In his 30-plus years of experience, Nitin Rai has witnessed the venture capital market rise and fall and rise again. These same highs and lows applied to his journey within the industry, often involving challenges beyond funding.
But the path to success in the U.S. was shaped by a challenging and impactful journey.
Today, Nitin serves as the managing partner of Elevate Capital. But he spent his youth in India. Once he turned 18, through a stroke of luck, he was accepted to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he studied computer science. In 1987, he was presented with another opportunity in Silicon Valley to work at an AI startup when the technology was “a thing but not a thing.”
However, despite his rising career, Nitin quickly faced the pervasive unconscious and subconscious biases embedded within the VC ecosystem.
Fundraising in a Financial Desert
During his early years in the tech industry, Nitin observed that, despite many immigrant engineers being highly skilled, they were often perceived as unprepared for leadership roles. Additionally, those on the path to obtaining green cards found themselves frequently earning 20% less than their legal counterparts.
“So that was the proverbial glass ceiling,” he says. “Eventually, I decided that this wasn’t for me.” So Nitin quit his job and returned to Portland with just $1,000 in his pocket.
By 1994, he had launched a highly successful electronic health records (EHR) company, First Insight Corporation. However, growth began to stall with a lack of capital.
He explains that during the 1980s and 90s, early-stage or seed funding was scarce, especially in Portland. So he was forced to bootstrap for about two years.
“It was: you do whatever you do, then you go to a VC for a Series A, and then you go public,” he continues. “Angels did it, but you needed networks to access them, and those networks in Portland were few and far between.”
Fundraising was even harder without the right connections. Exclusive venues like the Arlington Club required knowing key investors, who often dismissed him between lunch anyway.
“Everything that I’m doing today is based on my own experiences as a young engineer from India.”
Navigating VC as an Immigrant
For years, Nitin felt overlooked and underappreciated while trying to find his place in the VC world.
Due to his immigrant status, any upward momentum within a company usually came with strings, whether that denying him equivalent pay or withholding any real authority.
Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of a range of prejudices he would be up against.
As he was building First Insight Corporation, a competitor found out that he was employing Indian talent and discouraged potential customers from doing business with him because he employed “a bunch of foreigners.”
“The irony was that this company was outsourcing their debt to Malaysia. Talk about duplicity,” he says.
“Even in my own company, I experienced it firsthand,” he continues. “[An employee] called me a sand n****r. He called my Indian employees [and] Indian customers ‘dots’ in text messages to another sales employee.”
“That’s a lot to have to just deal with while you’re just trying to do what you love.” But, as with other immigrants, failure was never an option.
“Most of us have come here with nothing. [Immigrants come to the U.S.] to seek a better opportunity, they’re wired to survive. You know, all we’re doing is surviving.”
Validation Through Mentorship
Despite the trials and tribulations, Nitin always continued to move forward. This set him on the path to colliding with one of the most important people he would ever meet.
In 2014, Nitin was seeking grant funding from the Meyer Memorial Trust when he met Rukaiyahyah Adams, the former chief investment officer (CIO) of Meyers.
After his pitch to the panel, Rukaiyah pulled him aside and admitted to closely following his work. She was curious about his next career move, suggesting he consider launching a fund, which Nitin initially rejected.
Undeterred, Rukaiyah pushed him, promising, “If you change your mind, we’ll write you a check.” It was the first unsolicited offer Nitin had received in his 30 year career.
“Nobody’s ever validated me like that,” he says. “It put something inside of me that I didn’t think I had. She just invoked the grit and the passion and it just was like, this is going to be my life’s work.”
“I look at everything very differently after that experience, because what these entrepreneurs need, they don’t need just the capital. They need validation.”
Nitin applied all these lessons to his work.
“It also opened my eyes to the pain and suffering of the historic black community. I spent a year going to conferences and meeting people and trying to understand.”
Confronting and Challenging Personal Prejudices
Nitin says he’s working to pay his success forward, and not just for immigrants.
He has a high level of respect and gratitude for the Jewish, Black, and Latino communities, as they were the ones to pave the way for people like him.
But it didn’t start that way.
“As an immigrant, [you’re] not taught anything about slavery,” he explains. “And for me, I was pretty, pretty blunt. I’d ask people like: ‘Hey, I came here with nothing and I made it. Why can’t you?’”
As one person explained to him, “Well, you had grounding. You had parents. You actually had some privilege that got you here. We were bought and sold,” Nitin recalls. “I could never—after that—look at a Black person the same way.”
Reflecting on the conversation, he couldn’t help but ask Rukaiyah why she chose to invest in him. She replied, “Well, I had this feeling that you would cross over.” But more importantly, she wanted to see his “people helping [her] people.”
“That was another poignant moment for me—one that drove me to rally my community. To ask them to invest in me so I could, in turn, invest in them.”
In a twist of fate, the door to the U.S. was actually opened by someone he wants to help now.
“Back in those days, Indian engineers often had their visa applications rejected at consulates because we were seen as a risk,” he says. “Here’s the irony—my H1 visa was stamped by a Black woman who told me, ‘I got you.’”
‘Stay Centered, Stay Calm.’
In these uncertain times, there’s plenty to fear as a minority population, especially as an immigrant Nitin says he believes in staying calm and not reacting emotionally or get overly stressed.
“I’m in wait-and-see mode,” he says. “Just remember, most companies I invest in survive in a lot of storms on a dinghy.”
For him, what matters most is fighting on the ground level by creating sustainable profits.
“Success is about creating wealth and liquidity,” he explains. “It’s a multi-generational problem to solve. We focus on that with these founders. Eventually things will rise, and things will change.”
About the Author: Tess Danielson is a journalist and writer focusing on the intersection of technology and society.
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