Gold House has closed a debut $30-million venture fund to advance the interests of Asian Americans in the corporate world.
The money will be invested by dozens of entrepreneurial giants like DoorDash (the largest food delivery company in the US) CEO Tony Xu, Olympian Nathan Chen, and TV host Padma Lakshmi, along with a number of venture firms like Accel, GGV Capital, and Tribe Capital among others.
A nonprofit collective formed four years ago, Gold House, according to former Google product manager Bing Chen, had two missions from its outset, as reported by TechCrunch:
To get rid of how Asian-Americans are depicted in the media, where women are "overly sexualized and men are overly emasculated, which can result in really deleterious treatment".
To tackle the difficulties that Asian Americans face in the corporate world in breaking through to the upper management of the companies they work in.
The numbers are there to back this claim.
According to a Harvard Business Review study, Asian American professionals are the least likely demographic in the United States to be promoted into management.
The Ascend Foundation in their research found that employees of Asian background constitute about around 13 percent of the professional workforce in the country, but only 6 percent of executives.
The team has already invested 20 percent of the money it has raised into 32 startups.
Each of those has received an investement amount between $50,000 and $250,000.
"Diversity of the gender and ethnicity of our founders is important, but also diversity of ideas in terms of Asians starting companies that serve our population or community," said Eric Feng, a general partner at Gold House Ventures.
(With inputs from CNBC and TechCrunch)
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