Aiming to bring more women and people of color into engineering jobs, Learners Guild launches a unique training program — and some investors are sold on it.
Learners Guild’s goal is to bring more diversity to tech.
At a time when Silicon Valley is on the receiving end of criticism for lack of diversity and a tech-bro culture, one coalition of investors is putting its money where its mouth is.
Learn Capital, Obvious Ventures, Acumen and Kapor Capital are investing $10 million in an engineer training program — hosted by Oakland-based career accelerator Learners Guild — that aims to bring more diversity to the tech industry.
“The companies in Silicon Valley think of themselves as meritocracies,” said Mitch Kapor, founder of Kapor Capital. But they’re “mirror-tocracies, where people tend to hire people who look like themselves. ”
The $10 million investment comes amid a larger debate in the tech industry about some of the top tech companies — from Apple to Facebook and Microsoft to Twitter — showing their US workforces are about 70 percent male and almost 65 percent white. Some companies say they want to do more to diversify their staffs by hiring more females and people of color.
