Diversity Is In Our DNA – Color

At Color, we believe that diversity is an important part of who we are and what we do as a company. Our mission is to democratize access to genetic testing and empower people with actionable genetic information. To do this, we must have diverse voices and backgrounds at our company. Diversity is core to Color’s mission and fundamental to building a service that serves everyone. From day one, we have built Color to embody diversity, not just in our employee base but also our investors, advisors and underlying company philosophy.

We believe that diversity can be built into every company, whether it has 30 employees or 30,000. Color’s workforce is currently 30 employees, of whom 43% are female. While this is more than the industry average, we are committed to improving as we grow over the coming months. Our goal is to hire the best talent, and we believe this will naturally bring us to gender parity.

Color’s Goals

Color is honored to have been invited to the White House Demo Day Pledge alongside some of the world’s largest technology companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel, and Microsoft. The White House Pledge is a reminder of our commitment to diversity.

Because Color seeks to hire and retain the best talent, we are making the following commitments:

• Color will prioritize gender parity in the recruitment of its first 100 employees and beyond, targeting ~50% female employees.
• Color will invest in mentorship and career development for Color employees of all backgrounds by piloting a mentorship program that connects employees with Color’s diverse network of angel investors and advisors.
• Color will prioritize the inclusion of minority candidates when recruiting for key leadership roles.

We are fortunate to have more than a dozen investors and advisors who are well-known female entrepreneurs, executives and philanthropists, such as Julia Hartz (Co-founder and President of Eventbrite), Ann Mather (Google and Netflix Board Member, Formerly VP and CFO at Pixar), Mariam Naficy (CEO of Minted and Polyvore Board Member), Clara Shih (CEO of Hearsay and Starbucks Board Member), Sue Wagner (Co-founder of BlackRock), Padmasree Warrior (former CTO at Cisco), Katie Stanton (VP at Twitter) and others. Thanks to our investor and advisor group, we will be piloting a mentorship program to enable Color’s employees to learn directly from leaders in business.

Color also plans to work towards a more diverse employee base through inclusion of ethnic minorities. While the company is currently 50% Asian, Color will work to grow the representation of other minority groups as we scale. This means we will endeavor to include minority candidates in interviews for key executive jobs, as well as other roles.

Goals are just a start, and we have a ways to go to truly achieve broad diversity at Color. As our team continues to grow through 2015 and beyond, our ratios may fluctuate from our stated goals, but our commitments will not. We will continue to seek diverse talent as we democratize genetic testing for a diverse population.