Summer 2020’s reckoning with American systemic racism and the ways it plays out in modern times — police brutality, the criminal justice system and the disproportionate access to healthcare among communities of color in a global pandemic — put a special focus on an issue known here in the Philly startup community for a long time: Founders of color don’t have the same access to resources and capital as their white counterparts.

In response, we saw corporations across the city double down on inclusion efforts, hire diversity experts to executive roles, and make donations to nonprofits or Black-owed businesses. But it shouldn’t take civil unrest to focus on the inequity in the startup world, local leaders said.

Within Philly Startup Leaders (PSL), one of the city’s best-connected orgs for entrepreneurs, former Director Kiera Smalls put these thoughts out into the internet with a tweet thread in June. Within days, she’d received $550,000 in commitments from the likes of the City of Philadelphia, delivery biz goPuff and funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

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