🕑 Read Time: 3.5 Minutes
The first six months of this year, I’ve been reworking our approach to the 25v thesis. Most nights, after the house quiets down, I find myself staring at a Galton board on my desk. Bead after bead bounces down the pegs. At a glance, it looks chaotic. But the outcome isn’t chance—it’s physics: gravity, angle, friction. Each bounce follows rules. The illusion of randomness arises from not being able to see the full path.
Startups are the same. Founders don’t win by accident. They win because they’re gritty, adaptive, and resourceful—traits that countless studies and industry leaders recognize as critical for startup success. Resilience, in particular, is often cited as a defining factor that enables founders to navigate uncertainty and setbacks, turning apparent luck into repeatable outcomes.
But here’s the truth: the system is rigged. Tilt the Galton board even slightly, space the pegs unevenly, and you shift the whole distribution. In venture, that tilt is real and measurable. Women-led startups continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital funding—just 2.3% of all U.S. VC dollars in 2023, according to PitchBook. Black founders receive less than 1% of total venture capital funding, as reported by Crunchbase in 2024. Access to elite networks and early capital often determines who gets a head start, regardless of merit.
In the Galton board analogy, a breakout startup is a bead that somehow makes it to the far right, past the odds and averages, into rare territory.
I know because I’ve lived it. Growing up Filipino in the Bay Area, I called myself American just to sidestep the isolation. At 16, I became a batboy for the San Francisco Giants—probably the only Asian kid in the clubhouse. People didn’t ask what I did. They asked how I got the job. Back then, I didn’t understand. But over time, I realized: it wasn’t curiosity. It was code for you don’t belong here.
That experience shaped my perspective on founders. I gravitate toward people who have been underestimated, who have faced bias and found a way forward anyway, not as a charity play, but because pressure forges resilience. The same friction that pushes some out builds stamina in others. And in startups, stamina wins. Founders who overcome adversity often develop sharper problem-solving skills and a greater capacity for innovation—qualities that are invaluable in the unpredictable world of entrepreneurship.
That’s why we built the 25v Diversity Fund. We’re not here to fill a quota. We’re here to correct the board. We look upstream. We back founders who’ve done more with less, who’ve solved real problems without shortcuts.
Adam Neumann raised $350 million before launch—and another $100 million after. Meanwhile, every Black founder combined raised less. That’s not performance.
That’s perspective.
The illusion of randomness comforts the gatekeepers. It lets them say, “We’re just picking winners,” without asking who arrived at the starting line first. But venture outcomes follow patterns, and patterns can be rewritten. We don’t wait for luck to surface new leaders. We build systems that find, fund, and keep them in the game.
That Galton board doesn’t just sit there. It stares back—a quiet provocation. Every peg is a choice. Every bounce, a story we help shape.
Over the next few weeks, as I pore over data late into the night, I see each founder like a bead at the top of my own Galton board. They drop in—ricocheting off pins of privilege, bias, grit, and ingenuity. The patterns aren’t subtle. They’re waving. What looks like luck is just the sum of these bounces, each shaped by invisible forces and early friction. The real work isn’t waiting for randomness to hand you a winner. It’s learning to read the board, recognize the signals, and—when it matters—move the pins.
Because in venture, as in physics, outcomes aren’t magic.
They’re math. And it’s time we all started doing the calculations out loud.
xoxo,
Maximillian Diez,
GP, Twenty Five Ventures
P.S. Stay with me on this journey.