Introduction
Kevin Withane came home one day and everything was gone. His daughter, the cleaner, his ex-wife, all of it, mid-way through what was supposed to be an orderly separation. He didn't know where his daughter was. He ended up walking the streets in the heat, working through a family phone number until someone finally answered, and that was how he learned she was in Taiwan.
What followed was a court process that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost. His daughter, now 12, has built a life there. He sees her on a weekly basis, but it is not the relationship he wants, and some years he has gone almost three years without holding her.
That loss sits underneath everything Kevin Withane has built since: a senior legal career across Asia, Europe and the US, and DiversityX, a fast-growing community and emerging venture fund for founders he calls "underestimated." This is the story of how a man who describes himself as "a dark version of the person I wanted to be" found his purpose, and turned it into a mission to change who gets access to capital.
A childhood spent hustling
Kevin grew up in Enfield, North London, in a house that looked comfortable from the outside and wasn't always easy on the inside. His parents divorced, remarried, divorced again. At one point he and his brother were living out of a single room with a microwave in it, in their own family home, because the relationship with a stepmother had turned difficult.
What he remembers most fondly, though, is the hustle. As young kids, he and his brother mixed shampoo and conditioner together, poured it into bottles, dressed up in their dad's oversized suits, and went door to door on the high street trying to sell it. At secondary school, where pupils couldn't leave the premises, he ran a penny sweets operation out of stock his dad brought home from working security at a wholesaler, undercutting the one rival seller on price because he was buying near enough for free.
Then came the paper round. He held three or four at once, and to this day he says it's the wealthiest he has ever felt: money in his pocket that was entirely his own, tips at Christmas, and a sense of freedom that stuck with him long after he moved into more conventional work.
Paying his own way through law
Kevin studied law at a time when student grants were being phased out. His family wasn't wealthy, and when his father's income tipped over a threshold in his second year, his grant disappeared and he was pushed onto loans instead. So he built his own solution: he made a CV, walked around London during every university holiday, and knocked on the door of every local law firm he could find, offering to take notes in family cases.
One firm said yes. He realised other students needed the same opportunity, and other firms needed the same service, so he turned it into a small clocking-in business, sending students out to take notes for law firms and paying them a cut while they got real case experience. He ran it all the way through university and bar school, funding himself through one of the most expensive stages of a legal career.
Choosing corporate law over family law
Ironically, the experience that shaped his empathy also steered him away from family law. Having lived through his parents' divorce, he knew he couldn't do that work professionally. "It's heartbreaking," he says. "I'm quite an emotional person, and it will break me." He chose corporate and commercial law instead, reasoning that if he made a mistake there, it would cost a company money rather than damage a person's life directly.
A career built across borders
Kevin's law career took him through private practice in China and Hong Kong, then a striking posting to Russia, where his new colleagues didn't speak to him for the first two weeks because they assumed a UK-qualified lawyer at a US firm with no ties to Russia had to be a spy. He started smoking just to have a reason to step onto the balcony and get to know people.
The 2008 financial crisis caught up with him there. He watched his firm cut ten percent of its global staff, assumed his office might be spared, and was mid-way through booking World Cup tickets when the senior partner called him in. He negotiated an exit, signed the paperwork, and had a week to leave the country.
Back in the UK with no corporate work available anywhere, he tried to pick up temp work in Enfield and couldn't get any of it. One agency told him outright he was overqualified. Another asked him to prove he was really from Enfield because his CV "didn't sound like it." With nothing lined up, he bought a beaten-up old camper van on eBay for around £400, did it up with his mum's help, and drove it around France, Italy and Spain for six weeks with no fixed plan. He then flew to Thailand chasing a job that fell through, and finally enrolled to learn Chinese in Taiwan, where his then-wife was from.
That period of drift eventually led him back into work, into the in-house legal role he still holds twelve years later, and it took him to Oxford, Shanghai, Hong Kong and, from 2017, the United States.
Why he left America
The decision to leave the US in the middle of the pandemic wasn't made lightly. His wife was pregnant with their second child, and the couple weighed up staying against coming home. Part of it was political: they worried about what a return of Donald Trump to office would mean for them. Part of it was personal experience of racism in the US. And part of it was a moment that stopped him cold: realising his son, about to start Pre-K, would soon be taught what is now called active shooter training.
"I was like, what sort of world do we have?" he says. With no family support nearby and a second child on the way, the answer became obvious. They moved back to the UK, lived with his in-laws for three months while buying a house they'd only seen once, and settled close to both sets of parents. Kevin describes the sense of rootedness and voice he has felt since coming home as something he never had in "the land of the free."
