WEDS: The Story so Far (2024)

Looking back to our official launch event in February, we can’t believe it’s been 6 months, so we wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to and share our exciting plans for Autumn.

So, where have we been since then?

WEDS was founded by a group of women working in cybertech startups, and we’re all doing this around our full-time roles, so progress is never going to be as quick as we’d like — but we hope you’ll bear with us. Our commitment far outweighs our free time, but rest-assured things have been ticking along in the background. We’ve taken a pause for thought, to plan out the best way to achieve our goals and respond to any feedback we received.

Launching WEDS 🚀

Firstly, a thank you to everyone who attended or supported our launch! We were treated to some insightful talks and a panel discussion by our amazing speakers who all volunteered their time:

• Nicola Whiting (CSO, Titania)
• Divinia Knowles (startup advisor and former COO/CFO at Pact and Mind Candy)
• Debs Durojaiye (Afrotech Fest)
• Katerina Pascoulis (CEO, Personably)
• Alastair Paterson (CEO, Digital Shadows)
• Stephen Chapendama (University of Hertforshire & Foundervine).

We enjoyed the event enormously, and the amount of interest, ideas and encouragement was overwhelming.

What’s in a name? 🌹

We originally called our network “Women Empowering Diversity in Startups”(WEDS) because we were going to focus on gender diversity, as this was our shared, personal experience. Even though we decided to remove this constraint very early on, we chose to keep the name as all the founders were women.

However, we received feedback (thank you!) that the name doesn’t convey that we want to advocate for diversity and inclusion for all facets of identity, and that anyone, regardless of how they identify, is absolutely welcome to join our team.

So, one of the first steps we wanted to take was a bit of a rebrand — we’ve decided to change the network name to “We empower diverse startups” (don’t worry, we’re still WEDS for short). We like it and we hope you do too!

Why WEDS?

How to summarise why you started an initiative in a few lines?!

We recently attended a really insightful event entitled “Diversity Debt: Scaling your company with diversity in mind” run by Applied and the concept of “diversity debt” really pinpointed one of the problems that inspired us to start WEDS — if you wait to “do diversity” when you’re a more established company you will have accrued a massive debt and it only gets harder to fix it.

The WEDS team have been thrilled to see more events like this one as well as the many other exciting goings on in the D&I in startups space (particularly in London where we are based) from the likes of YSYS, FounderVine, Backstage Capital, Hatch, Diversity VC, Enterprise and colorintech . All of these are running innovative projects to help support diverse founders and ensure the VC sector itself diversifies and changes the way it invests.

Above is our visual overview on which parts of the startup ecosystem these London-based initiatives are working on and where WEDS fits in — together we cover a lot of ground! This wasn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of all initiatives in the UK, but we’re more than happy to update with your organisation if you focus on D&I in startups too — just let us know!

The WEDS approach

The WEDS team hope to add something, in our own small way, that complements and bolsters this exciting work. We want to contribute by approaching from a different angle — when people found their startup, how can they weave diversity and inclusion into its fabric from day one?

We aim improve the D&I efforts in all startups by collating a set of best practices for all facets of start-up life and providing the tools and examples for people to use.

We hope that by building a central location for free, startup-specific best practice for all aspects of D&I, we can break down the perceived barriers (“no money, no time, no HR!”) to doing it from the get-go.

The WEDS Vision ⭐️ 🔮

Our ultimate vision for WEDS (hey, a girl’s gotta dream!) is that we can create an alliance of startups that pledge to employ these D&I best practices and strive to constantly improve upon them by responding to developments in this area and sharing their lessons learned within the network.

Imagine a world where when you want to know whether that startup you want to work for/invest in/ become a customer of implements D&I best practice, you can just check for the “WEDS pledge”. Or, you’re a startup that really wants to support diverse candidates but isn’t sure how to demonstrate this — you can join WEDS, implement the tips and use the “WEDS alliance” logo on your website.

D&I doesn’t need to be a mystery. Yes, it’s a complex and nuanced topic, but there are many things that everyone seems to agree on as “the basics”, so let’s make these as easy as possible to implement.

Now, we’re not saying that if you implement these then you’re done, you’re super inclusive… but it’s a start, right?

Ok, ok, so this goal might not be achieved overnight, but we hope that sharing our vision may inspire more of you to help us take the first steps on this journey.

We have created a set of “Foundations of D&I in Startups” which we think describe the pillars of diversity and inclusion in startup life. We will align our events to these Foundations, working through them one by one in a series of workshops to collate startup-specific best practice and create resources as we go. You can read more about the Foundations and how we will run these events here.

We’re excited to announce our first workshop “WEDS Foundations of D&I for Startups: Growing your team” will be held in London on October 16th 2019. You don’t need to have specialist knowledge of D&I to take part in the workshop, we’ll have plenty of folks who have experience to share, so feel free to come along to learn. If you think you’d benefit from the resources we strongly encourage you to get involved in their creation.