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The venture capital model should be adapted to address the US’s racial wealth gap, according to Omidyar Network’s Aniyia Williams.

“We gain much more from creating thousands or millions of Black millionaires versus one Black Mark Zuckerberg or Robert Smith,” Williams said on a panel at impact investing organisation ImpactPhl’s summit in Philadelphia last week. “The venture model is one that makes a bet on just a few making it, and making it really big. We really need to bring up an entire wave of people [in minority communities].”

Williams is a principal on the Responsible Technology team at Omidyar Network, a “total-portfolio” impact investor deploying the personal wealth of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The Omidyar Network had assets worth $495 million in 2021, the year of its latest published financial statement. It invests directly and via funds and co-investments, New Private Markets understands.

The Omidyar Network is “aggressively adversarial towards big tech”, said Williams, “and we do a lot of advocacy and fighting and pushing big tech to be better and try to produce better outcomes”.

Unsustainable and irresponsible use of innovation often emerges when technology start-ups backed by traditional venture funds attempt to grow their revenues from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Williams. To get “one more zero” in their revenue to achieve the exit valuations that these VC funds expect, founders face “a decision tree of things that give us the kind of outcomes from technology that we don’t want – the unravelling of democracies, winding down of privacy and protections. A lot of the ethics and morals of what they had set out to do start to change”.

Williams manages an $8 million, four-year budget from Omidyar Network to build the ecosystem around responsible venture capital – used to finance resources and networking events for responsible investment and innovation by venture capitalists and founders.