Meagan Loyst, the founder of Gen Z VCs, asked her social media followers for the one thing they would change about venture capital. Here's what they told her.

• Loyst founded Gen Z VCs, a community of over 25,000 young investors, founders and operators.
• After getting nearly 400 responses to her prompt, she sorted the data into four categories.

For newcomers, the clubby world of venture capital can often seem like a black box. That's at least what the group of over 25,000 young investors, founders, and operators have been telling Meagan Loyst for years, and it's something that she wants to change.

Loyst, a former investor at Lerer Hippeau and founder of the online community Gen Z VCs, put out a call out to her thousands of LinkedIn and X followers and asked them: "If you could change one thing about VC, what would it be?"

Nearly 400 investors, founders, and operators replied to her, she told Insider. While not all of those investors were part of Gen Z, many young people weighed in, given the nature of Loyst's network, she clarified.

"I think it's important to approach everything in a community-oriented way, versus inserting my own opinions at the outset," Loyst said. "So, I thought I'd do what I do best—leverage my platform to actually ask people about what's broken."

According to her poll, 45% of respondents said they wished the venture capital industry was "more accessible" to newcomers. And 28% of those that responded said they wanted the industry to be "more transparent," 18% wanted the industry to be "more open-minded," while 9% said they wished the industry had "better alignment" with their social values, such as an emphasis on sustainability or mental health.

Loyst also noted that within the responses that wished for the VC industry to be more accessible, over 60% of those responses directly called for more diversity on the investor side of the table.

Diversity has been a longstanding issue in venture capital, and within the past few years, efforts and initiatives to tackle homogeneity in the industry have gained steam. Yet those efforts have yet to make a significant dent in the disparity.

According to PitchBook's 2022 report on women in the US VC ecosystem, women check-writers at firms make up 16.1% of all investors at the decision-making level, and Black investors account for only 4% of all VCs in the US, according to the nonprofit Blck VC's 2023 State of Black Venture report.

Loyst's survey responses are reflective of how many young investors and founders feel shut out of the venture capital industry today, which could potentially get worse during the venture capital downturn. Venture funds like the startup accelerator Y Combinator laid off members of their growth investing team, joining many VC-backed startups that made the decision to cut staff this year. Sequoia also laid off seven staffers from its talent team over the summer, Forbes reported.

During times of market uncertainty, there can also be a tendency for businesses to shy away from increasing accessibility, which includes less of a focus on diversity initiatives.

Loyst is now enrolled in an MBA program at Oxford University and part of the impetus behind the survey was to help her generate data for her master's thesis on helping young people build wealth through investing, she said. While these results don't immediately point to clear solutions to these problems, Loyst offered up some thoughts, including advocating for making the asset class more open to newcomers.

"Within the responses, there were asks for more female GPs, diverse angels & boards, seeing more female founders get funded, and opportunities for more women, people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, to join the VC space in general," she said. [The industry] is probably going to need systemic change."