Book Review: It’s About Damn Time by Arlan Hamilton
An inspiring guide from the unapologetic venture capitalist whose identity fuels her work.
Written by: Ayo Osobamiro
If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine a venture capitalist, the image you would conjure up is likely a middle-aged white man in jeans and a hoodie, spinning beautiful narratives of a better future. It’s the face we’ve seen over and over again in media, both fictional and journalistic, and it’s the face that you are still most likely to see in an industry that is only 2% Black.
Enter Arlan Hamilton. She might still be in jeans, but she is far from that boring white guy.
Instead, she’s the steely, self-assured venture capitalist who started with the question “What if the next Mark Zuckerberg is a little Black girl from the South?” and subsequently built Backstage Capital to fund underrepresented founders. Along the way, Arlan became a bonafide Silicon Valley star, as the first Black, queer woman to start a venture capital firm. To date, Backstage Capital has invested more than $10 million in more than 130 startup companies. They range from tech-y ideas like Blendoor, founder Stepahnie Lampkin’s recruiting software that uses AI to eliminate bias, to Partake Foods, Denise Woodard’s allergy-friendly meals and snacks.
Arlan has purposely kept her identity at the forefront of her image and capitalizes on outspokenness. She told The Advocate: “Every part of my identity is important to me. It’s what makes me who I am and gives me my unique standpoint. As a Black gay woman, I am often underestimated, especially within the industry of venture capital. Luckily, I know that my difference is my edge." Recently, she put her diversity gospel into words in her first book, It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage.
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Released earlier this month, the book is a business guide, wrapped in a self-help book, wrapped in a memoir. At the heart of the book is how the self-assured Hamilton ignored her lack of formal education and instead used business skills learned from working in the music industry to carve out a tech career for herself. Each chapter starts with Arlan exploring an important nugget from her resume and her personal biography. She succinctly fills in the gaps from the profiles in glossy magazines that tend to reduce her to a hollow inspirational narrative. There is something intoxicating about the demystification of the tech narrative as she lays out the nitty gritty of her success. Then, each chapter ends with the reader. After using her life as an example, she underscores the lessons for the hungry entrepreneur she undoubtedly imagines on the other side of the page.
The book is a continuation of the way Arlan has always used writing as a microphone, from Your Daily Lesbian Moment, a blog she ran in her twenties, to her popping Twitter feed today. Famously, her venture capital career began when she poured her frustrations with the tech industry into a 2015 post that went viral on Medium. In it, she invited investors of “the Caucasian persuasion” to “turn off your Yeezy mixtape, and listen to me as if I were not an anomaly sent from another planet.” With her trademark boldness and wry humor, she made the case for investing in underrepresented founders at a time when just 0.32% and .0006% of the $425 Billion in venture funding went to startups led by Latinx women and Black female founders respectively. “I wanted to turn the idea of pattern matching for ‘white male nerds’ on its head and instead use pattern matching to my advantage,” she writes, “I was looking for people who reminded me of myself” (It’s About Damn Time, 9).
Alongside her brazen comfort with who she is is a refusal to frame diversity as a moralistic argument. To her, it’s purely an economic one. The unspoken question in Silicon Valley was: “Do Black people, women or LGBTQ people have the ability to build venture-backable companies?” To that Arlan says, “I wanted to tell them that I intended to run a for-profit business that could make both me and others very rich. I wasn’t looking to give handouts; I was looking for return on investments” (It’s About Damn Time, 14). The idea is that Black, brown and queer founders are looking for who everyone else in tech is looking for and are equally likely to achieve it. Arlan embodies the ambitious, unapologetic business leaders her book will inspire.
Photo from the book’s website.
