TL;DR — I invested in Mathison a platform and marketplace matching Diverse Talent with the companies that want to hire them. Love the team. Love the mission. Love the market. ❤️
Gaingels introduced me to Dave Walsh and Arthur Woods, the founders of Mathison. The company is a what I would call a service-enriched platform 😁 😁 😁 enabling employers to find great diverse hires, and diverse talent to find great jobs. What makes the platform truly unique is that they partner with non-profits who serve diverse communities (think Native American Journalists Association, Girls Who Code, United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, etc.), giving them tools for their members to find great jobs. For every job seeker that gets hired, Mathison makes a donation to the non-profit. Built right, this could be a real flywheel for the company, driving growth and also creating a moat that competitors find hard to surpass. Already, Mathison has 1.7M DIVERSE job seekers on the platform, ensuring excellent density for hiring firms.
Because the market is immature and fragmented, Mathison can serve as an aggregator. Aggregation of supply makes the platform — or marketplace — very compelling for companies seeking diverse talent across a variety of areas — women reentering the workforce, people with disabilities, older and experienced people, Veterans, formerly incarcerated people, refugees and immigrants and of course Black, LatinX, Native American, LGBTQIA and women. 140 AI models accelerate and automate the sourcing and matching of diverse candidates, aiding marketplace liquidity.
Having been the CEO of a company concerned with diverse hiring, I know that creating a pipeline of talent is essential. It’s not the only part of building diversity into your company’s foundation, not at all. But it is the starting point. And building a pipeline of talent of any kind has been more challenging in recent times because of our high employment rate. Building a pipeline of diverse talent has been all the more challenging. As a talent executive, would you rather build a pastiche of sources that looks like the Million Dollar Homepage or would you rather have a partner with a powerful platform that connects you with truly diverse talent across a range of categories, enabling you to recruit people you might not otherwise have in your pipeline? Easy decision.
I found Mathison very compelling and was eager to invest. I also introduced the company to fellow investor and friend Nico Berardi of Animo Ventures who led a $2M round in the company. Read more about the company and it’s strategy here.
In the spring as COVID hit hard, I thought Mathison’s traction would suffer. It hasn’t. Just the opposite. ARR has grown 7x since the beginning of the year.
Quixotic Ventures 