andrea Palten: Now, when you were saying you’ve only been fishing in one part, and you should go the other pond that reminded me of what happened in Silicon Valley with all the developers. All male developers and then I started fishing in the female pond and started getting women developers, but they did not stay. They could not retain them so that’s the other important thing is how do you keep people that are diverse or are minority coming in and how do you keep them and make sure that you retain them. What do you think about that? What is the best practice for that?

Vanessa Liu: I think that it goes back to again inclusion and belonging and how do you create that type of environment. It’s not just a question of saying like hey we’ll just bring more people and then it’s fine. It’s also about being able to have the type of dialogue in the companies, to be able to set the culture that you want. One of the companies that have worked with is a startup called Narrative. They are best practice at showing and talking about how we’re trying to be inclusive, and they have at the get-go. Part of the training when you are onboarding. is about the values that the company has and also has to have. Every other Friday, they have some type of diversity inclusion training and I think that that is incredibly important.

So, that’s how they’re doing it. I think a lot of other companies are still trying to figure that out. I think larger organizations typically are having a little bit of a tougher time. They’re like how we do that because our organizations are so large and thinking about the retention elements is something really important. Typically, what happens is that they realize like wait a second there’s been a slew of departures. Is something going on that we need to think about? Unfortunately, that’s usually a little bit late but it’s still something that you can correct, but you have to do it usually with outside help.

Andrea Palten: Yeah. Yeah. I want to end with talking about the future of diversity in the workplace. So, I’ve been reading statistics about the US that in no time at all we will have an extremely diverse nation. Our predictions are saying by 2065 that we will not have any single ethnic or racial majority anymore. So, what does that mean for us that we’re working on diversity right now? Do you think there’ll be new diversity to tackle? Do you think that over time, this naturally evens out? What is your thought about the future of diversity in the workplace?

Vanessa Liu: Gosh! You know thinking about human nature especially over the last few years. I think we are species that no matter what, if you are different in some way, there will always be something. There will always be people who look at you differently and potentially not accept you. It might not be how you look on the outside in the future, but it could also be what you think. We’re seeing a lot of that now in the United States. It is a very polarized society, and it is about well, what are your thoughts and your beliefs and how do you drive towards that. I think that it’s going to be a lot more nuanced in the future. How do you preserve the diversity of thought? How can you celebrate those types of differences?

How can you do that in a way so that you can hear different voices? Because it’s not going to be about unnecessarily who has the majority, but it might be about who has the strongest argument, but then that comes in many different flavors. I think we’re seeing a lot of that type today and I actually think it’s going to be that much harder down the road, as it is now to foster those types of discussions, especially in a society where we’re not truly valuing listening to one another. So, I think that it’s going to be a tough road going forward, and I actually think that this is why we need to really, really flex those muscles in how you harness differences because we’re going to so need it as a society.

Andrea Palten: Yeah, setting ourselves up for a better future. I love that. Well, thank you Vanessa so much, I really appreciate your time. We love hearing from you so we’re going to invite you back hopefully for another episode soon.

Vanessa Liu: Thank you so much for having me, Andrea.