That's a straw man argument because I did not assert that (and obviously wouldn't because it would be a stupid thing to think).
Maybe he thought your question was piercing because it implied you suspected he was racist or sexist or not concerned with gender and race bias.
Fwiw I'm from one of the excluded categories. I think they should just focus on tackling carbon reduction as they see best fit. If they achieve their mission it'll benefit every man, woman and child on earth. It's unreasonable to expect them to be omniscient. They are a small fund with a small sample of investments. Skew doesn't necessarily mean they have gender or race bias.
Elevating isn't their goal. Reducing carbon is. If we don't do that, there may be no races left to worry about equalising.
Sure, not what gp said, but agreed.
"but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds"
Just some unsolicited feedback, the original race/gender quote from the article and this statement leads me to interpret that you either value equality of outcome (EG: all of these startups should have proportional distributions of gender and race in all positions) over technological advancements, or that you suspect the organization is biased to some detrimental degree.
This feedback isn't meant to insinuate that you actually believe either, just that it was my interpretation from the seemingly out of context nod to race/genders of the startup founders.
For example, if you'd have included a quote along the lines of "The startups announced by BEV so far are all above 6' tall". The statement would seem to insinuate that there's either something wrong with being 6' tall (analogous to something wrong with being white/male), or that the organization seems to unfairly favor tall people.
Also, there is no historical bias towards 6-foot people. But there was, and is, a lot of bias towards white males. For me it's fair enough to call that out.
I'm not white yet from a very privileged background. I find the way you so casually equate ethnic origin and social background to be quite shocking frankly.
We've tried being gender and race blind. But it's not helped us much, because systemic biases can't simply be overcome that way. There are good ideas in all corners, but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds you have to work harder.