Feb 26, 2020
Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital is a superior performer. The London-based venture capital firm’s $85 million first fund is ranked in the top 5% of funds raised in the US and Europe in the past year, according to Cambridge Associates and Prequin. A second $185 million fund took just three months to raise.
Below, Louis Hernandez, Jr. Founder, CEO and Managing Director at Black Dragon Capital℠ discusses one of the key elements that make Blossom capital successful, its drive for diversity.
Ophelia Brown should be celebrating. But what comes through in a January 22 Fortune profile is frustration. Brown, Blossom Capital’s 33-year-old founder, isn’t pleased that the questions she gets are less about performance than about the novelty of being a woman in private equity and the founder of a firm with two other female partners.
Brown says, rightly, that the focus should be on the firm’s results. But for the private equity industry, the attention may be a necessary corrective. PE leaders should clearly be aware of two things: one, private equity lags badly on diversity, and two, firms that achieve gender, racial and ethnic diversity dramatically outperform their homogenous peers.
Diversity is a hot topic in business, as it should be. It leads to superior performance
The value of diversity and the failure to achieve it isn’t limited to private equity, of course. It’s a pressing topic for business in general and…