ARLAN HAMILTON Finding and fueling the overlooked tech founders
MEGAN ROSE DICKEY: Tonight I’m chatting with Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Backstage Capital. Backstage Capital primarily invests in people of color and other underrepresented people in tech. First I want to talk about some of the recent events of police brutality in this past week, as well as the role that tech can play in an upholding white supremacy, that maybe some people haven’t thought about or realized before. So what has the last week been like for you Arlan? ARLAN HAMILTON: It’s been a lot of things. Right now as we speak, I have helicopters whizzing by and distracting
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me—police helicopters, because of protests right downstairs, which I’m very happy to support and proud of that are happening. It’s been a lot; I don’t think I’ve ever been reached out to by more people at once, including my wedding and the book coming out, which were two big days where it’s just been a lot of inbound and a lot of mostly positive and mostly good. But it’s a lot to have this point of point of view right now, because so many people are looking to me to speak on certain things or for an opinion about something— which I’m happy to give, as you probably probably know. [Laughter.] The first thing that came to mind when you said that was just like an inundation
of thoughts from other people, of noise, physically physical noise just because of all the protests, and of emotion. I still consider myself one of the luckiest people in this, because of the augmented privilege that I have procured for myself, I am not forced to be in any situation that I don’t want to be in at this moment. And I’m painfully aware of that. DICKEY: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned that there’s a lot of like a lot of inbound, and I’ve definitely seen you commenting on some things via Twitter. But I’m curious, like what what are people in the tech community kind of coming to you with? Are they asking for advice?
