Autistic founders described being shut out of the rooms where money moves

When the entrepreneurship panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne turned to why some founders are funded and others are not, the room heard that privilege explained more of it than neurodiversity did. The factors listed were the school a founder went to, how much training they had received, how confident they were, and the intersecting factors of gender and economic class, with everything that goes with them.

The same stretch of the discussion turned to venture capital itself, where, the room was told, “deals are still done on the golf course”. Getting venture capital funding depended on social capital and access to networks, and ran on cross referral and on being told to go and speak to so and so. The speaker called that really tough, and then offered a way to turn it to advantage. Autistic people, the speaker said, were already founders of companies and very much in abundance within the venture capital world, and autistic founders should forge connections with them so that they could find ways to rise together. The community was already out there, the speaker said, and it lacked visibility.