![]() “But what I’m most excited about Derrick as a founder/CEO, is not what he’s building, but how he’s building it. “I saw that this could be a very large company worth billions and billions of dollars,” Fuller said. When Fuller and others learned he was serious, they referred more Black job candidates to Bevy. He got help from Black investors like Kobie Fuller, general partner at Upfront and founder of Valence. ![]() Getting investors on boardĪndersen didn’t do it alone. Half of Andersen’s direct reports are women. Andersen said his goal is to make that 20% of the workforce by September. Today, the company has 14% Black and Latinx employees on its staff of 100. Slowly, Andersen started hiring Black and Latinx employees. And so we set a goal internally to have 20% of our team be from the Black and brown communities.” But we need to be well above that so we can really speed these things up. “So we said we needed that to be at a minimum there. “We set a goal internally to bring about the change, as we know about 14% of the U.S. The more he thought about it, the more Andersen believed that improving racial inequities in the tech sector wasn’t only the right thing to do, it was the profitable thing to do, especially for a community-oriented company. He also looked inside his company to see what it could do. ![]() What could we do to bring about the change that needs to happen?”Īndersen said he had conversations about racism with his children, who are between three and 11. “When George Floyd was murdered on May 25, we started to really look inside of ourselves. “A year ago, I’m embarrassed to say, of the 27 people on the team, not a single one was Black or brown,” Andersen said. After the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter unrest, Andersen had to grapple with uncomfortable truths. It had grown its headcount to 27 without a single Black employee. With Bevy, they wanted to build a platform for enterprise communities, but the pandemic forced them to focus on virtual communities and digital events.Ī year ago, Bevy was looking at a different problem. Bevy CEO Derek Andersen and cofounders Joel Fernandes and Alex Bendig started Bevy in 2017 after finding success with Startup Grind.
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