Venture capital-backed companies drive the U.S. economy, accounting for trillions of dollars. But the unfortunate truth is that a majority of these investments have gone largely to white male founders. Fewer than 5% of big tech employees are Black. Women and Latinx communities are also lagging. Committed to doing things differently, tech venture capitalists Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor have spent the last ten years on a journey to prove that investing in gap-closing startups—that is, companies whose services or products close opportunity gaps for communities of color and/or low-income communities—is good business. By fusing a strong mission into the DNA of their venture capital firm, Kapor Capital, they’ve defined success not only in dollar terms but in moral ones, and helped launch dozens of companies that fuel racial and economic justice while showing remarkable growth, with many valuations in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Along their path there have been high-profile blowups and millions lost. But in the end, Kapor Capital’s investing principles have created a stunning new multimillion-dollar ecosystem of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs, CEOs and investors, all bringing innovative, effective solutions to some of our country’s most pernicious problems in some of America’s poorest communities. In The Equity Gap, Freada and Mitch will share how they did it. Using case studies of people and companies Kapor Capital has invested in, they reveal why the world of investment as it exists doesn’t work, how it can be fixed, and what the future will look like if others adopt their model. The Equity Gap will share their stumbles and fails, unexpected hits and bullseyes, and the learning process they used along the way. The result is wholly different way to do business, offered up as a kind of open-source software meant to be shared, copied, and improved until what is broken is fixed.