Does anyone in the room look like you?
When Solai Valliappan started attending startup investment events, people assumed she was there as a founder. At first, it was funny. Then it was tiresome. Then the penny dropped. Welcome to The Club.
“Women of colour are very conscious that when they’re being put into positions, they have further to fall. You always have to be more careful.”
Solai Valliappan is an angel investor, mentor, advisor and coach. And as such, she’s also a woman of colour in a space dominated by white men.
“I distinctly remember I went to an event — I was going as an investor — and someone stopped me and said: ‘This is the investor registration table, the founder registration table is over there’,” she recalls.
“This stuff happens all the time.”
Solai realised there was really nobody in the investor ecosystem that looked like her. So she took it upon herself to start making change; to dive head-first into angel investing, and to bring a little more diversity into Australian startups in terms of gender, race and attitude.
Because — as anyone who has spent any time with Solai will understand — what else could she possibly have done?
Brainy and precocious
Solai started her career as an actuary (someone who analyses the financial costs of risk, usually in the insurance industry).
In 2017, she left her secure, corporate job for a tiny startup. It was a decision that left her migrant parents a little baffled, but it was actually entirely on-brand.
In her own words, Solai was a “brainy, precocious child” — and her parents have always been supportive and trusting of her decisions.
They’ve never tried to talk her out of anything, mainly because “they know they can’t”, she laughs.
While working at the startup, Solai noticed all the investors coming through the door were men. She also started attending more industry funding events, and it wasn’t long before the cogs were turning.
“I realised I could do this,” she says.
“It matches my skill set of looking at numbers, looking at risk, and looking at information. You digest it all, and then you make a call,” she adds.
“So with the money I had set aside for my MBA, I started angel investing.”
For the past five years, Solai has been investing in, mentoring and coaching early-stage startups, as well as consulting for various accelerators and groups.
In January this year, she joined the women-focused angel network Scale Investors as a general partner.
Pattern un-matching
It’s not only that Solai has the skill set to be a great investor, she also realised that if people were making assumptions about her, they were making those same assumptions about founders, too.
“As someone who is highly qualified — and I think I can do anything as long as I put my mind to it — if I’m getting dismissed and questioned like this, imagine the founders and the position they’re in.”
The issues are cumulative, Solai says.
There are systemic challenges that mean women — and particularly women of colour — aren’t starting from the same starting line.
The gender pay gap means it takes women longer to save up to start a business; women are more likely to be carers to their children or ageing parents; they’re less likely to have the tech education to build their MVPs themselves; and migrants are less likely to have professional networks at their fingertips.
On top of all that, we see biases among investors that lead to what Solai calls ‘pattern matching’.
If you look at who is securing funding, they often have similar experiences or backgrounds; they know all the same people.
“There’s a very clear pattern,” she says.
“If we’re funding the same ideas, then where are new ideas going to germinate or generate from?”
It’s human nature to gravitate towards people you feel an affinity with, Solai notes. But when the people who control the money all share the same backgrounds and experiences, the distribution of funding becomes similarly skewed.
“How do we break that? How do we take a little bit more time to find something in common, where maybe on the surface it’s not there?”
Solai entered the investment arena with a plan to do things differently.
It’s not about being “warm and fluffy”, or even focusing on women founders or people of colour.
It’s about treating people with respect, and paying more attention to their work than to their background or presentation. It’s meeting them where they are, and not trying to fit them into any ‘bucket’.
“I wondered if I could give founders a different experience,” she says.
“Sometimes you need to spend a little bit of time with a founder. They may not present the same way.”
A playbook for others to follow
With all of that said, even Solai is just one woman. At Scale Investors, she’s one of four partners.
But Solai is all about collaboration over competition. To move the needle, she wants to see more women from diverse backgrounds investing, and more investment groups to support them.
To state the obvious, Solai won't be the right match for every woman of colour looking for funding. Not every founder story or world-changing solution will resonate.
“My lived experience will be different to other people’s, and I may assess things very differently.
“I personally don’t identify with the refugee experience, for example. I can empathise with it, but that was not my experience at all – nor was it anyone in my family’s.
“It’s those kinds of things where you can’t just bucket me in. There’s this wide spectrum.”
They say you can’t be what you can’t see. But in an ocean of white male investors, Solai’s visibility is conspicuous.
For better or worse, people care about what she’s doing. People are watching.
“Women of colour are very conscious that when they’re being put into positions, they have further to fall,” she says.
“That’s why I try not to do anything wild or outrageous. I know that if it’s picked up it will be amplified even more. You always have to be more careful.”
Solai says she isn’t exactly walking on eggshells, but her position as a ‘trailblazer’ and a ‘role model’ is an extra thing to think about; just another addition to the mental load.
The more women of colour there are in this space, the more that pressure will ease.
“I’m very conscious, and I try to be very thoughtful … I always consider things very carefully and cautiously anyway,” she explains.
“I’m just aware of the long shadow that I can cast from being in this kind of position,” she adds.
“What is the role modelling that I want to do for others? What is the playbook that others can follow?”
Did this story resonate? Leave a comment to let us know.
About Solai
Solai Valliappan is an actuary-turned-startup investor, who was backing climate tech before it was cool. She’s also the newest general partner at Scale Investors, an angel syndicate network investing in women-led, Australian startups.
Since entering startupland in 2017, Solai has been an active advisor, researcher, coach and mentor, looking at everything through a lens of data and risk analysis. Because once an actuary, always an actuary.
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