Capital & Rona - Ben Stokes

Beyond The Rona

Ben is the Founding Partner at Chasing Rainbows - https://www.chasingrainbows.vc/ - an early-stage investment fund specifically aimed at creating equality in the investment space. The fund makes equitable investments in founders who come from under-represented backgrounds in tech and specifically invest in companies whose founding team consists of Women, People of Culture and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

Ben is also an Advisor & Mentor at Austrade’s Landing Pad in San Francisco and was the CEO & Founder at SocialTable, also based in San Francisco. He’s also had roles in Lever, Salesforce and Oracle. In fact he started his career in the medical sales field.

Ben explains to us how he started Chasing Rainbows particularly with the members of the LGBTIQ+ community in mind, because when they come out to their family members, they can become excluded from friends and family and this limits their opportunity to raise the capital required to start a business (which is commonly raised amongst friends and family). So this is where Chasing Rainbows comes in - to invest in these start-ups and support them on their journey.

Tim and Ben then discuss the Pandemic and the opportunity it presented to have people working remotely. The problem it brought was that founders now need to be more creative in how they build teams and how they keep the company culture alive, since working remotely, you lose that element of “walk and talk” and getting to know each other.

Ben says that businesses now need to use technology in a way that works for them, in order to find new ideas for using technology to keep relationships alive.

In order to do this well, the Pandemic has illustrated clearly that we need better access to tech, and technology infrastructure.

Andrea discussed the fact that nearly 30% of Australians are excluded from the digital world, according to the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (2021) and that this affects mostly people in lower socio-economic areas - https://www.digitalinclusionindex.org.au/key-findings-and-next-steps/

We then sidelined the discussion for a bit to talk about Digital Health, telehealth, the protection of patient information and the possibility of developing service-based businesses using tech - particularly for rural and regional areas. Government policy would assist these start ups, including the policy announced by Senator Larissa Waters to support Women-led Businesses for rural and regional areas - https://larissa-waters.greensmps.org.au/articles/policy-launch-supporting-women-led-businesses

Ben agreed with the combination of government policy as well as tech to support founders starting up a business within their community and then staying in their community.

Both Tim and Ben are looking forward to the continued growth of women in tech and the growth of Logan-based founders. Ben’s message for people who are interested in starting their own business is “Don’t hold yourself back” - although he does acknowledge that there are gaps in government policy and infrastructure to support new founders.

Ben’s 3 Big Ideas:

1. Equitable Investment in new start ups
2. Equitable Opportunity for new start ups
3. Representation for and by diverse communities

Beyond the Rona Podcast is recorded in Logan, Queensland on Yuggera country. We acknowledge the traditional owners past and present.