It’s Juneteenth, and instead of listing the same statistics we have before about the sorry state of DEI in venture, I thought it better to put the macro aside, and focus on one investor: Charles Hudson, Precursor Ventures founder and managing partner, a VC who’s rethinking the status quo.
“We as a firm decided we’re not going to participate in ‘woe is me journalism’ because I think it’s bad for the founders,” said Hudson, on the phone while driving his son to soccer camp earlier this week. “I really do think continually being hammered with these messages isn’t useful for them. We’ve tried to focus on the positive side of it, the things you can control as a founder, not the random investment decisions any individual venture capitalist might make.”
Hudson founded Precursor in 2015 as a generalist firm focusing on early stage companies and founders. The firm now has $230 million in AUM, and writes checks between $250,000 and $500,000. To date, Precursor has backed companies like Bobbie, Carrot Fertility, Modern Health, Pair Eyewear, Rad AI, and, perhaps most famously, The Athletic, which sold to the New York Times for $525 million in 2022.
Hudson grew up in Michigan, going to the same high school as Sun Microsystems cofounder William Nelson Joy. He went to Stanford “on a whim” and got a bachelor’s and an MBA, figuring he’d soon head back east. At least, that was the plan until an internship at now-long-defunct Excite@Home led to a break in venture.
Hudson’s been in California ever since. After eight years at Uncork Capital, he started Precursor, which is devoted to backing founders from backgrounds where they haven’t necessarily had the opportunity to prove themselves. That includes, but isn’t limited to, Black founders—who still make up a small portion of venture-backed entrepreneurs.
“I think, on average, Black founders are getting better advice about how to pitch VCs and what a VC-fundable pitch and business looks like,” said Hudson. “Before, maybe five, ten years ago, there was a pretty big gap between what people were building and what was venture-fundable. I don’t think there’s as much of a gap anymore.”
In his spare time, Hudson is on the board of the San Francisco Opera, and he’s generally drawn to modern, innovative operas, he tells me.
“Surprising as a VC, I know,” Hudson laughs, briefly pitching me on a current favorite of his: It’s called Innocence and it was first staged in France in 2021—it’s about gun violence, weddings, and intractable choices.
I think there’s an opera-startups corollary, I tell Hudson. Operas (at least, since Mozart) are often triumphs of individualization. No matter where a character falls in the social hierarchy, in an hours-long opera, they’ll get their aria—and you never know who’s going to have the aria that everyone remembers. (Take The Magic Flute, where the two most memorable songs belong respectively to a half-man-half-bird and a dark, blustery queen mother.) In some ways, early stage venture is the same—you never know who’s going to shine at the moment of truth.
“That’s why you invest!” said Hudson. “It’s funny, when I’m talking to LPs and they ask, ‘Well, how do you pick all of these people?’ I tell them that we pick everybody using the same lens…There are a bunch of people who can succeed if you give them the opportunity. That’s honestly the most satisfying thing about my job, when we give a founder—white, black, male, female—the opportunity to do it for the first time, and see them succeed.”
Just because someone is from a different background (or, in the case of The Magic Flute, is partially a bird) doesn’t mean they won’t shine when the moment comes, beating the odds—and the statistics.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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