[geofft]

Underrepresented groups tend to have less financial security. (That's part of why they're underrepresented in the first place; the term means that there's less of them in some particular space than their fraction in society as a whole, not that they are a minority in terms of underrepresented numbers.)

Venture capital is great for taking someone who has some amount of financial security, but not quite enough to entirely bootstrap their venture, and giving them enough more. But it's not particularly effective at helping someone who really needs a low-risk (even if low-reward) option because they have no fallback if their company fails. (To be absolutely clear, this isn't the fault of any venture capitalist, nor is it a thing I think a venture capitalist can reasonably solve in the short term, so this is not a complaint about venture capitalists, just a statement about how the world is. Perhaps in the long term, YC's experiments with UBI might help, but that's an experiment and it won't become a reliable source of financial security for anyone for many many years.)

Race doesn't line up perfectly with financial security, and it certainly does not determine financial security. But in the US, today, it's pretty strongly correlated.