An investor said investors should check their own bias before judging autistic founders

At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, a panellist speaking from the private capital side said plainly that investors needed to be educated about their own bias, and described what their own firm does about it. At the firm the panellist owns, they said, “we actually feed in unconscious bias checklists into our decision making processes”, covering who the firm would invest in.

The checklists, as the panellist described them, prompt frank conversations between the people making the decision. The panellist gave two examples of the questions they ask each other. One was “am I zoning out because this person has a very thick accent that I’m struggling to understand”. The other was whether a founder was highly performative and charming, whether the investor had been completely seduced, and whether the business was in fact good enough. The two questions point in opposite directions, one catching founders who are marked down for how they sound and the other catching founders who are marked up for how well they perform.