Meet our sprint designers: Ashlee & Siri
News from the Funding Innovation Lab: August 28, 2024, Edition 11
We are deep in the work now of designing the experiments (sprints) for this year. Since I can’t talk about them yet - the big reveal will happen on October 30th at our Results Reveal Party - I’m going to start introducing you to the individuals who volunteered their time and expertise in helping design these experiments.
I’ve mentioned before that the community for the Funding Innovation Lab includes people who work in the venture funding space: investors, founders, and ecosystem partners. I’m incredibly proud of the representation - of expertise, identity, and lived experience - within both of our sprint teams.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll introduce everyone. Today, meet Ashlee and Siri.
Ashlee Ammons Halpin
Ashlee Ammons Halpin is a partner on the a16z Talent x Opportunity Initiative (TxO) focused on TxO University and program management.
Prior to joining a16z, Ashlee broke barriers in the technology industry as one of the first Black females in the U.S. to raise over $1M in venture capital. Her contributions as a founder have been recognized for influencing entrepreneurship opportunities in the Southeast and beyond. Earlier in her career, she collaborated with prominent figures and brands in event management.
Ashlee graduated with a BA in mass communications and public relations from Baldwin-Wallace University. Residing in Atlanta, GA, she actively nurtures upcoming entrepreneurs through community and advisory roles.
Ashlee shared her thoughts on the work of the Funding Innovation Lab:
Ashlee, why is the work of creating more funding access and opportunity important to you?
As a founder myself, I will always identify with and champion the founder's journey. Working closely with founders every day, I see firsthand the gaps in our ecosystem that need to be bridged to make innovation more straightforward, rewarding, and accessible for everyone.
Now that you have participated in helping to design an experiment for the Funding Innovation Lab, can you speak to why you chose to get involved with this work and/or what you find exciting about this approach?
As a founder, I've learned that every connection holds value. Even when a person or situation turns out not to be the right fit, there’s always a lesson to be gained. With nearly a decade of experience, I have a wealth of knowledge to share. Now, in my role as a program partner at an accelerator, I find that conversations often provide actionable insights and help me refine and enhance our services. Every interaction is an opportunity to grow and improve our support for founders.
Siri Chilazi
Siri Chilazi’s life's work is to advance fairness and gender equality in the workplace through a blend of rigorous research and actionable insights.
As a Senior Researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, Siri focuses on identifying and testing concrete solutions to inequity in organizations. Her work spans multiple dimensions of fairness, including women’s advancement, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), unconscious bias, behavioral science, the gender pay gap, parental leave, flexible work, remote work, and organizational talent processes such as hiring, performance evaluations, promotions, retention, and compensation.
Siri shared her thoughts on the work of the Funding Innovation Lab:
Siri, why is the work of creating more funding access and opportunity important to you?
Venture dollars play a huge role in shaping the society of tomorrow by determining which ideas get a chance to come to fruition. In my mind, it’s absolutely imperative that we draw on the greatest possible breadth of ideas, which means drawing on the greatest possible breadth of talented people who come up with those ideas. The data clearly demonstrates that we are leaving tons of talent (and ideas) on the table today, so leveling the playing field to give all founders and all ideas an equal shot at success is an urgent priority.
Now that you have participated in helping to design an experiment for the FIL, can you speak to why you chose to get involved with this work and/or what you find exciting about this approach?
As a behavioral scientist, I am passionate about helping organizations take a more evidence-based approach to their work. Running experiments and testing promising ideas is literally what my colleagues and I do every day, and nothing makes me happier than seeing this approach proliferate in other industries, including the venture ecosystem, as well. We will all be better off when we shift from using untested and unproven “best practices” to relying on the “best evidence”—and, better yet, generating more of that evidence!
2024 Sprint Progress Update
The Funding Innovation Lab is live and actively working on experiments now! We will be keeping you updated on our progress with this weekly Progress Update section.
Phase 1: Design the Sprints for 2024 (July-August)
July 25: We announced the focus areas for this year’s two sprints at our Kickoff event
August 6: We finalized the sprint design teams and scheduled the meetings where these teams will determine what/how/when we will run these experiments
August 21: One experiment is fully designed and in motion. The second is partially designed, with some logistics around how it will get executed still to be determined.
Phase 2: Facilitate the Sprints (September)
Details TBD
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Save the date for our Summit and Results Reveal Party!
October 30th in Cambridge MA (registration coming soon)
Our approach & strategy
The Funding Innovation Lab is our sandbox for testing and developing new playbooks for venture funding that are inclusive by design. These articles provide a great introduction and reminder of the strategies we are using.
Tiny, fast experiments: We learn quickly and with very low effort or cost whether a change to the playbook creates more access and opportunity.
Inclusive design: We expect most successful interventions to create a net positive for all participants, not just the diverse founders we may have designed the intervention for originally.
Nudges: We’re looking for small changes that create the outcomes we want by default.
Systems, not individuals: The kinds of interventions we want to design should address the system. Instead of asking individuals to change their behavior, we want to find ways where the structure itself encourages the behaviors and actions we want to see.
The DARPA strategy: We’re taking inspiration from DARPA - creating temporary teams of experts to tackle a wicked hard problem.
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding inclusion, access, and opportunity for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Lab convenes and supports innovators from across VC, universities, and entrepreneurial support organizations as they run rapid design sprints to solve the persistent systemic barriers and bias in the fundraising and capital deployment process. The Funding Innovation Lab has an open-source policy, sharing the wins and fails from these experiments here on Substack and with its community of practitioners with the goal to see widespread adoption and replication of emerging best practices in this field.