“If I wasn’t an indigenous queer woman, I probably would have posed a lot more, at a better value.” – Bobbie Racette calls out industry diversity bias

Toronto – June 20, 2024

Virtual Gurus Founder & CEO Bobbie Racette (pictured above) has highlighted the challenges faced by Indigenous entrepreneurs in securing funding.

Speaking at Collision in Toronto, Bobbie shared, “When I closed my first round, we were about 1.8 million in revenue, and I only closed it at 1.25 million. If I wasn’t an indigenous queer woman, I probably would have posed a lot more, at a better value.”

Bobbie discussed strategies for empowering marginalized communities, emphasizing the importance of confidence: “I think confidence is probably one of the hardest things as indigenous folks, because let’s be real. We’ve been looked down on for many, many, many years. And, you know, having the confidence to be out there, to be on stage, to ask for money, to stand out, to take the title of first of something is really, really difficult. It hurts. It’s hard.”

Bobbie recounted the emotional journey of fundraising: “The first 20 no’s kind of just made me sad. The next 40 no’s made me really angry, and then the next ones were basically, if you want me to do something, all you have to tell me is I can’t do it.”

Bobbie shared “If there’s only one thing that I can do at the end of every day, my number one goal is, if I can inspire one person, I’ll inspire a nation. And so that’s what we’re doing here, is we’re inspiring more indigenous folks to come out.”

During the discussion, Bobbie was joined by Carol Anne Hilton, CEO and Founder of the Indigenomics Institute and the Global Centre of Indigenomics, and Jeff Ward, Founder & CEO of Animikii Indigenous Technology.

Jeff Ward emphasized the need for Indigenous representation in tech: “This mainstream tech community really needs indigenous voices… Indigenous voices have not been represented on stages like this.” 

Carol Anne Hilton added, “I think that being an indigenous entrepreneur takes a tremendous amount of courage, and I recognize that every single day. Operating within the tech industry, I realize that many spaces were never meant or designed for us as Indigenous people.”

Bobbie highlighted the difficulty Indigenous people face in raising funds: “Being an indigenous person, it’s really hard to ask for money, and so I think that was one of the hardest things for me.”

The comments from Bobbie Racette, Jeff Ward, and Carol Anne Hilton were part of a broader discussion on the funding roadblocks and personal journeys of being Indigenous founders at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors, and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

All of our summaries will be published on the Web Summit Summary Service page.

For any questions about this or any other Web Summit Summaries content, please contact us at media@websummit.com.

About Web Summit: 
Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship program, and our community partnerships.

Useful links
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
About Web Summit: about.websummit.com