I'm Jonathan K. Parton. Welcome to K-Part. One of the big knocks against Wall Street is that the

world of finance and the capital it has access to are not very open to women and people of color.

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the national protests his death inspired,

Richard Parsons decided to build an equity pipeline. If anyone could get it done, it's Mr. Parsons.

His resume reads like a blue chip registry, Chairman of CityCorp, Chairman and CEO of DimeBankor,

Chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Interim Chairman of CBS. And he's put that expertise and experience

into co-founding equity alliance with the stated goal, quote, to democratize access to capital.

In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post Live, on March 23rd, Parsons doesn't just

talk about equity alliance. He talks about Silicon Valley Bank, the accusations of woke capitalism

and the action taken by the federal government. The federal government stepped up and did the right

thing. They learned something from 2008. Let's talk about the leadership you're engaged in now,

Mr. Parsons. What exactly is equity alliance and how are you measuring success? Is it just the

bottom line? No, it's not just the bottom line. Let me start from the beginning to build up a little

bit. The equity alliance was an idea that I had with a friend of mine in Kenya earlier. We were

sitting around in the wake of George Floyd. And I was complaining about the fact that

everything that the people were reporting and complaining about with the George Floyd incident,

incident, incident, excuse me. It sounded like 50 years ago when I was, you know, a college student

or a law school student, just coming out of school. And we had all the rides in Detroit,

in New York, in Philadelphia, when the commission reported on the causes of these rides,

that disappointed the story. And you could have taken the first page out of that.

And read it 50 years later with the George Floyd's and same issues, you know, and discrimination,

poor housing, lack of educational quality, lack of job opportunities, unfair policing. Nothing

...