Richie Serna is the Co-Founder & CEO of Finix, a San Francisco based payments infrastructure company that gives SaaS businesses the ability to own, manage, and monetize their payments in-house. Since co-founding his company in 2015, Richie has gone on to raise over $100 million from some of the top firms in Silicon Valley and has undoubtedly become one of tech's most highly visible Latinx CEOs. A first-generation Mexican-American with humble roots stemming from Santa Ana, CA, Richie is a shining beacon of success for the Latinx community in America and beyond.

In our final episode of Season 1, Richie goes deep to his roots growing up in Santa Ana, his experiences of enduring racism as a young man, and the difficult lessons he went through during the process of building Finix as a true Silicon Valley outsider. Those experiences and learnings came to a head in the Summer of 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Finding inspiration with his friend and Seed investor Alejandro Guerrero’s Diversity Rider, Richie explains how he used his platform, power and influence as a co-founder of a “hot” Silicon Valley company to bring 80 Black and Latinx individuals as co-investors into his Series B extension for the purpose of access, attribution and generational wealth.

Dave Young is a Partner at Cooley LLP, a preeminent law firm headquartered in Silicon Valley with 5+ decades of experience in Venture Capital and one of the legal market leaders in the entire VC space. Dave has been a tech lawyer for over 25 years where his practice has consistently been representing venture backed companies and their inventors. He founded the Santa Monica office for Cooley in 2012 and has since grown it to over 60 employees, while gaining a reputation as one of the top law tech lawyers in the Los Angeles tech and venture capital ecosystem.

Dave was instrumental as an advisor in the evolution of the actual language that ultimately became the Diversity Rider. In this episode of the Diversity Riders Podcast, Dave shares the insight of how lawyers and executives across Cooley came together in the Summer of 2020 to discuss and formally include the Diversity Rider in their internal term sheet generator for all their clients, and also their external term sheet generator for the general public at Cooley GO.