This Week on Build Mode: Building Diverse Teams From Day One With Leah Solivan
If there’s one clear takeaway for team leaders and founders this season, it’s this: sourcing the right talent for your team is far more complex than just sifting through a stack of resumes.
This week’s guest on Build Mode is Leah Solivan, founder of Taskrabbit and current early-stage investor. Leah has seen firsthand that transforming the startup ecosystem’s longstanding homogeneity starts with empowering diverse venture capitalists. Those VCs, in turn, fund underrepresented founders — who go on to recruit the hidden, overlooked tech talent that the industry so often misses.
From bootstrapping Taskrabbit on personal credit cards to scaling it into one of the gig economy’s most defining companies, Leah learned this core lesson firsthand: the hardest part of building a business is never the product itself — it’s selecting the right team to build it.
In this episode, host Isabelle Johannessen and Leah unpack what it actually takes to build diverse teams from a company’s very first day, and why most companies get this wrong by delaying diversity efforts far too long. They also explore how the lack of diversity in venture capital directly shapes which founders secure funding — and ultimately, which candidates get hired.
Their conversation covers:
Actionable frameworks to intentionally build diverse teams from the very beginning of a company
Why the “low-effort, easy path” in hiring almost always leads to less diverse, less innovative outcomes
The direct causal link between diverse VC pools and more diverse, successful companies
How to shift hiring priorities to align around culture and shared values over traditional resume credentials
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New episodes of Build Mode drop every Thursday. Hosted by Isabelle Johannessen, produced and edited by Maggie Nye, audience development led by Morgan Little. Special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams for their support.
This Week on Build Mode: Building Diverse Teams From Day One With Leah Solivan
