Building a company is a multivariate experiment. As an organization, you experiment with  product, tech, process, go-to-market strategy - pretty much every part of the company. In fact, being in a mindset where failed experiments are viewed as successful learning and operating with low ego is key to being a great team. 

Recent events, including the continuing, unnecessary deaths of black civilians, especially at the hands of people who swore an oath to serve and protect - made it clear that what we’ve done until this moment has not worked. It’s time for a new experiment.

Our team unanimously decided in favor of action over silence. So when I say “we”, I speak for every single person on our team today. If you go to Drafted today you'll see a homepage takeover with one message.

Black Lives Matter

We had a team conversation about how best to make it clear where we stand, and how to do so with humility. We decided that showing our support with the simple but powerful statement - Black Lives Matter, was a good place to start. In addition to that, we wanted to find a way to help amplify the message further, in our small way, with what we have to contribute, which is building software.

That's why we made blacklivesmatter.tech. Now it's insanely simple for anyone to show their support and make the statement on their website with a simple copy-paste.

You can find the open source code here on GitHub, and we welcome anyone who wants to contribute.

What We're doing at Drafted

At Drafted, we believe in focus around our mission - to help people get referrals to companies. As an early stage startup, we don’t have the same resources as larger companies–but we believe that this should not prevent us from taking action. To balance our need to focus on our journey with our desire to take action, we try to find ways to contribute that lie at the intersection of three things - our core mission, our strengths, and causes that we unanimously believe in supporting.

Today we are committing to three projects at Drafted that lie at this intersection.

1. Diversityreports.org - We launched this back in 2018, but we are renewing our commitment to updating this regularly. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be contacting hundreds of companies and asking them to make their diversity reports open. We hope this will help with transparency and accountability when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
2. External referral programs - Historically, "top of mind" referrals are known to be less diverse. But external referrals open the opportunity to connect with a more diverse talent pool. We will be prioritizing this part of our product offerings in 2020.
3. URM (Under Represented Minority) referral bonuses - Referral bonuses for URMs are proven to move the needle on diversity. This is something that we already encourage our customers to do, but we're going to double down by committing to evolving our products to have better support for URM bonuses specifically. More on this soon.
   

We welcome any feedback or suggestions for what else we can do, both from the Boston community and beyond.