The custody battle that broke him open
The hardest chapter, though, predates the move to America. During his time in Asia, Kevin and his first wife separated, and in the process, she left, taking their daughter with her. He didn't know where they'd gone until a phone call confirmed they were in Taiwan. What followed was a legal process that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he lost.
He has made peace with the outcome. His daughter, now 12, is settled and has built a life there, and he sees her weekly, though not with the flexibility or frequency he wants. Some years he has gone almost three years without seeing her in person.
"I thought I was handling it. That's the truth, but I wasn't," he says. "I was a dark version of the person I wanted to be." He threw himself into work, into climbing, into being someone he didn't recognise. He calls himself a bottler, someone who boxes feelings up rather than talking about them, even with his wife.
Learning to open up
What eventually shifted things was counselling. It gave him a way to start talking, including to his wife, about how he actually felt. Through that process he came across the Japanese concept of ikigai, the idea of understanding your purpose through what you're here to do and how you serve others. He describes himself as spiritual rather than religious, and ikigai gave him a framework that fit.
A lesson from Okinawa
Wanting time to sit with these ideas, he flew alone to Okinawa, an island known for having one of the highest concentrations of people who live past 100. He had 24 hours, a three-hour bus journey into a village where he didn't speak the language, and no plan. A local man approached him, took him for coffee, then spent the afternoon introducing him to his family, his friends and his daughter's household, at one point roping Kevin into helping fix a toilet.
He never met anyone over 100, but he spent hours with people in their eighties and nineties, and asked them why they stayed so close. The answer: a sense of belonging. People left the island and came back, tethered to each other, serving one another in small, constant ways. "That's what we've just done," the man told him, pointing at the afternoon they'd spent together. It stayed with Kevin. It was the moment his purpose crystallised: to use his skills to help others make the world a better place. He writes it at the bottom of his journal every day.
Why "underestimated," not "underrepresented"
That purpose is the engine behind DiversityX, a community Kevin founded for founders and entrepreneurs he deliberately calls "underestimated" rather than "underrepresented." His argument is precise: women founders, founders of colour, LGBT+ founders, disabled founders, they are not underrepresented in ambition or ability. They are well represented. What they are underestimated in is the equitable allocation of capital, and in the assumptions investors make about their ability to deliver returns.
DiversityX exists as a safe space to share those experiences, including the uncomfortable ones. Kevin doesn't soften this: he describes hearing founders talk about investors overstepping boundaries and expecting something in return, and says plainly that these are the same patterns as any other abuse of power. The community exists partly so people don't have to carry those stories alone.
Building capital access, not just conversation
Community was never the end point. Kevin, alongside partner Marcus and advisor Joyita, is building a venture capital fund to invest directly in underestimated founders, plus a founder education programme covering both business skills and the life skills founders need, tailored specifically to people who haven't had the access others take for granted.
He is candid about why this matters to him personally: he has three mixed-race children, a 12-year-old daughter and two young sons. He wants sustainable businesses to exist in six, thirteen, eighteen years' time that were built by people who look like his kids, not because it's a nice thing to do, but because he has seen enough reports confirming the same problem without enough action following them. "I'm done with the reports," he says. "Good intentions are great when you actually do something about it."
Community over competition
One principle runs through everything Kevin has built: no competitors, only collaborators. He points to founders in similar sectors, sustainable fashion is one example, who support each other rather than guard territory, because the market opportunity is bigger than any single founder can capture. DiversityX runs a Friday ritual where members share their "wins, losses, and obstacles not yet overcome," treating every outcome as something worth learning from and celebrating.
Growing it hasn't been simple. Kevin describes the tension of scaling a community faster than he could manage alone, the difficulty of finding the right unpaid collaborators, and the ongoing grind of raising capital for the fund itself. He's also had to push back on the assumption that supporting underestimated founders means lowering the bar. It doesn't. "They still have to deliver on all of the other things," he says. "I have a fiduciary duty, and I take that seriously."
Human leadership
Asked how he defines leadership, Kevin doesn't reach for a corporate framework. He calls it human leadership: showing up as yourself, open and vulnerable, setting a vision people genuinely buy into, and never losing sight of the fact that leadership is about serving others, not being served. He finds it strange when people leave organisations on bad terms. His instinct is gratitude: thank people for choosing to spend their time and energy with you, because they could always have gone elsewhere.
The partner behind the scenes
Kevin is unambiguous about who makes all of this possible. He calls his wife his "first LP," borrowing the venture capital term for limited partner. Not cash in, but everything else: covering the parenting load when he travels, keeping him grounded, giving him the energy to keep building. "Without her, none of it could happen," he says.
