Melinda French Gates is redefining what a ‘smart bet’ in venture capital looks like

In a new op-ed for Coins2Day, French Gates explains exactly how that will work. 

The investor and philanthropist sees opportunities for more “market-based solutions to overlooked problems,” like the caregiving crisis in the U.S. Pivotal’s funding has gone toward founder Helen Adeosun, whose company CareAcademy trains caregivers online. 

To reach these goals, Pivotal is rethinking traditional markers of venture-capital potential and success.

For due diligence, Pivotal has introduced “alternative models of evaluating investment opportunities.” This mainly applies to its work as an LP backing women-led funds, which are often smaller and newer than male-led funds. Rather than solely seek out funds that have hit a certain threshold of assets under management, Pivotal’s investment team takes into account other factors—like founder feedback about working with the fund. “We aren’t lowering the bar in any way, just redefining what it means to meet it,” French Gates writes.

With new definitions like this, French Gates hopes to move the needle on stats like the roughly 2% of venture capital funding that goes to businesses founded solely by women each year. She acknowledges the lawsuit against Fearless Fund, the Black women-led fund backing women of color entrepreneurs and its impact on these goals, too.

Openness to new ways of evaluating investments—and its knock-on effects for fund managers and founders—could “change the entire investment industry’s understanding of what a smart bet looks like,” she says.

Read French Gates’ full op-ed here.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

"I think that fight in me, that grind, has definitely allowed me to be where I am now."

—Women's golf prodigy and college student Rose Zhang on how she tore up the junior circuit in Southern California and became the first woman in 70 years to win her first professional outing