Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon

Board Member; Governance Committee Member

2024

Founded in 1989, HPP is the largest nationally-recognized family resource center in San Francisco that works in partnership with homeless and low-income mothers to break the cycle of poverty and build healthy, stable, and self-sufficient families.

Founding LP | The Diversity Capital Fund

2021

Angel Track

2018

Member of First Round Capital's Angel Track, a group of select angel investors comprised of operators and founders from the most successful private and public tech companies. Mandela was one of 15 angel investors selected to the founding cohort in April 2018.

Angel Investor

2018

Manages personal portfolio of tech startups; sector agnostic with a focus on pre-seed through series A

Scout Investor

2020 - 2023

2x Member of Sequoia Capital Scouts, investing in seed and series A deals. Sequoia Scouts are a group of select angel investors comprised of operators and founders from the most successful private and public tech companies, as well as professionals from the world's leading education institutions.

Advisor

2023 - 2023

Served as an advisor to the Board of Directors and executive leadership team to achieve a successful CEO transition. The succession plan was achieved, and Paige Hendrix Buckner – Mandela's Chief of Staff at All Raise and former COO at Founder Gym – was appointed the third CEO of All Raise.

CEO

2022 - 2023

All Raise is a non-profit on a mission to help women and non-binary leaders succeed in tech. The community is 22k strong, and includes 90% of women VCs on the Forbes’ Midas List, 84% of women check-writers at funds with >$25M AUM, and >200 venture capital firms. All Raise operates 6 Chapters in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC and Miami. Mandela was recruited as All Raise's second CEO, during the organization's fourth year of operations. KEY CONTRIBUTIONS: ❖ Leveraged expertise in business development and donor management to substantially increase funding, adding another three years to the non-profit’s runway, despite the market downturn of 2022 ❖ Transformed the executive leadership team from a single leader (CEO) into a team of five, adding a Chief of Staff, Head of Finance and HR Ops, Head of MarComms, and Head of Programs ❖ Expanded All Raise Chapters from four to six cities, adding Washington, DC and Miami, in order to serve thousands more women and non-binary leaders building in America’s emerging tech hubs ❖ Leveraged deep industry knowledge, engaging thought leadership, and charismatic speaking abilities to secure features in Tier 1 media publications and conferences, including Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, and TechCrunch ❖ Designed, marketed, and executed a sold-out All Raise Summit in less than 3 months on the job; 500+ women and non-binary VCs and male allies attended; for the first time, race/ethnicity, non-binary genders, geography, and other elements of intersectionality were prioritized in attendee and speaker selections, and diversity metrics were set and achieved ❖ Updated data collection, analysis, and reporting standards and systems, and utilized quantitative and qualitative findings to improve engagement, assess program efficacy, inform change-management, and direct strategy ❖ Transformed volunteer guidelines to improve the outcomes of >200 women, non-binary, and male ally volunteers operating affinity-based programs

Co-Chair of Fortune's Most Powerful Women's Summit

2022 - 2022

Fortune magazine selected Mandela SH Dixon to serve as Co-Chair of their Most Powerful Women (MPW) Summit, held in October 2022 in Laguna Niguel, CA. The MPW began as a list in 1998, and has since evolved into an extraordinary leadership community convening the preeminent women in business, including women in the C-Suite of Fortune 500 companies, along with select leaders in government, philanthropy, education, and the arts. KEY CONTRIBUTIONS: ❖ Advised Fortune's editors on how to effectively integrate topics and speakers from the tech and venture capital ecosystem, so that conference content would keep pace with the innovation economy and its impact across the business world ❖ Nominated and recruited speakers and attendees to the MPW Summit, in order to ensure a diversity of identities, geographies, and backgrounds were represented as main stage speakers and event participants ❖ Served multiple speaking roles at the in-person summit, including interviewing leading women venture capitalists, and two of the world’s most successful Black women tech founders and CEOs

Founder and CEO

2017 - 2022

Founder Gym was the largest online accelerator training underrepresented founders on how to raise their first round of capital to scale their tech startups. Founder Gym’s membership included >600 founders, spanning 26 countries and 6 continents. FG Graduates reside in Australia, Canada, Cayman Islands, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, England, Estonia, France, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, The Philippines, Palestinian Territories, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. KEY CONTRIBUTIONS: ❖ Bootstrapped a lean startup into a seven-figure profitable business within three years of launching ❖ Authored a multi-month curriculum in alignment with Silicon Valley’s fundraising best practices; curriculum designed for optimal accessibility, in order to serve hundreds of pre-seed and seed stage underrepresented founders building tech startups across the globe ❖ Authored the Community Guidelines and Code of Conduct to ensure the digital, global, and diverse community of Founder Gym operated in compliance with DEIB standards ❖ Scaled customer base to over 600 founders residing in 26 countries spanning 6 continents; program graduates raised more than $130M in startup capital from 2018-2022; 1 out of 10 Black women to ever raise $1M or more in funding were graduates of Founder Gym (for context, only 0.34% of VC funding goes to Black women entrepreneurs) ❖ Recruited >100 program instructors from Silicon Valley's most successful companies and VC firms, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator (YC), New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and First Round Capital ❖ Partnered with leading organizations in the startup ecosystem to expand reach, improve trainings, and increase funding; partners included Google for Startups, Microsoft for Startups, Meta (formerly Facebook), Shopify, AnitaB.org, Kapor Center for Social Impact, and Silicon Valley Bank

Advisor to Board of Directors

2020 - 2021

Advised the Founder & CEO of All Birds and varying executives from Google and UC Berkeley on the creation of their new non-profit: Colorwave. The national non-profit focuses on reducing social capital gaps in America’s innovation economy by connecting underrepresented professionals to meaningful career opportunities across the venture-backed ecosystem. KEY CONTRIBUTIONS: ❖ Embedded startup best practices (e.g. design thinking, business model canvas, lean startup) into the non-profit's foundation, in order to ensure experiments were designed and executed with minimal resources and maximum impact ❖ Coached Board of Directors and executive leadership team on how to develop transformative programs that pair historically overrepresented groups (e.g. White male tech founders) with historically underrepresented groups (e.g. Black women tech employees) to achieve shared outcomes ❖ Authored the multi-month curriculum for the program’s inaugural cohort, which focused on teaching Black and Latinx professionals how to access the wealth-creation opportunity of securing equity as early employees of venture-backed startups

Advisor & MC for Afrotech

2016 - 2019

Played a critical role in the early success of Afrotech, the largest tech conference in the world serving the Black community. Afrotech grew from 500 attendees in 2016 to 22,000 attendees in 2023. KEY CONTRIBUTIONS: ❖ Advised Blavity’s CEO on the program design and speaker lineup for the inaugural Afrotech conference held in San Francisco in 2016, and served as the Master of Ceremonies (MC) for the event; ensured attendees, speakers, and sponsors had a superior experience, which contributed to the virality of the event and increased user engagement across various Blavity platforms ❖ Recruited to serve as MC of Afrotech for a second consecutive year (2017), applying exceptional public speaking abilities to captivate the crowd and achieve a transformative experience for all in attendance ❖ Served as a main stage speaker for the third and fourth years of Afrotech (2018 and 2019), training sold out crowds of Black tech startup founders how to raise venture capital