Porter Braswell
Founder & CEO, 2045 Studio · 1 appearance on the record.
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Porter Braswell co-founded Jopwell, a Y Combinator-backed diversity recruiting platform acquired by True Search in 2023. He also authored the career guide Let Them See You and hosted the Harvard Business Review podcast Race at Work.
22statements → 5claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.91/5average debate potential →
1 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 assertions · 9 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Porter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Braswell: 2014 Tech Diversity Reports Sparked a National Conversation
“And at that time, the summer of 2014, right before I left, all the tech companies came out with the stats of the lack of diversity, which is something we all knew. Right. But it was the first time it became really a national conversation.”
Everything Porter Braswell said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Braswell: Data disproves tech's "pipeline problem" for minority engineers
“And when companies say, oh, you know, there's not even like the pipeline of black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American engineers. One, that's not true. And the data does not suggest that at all.”
Braswell: Techstars NYC rejected us because "recruiting is not a challenge"
“We then actually applied to New York Techstars. And did not get in. And this was in December. Made it to the final round. They basically said, I don't understand diversity. Recruiting is not a big challenge. And you guys don't have anything. Like, I don't know…”
Braswell: Vague "diversity" jargon prevents companies from solving specific hiring challenges
“When I hear the word diversity and I hear people describe diversity challenges I think that One, when I hear that, I don't really hear much because that diversity is kind of, it could be anything. You can make an argument that anybody is diverse and that reall…”
Braswell: Low diversity in non-technical tech roles disproves the pipeline excuse
“If your company is two percent black or three percent, you know, Hispanic or Latino, you can't say that you can't find enough people who are people of color in non-technical roles, sales, consulting, finance, HR, you name it. And so if your organization is sti…”
Braswell: 44M underrepresented minority professionals and students exist in workforce
“And there are forty four million black, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American students and professionals in the workforce that, that that exists as well.”
Braswell: Hiring from early friend networks causes startup diversity debt
“But as you hire your friends and for friends, friends, and that's how companies scale. So when we think about like the difficulties of how companies kind of get to where they are, where there's a lack of diversity, we experienced it from a very extreme other s…”
Braswell: Low baseline diversity means underrepresented applicants lack internal job champions
“If you look at the numbers in tech, for instance, right? If two percent of your workforce is black and three percent are Latino or Hispanic, odds are you don't know anybody that works there. And odds are you're not going to have that champion that kind of says…”
Braswell: Direct Job Applications Disappear Into a Black Box Without Referrals
“When users on Jopwo are saying, you know, why don't I just apply? You can, and you should but you're going to go into a black box unless you know somebody.”
Braswell: Publicly admitting diversity gaps unlocks new talent pipelines
“I think raising your hand and just saying publicly, like we need assistance with a particular challenge is the way that you kind of get out your own way and you start to unlock other pipelines of talent.”
Braswell: Jopwell only pitches companies that already value diversity
“We don't choose companies to work with that don't believe in the value of diversity. So the only sell we make is why you should use Jopwell. So we never get into the conversations around why diversity is important to your organization because they understand i…”
Braswell: Hiring startups must solve specific pain points beyond claiming quality
“If you're trying to build a hiring platform you have to be known for something. You have to have a particular You know, focus. You can't just have claim to have quality talent. You have to have, you have to be providing a real solution to a real problem that c…”
Braswell: Educating a VC partner shifts fundraising leverage to the founder
“And once a senior partner at a firm feels like he's being taught in a very respectful way, The leverage changes.”
Braswell: Managing culture becomes the CEO's primary job at 15 employees
“Focusing on the culture. It's the number one thing that like, you know, when you're four people, it don't really have to focus on it. It just, it's just, you know, it is what it is. And when you're 10 people, you really don't have to focus on it. At some point…”
Braswell: 2014 Tech Diversity Reports Sparked a National Conversation
“And at that time, the summer of 2014, right before I left, all the tech companies came out with the stats of the lack of diversity, which is something we all knew. Right. But it was the first time it became really a national conversation.”
Braswell: We structured Jopwell as a for-profit to scale via tech
“So we set out from the start to build it as a for-profit entity and not a nonprofit, which there are many amazing nonprofits that, that focus on diversity recruitment. But we just took their approach to leverage technology, do it at scale and solve a problem.”
Braswell: I quit Goldman Sachs before validating my startup idea
“But in terms of, you know, testing this out, I never really tested it out because I lived through it. I was so convicted with it and I like intimately understood what the pain points were. So You know, ignorance is bliss to some degree. And so I had this visio…”
Braswell: Jopwell personalizes platform communication tone by candidate seniority
“So what we've now done with our platform is that based on certain tags and triggers and whatnot. We speak to you in a different tone. So people When they interact with Jopwell, they're, they have different personas at Jopwell that they're interacting with. Not…”
Braswell: Jopwell Raised $3.5M on Demo Day with Real Traction
“And by the time we applied to YC, we had built a business that was getting traction, and 10 weeks later, we raised three and a half million dollars on Demo Day.”
Braswell: We pre-sold Jopwell to employers before building software
“And I made this deck along with Ryan, my co-founder, and we just showed it to companies and said, this is what we're going to build, and if we build this, will you be a customer? And so we got really fortunate that when we made these phone calls, people answer…”
Braswell: Jopwell's sweet spot is talent with under 12 years of experience
“What we do really well in is call it people within their 20 or 30 somethings within their age range. And so really that entry level to mid-level talent is where we thrive the most. We do have people that we would consider executives on the platform, but it's l…”
Braswell: I require meeting agendas and block my calendar time
“Like you have to give me an agenda of what the meeting's going to be on. I have particular blocks of time. You can, we can have meetings and I just have to be really protective over my time.”
Braswell: I hold daily 45-minute coffee chats with different employees
“Now I have a coffee session where every morning I get coffee with a different employee for about 45 minutes cause I go get coffee anyway. So I might as well go with somebody and just sit down and just have a conversation. And it's in those one-on-one settings …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Funding Is an Outcome of Building a Good Business - Porter Braswell of Jopwell · Y Combina | Mar 21, 2018 | 38m |