Senofer Mendoza is on a mission to fund diverse and historically-excluded business owners by using an improved model of venture capital.
Based in Boston, Mendoza Ventures is women-owned and the first LatinX-owned venture fund on the East Coast. The firm is run by Senofer and her husband Adrian Mendoza, entrepreneurs and veterans of the Boston startup ecosystem. They focus on diversity as playing an important role in their investment decisions, as roughly 75% of Mendoza’s portfolio consists of start-ups led by immigrants, people of color, and women.
Mendoza Ventures seeks to create positive changes in the fields of cybersecurity, technology and artificial intelligence.
Representation matters when it comes to funding businesses.
Senofer Mendoza noticed that businesses founded by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals were not being funded. She sought to affect change by choosing projects started by historically-excluded founders in security and technology, ultimately providing a blueprint for the future.
Mendoza Ventures shows us the value of diversity in the workplace.
Studies show that diverse workplaces outperform homogenous ones, and Senofer Mendoza thinks she knows why. In her experience, diverse teams outperform because they are able to use their rich backgrounds, knowledge and experience to collaborate. Fueled by passion and a common goal, inclusive teams can have difficult conversations and overcome greater obstacles.
Senofer Mendoza is flipping traditional venture capital on its head.
The goal of Mendoza Ventures is to produce a more thoughtful and holistic approach to venture capital: Doing more work to qualify applicants up front, keeping a smaller niched portfolio and providing hands-on business coaching and support to the founders they’re funding. Rather than just writing a large amount of checks with the assumption that the majority will fail, Mendoza Ventures hand-picks passion projects and goes all-in to ensure their success.
Quotes
“If you built an entire VC firm around supporting a healthy company instead of the traditional model of writing a hundred checks assuming that 80% of them are going to go out of business…how can you change outcomes for founders?”
“We do a lot of diligence up front. We get on the phone with them and ask, how can we help you this week? We pull from our investor base to help them.”
“We coach clients to get to profitability faster or towards getting acquired earlier.”
“Only 1% of general partners in VC companies are women…and that doesn’t mean founding partners! The tricky thing about inclusion is that even as you go up the capital stack, it’s still bad. It gets worse. We need to be pulling ourselves up…and we also need to be pulling someone up with us.”
“We’re not just talking about inclusion, we’re not just highlighting or amplifying inclusion. We’re proactively making sure that people who are very different from ourselves are in every single layer of our company.”
“I love giving women millions of dollars to grow their businesses. And people of color, and LGBTQ people! I am deeply passionate about making sure generational wealth in the United States looks like the population of the United States.”
“Inclusion is awkward. It looks good on the posters, but when you’re practicing inclusion, someone always says something offensive or makes a bad joke. You have to sit in that uncomfortable moment and talk through what just happened. When you have a diverse team, they’re capable of doing that together. And if you can do this together, you can do anything! You can talk about sales numbers, you can adjust your strategy, and you share a common goal. I think that’s at the core of what’s making them outperform.”
Links mentioned in this episode:

Podcast Resources
Check out the Mendoza Ventures website to see their portfolio and learn more about their work: https://mendoza-ventures.com/
To inquire about a startup or if you have a media request, please reach out to Senofer and her team at partners@mendoza-ventures.com
Find Senofer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/senofermendoza/

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