Why I’m funding Women in Hardware in 2016
I founded Grit Labs in 2014 to help seed-stage hardware startups traverse the chasm from concept to launch. I’ve met some amazing entrepreneurs these last couple years and surprisingly a lot of women founders. I think the timing is right to lead the way in investing in women in hardware and bring attention to the power of diversity in a founding team.
I’ve never really had the opportunity to work directly with more than a few women. My first hardware engineering job out of grad school was at Sun Microsystems. I was assigned to a workstation motherboard design team and given a woman mentor. I didn’t realize that she was the only other woman in hardware engineering until she left a month later.
A few years later when I was at Stanford Business School I co-founded The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs (now known as Watermark) to support women in technology, investment, and entrepreneurial careers. After graduation I joined a top tier venture fund, Sevin Rosen Funds, as their first woman partner. At the time, you could count the number of women tech CEOs or VCs on one hand.
I spent 10 lonely years at Sevin Rosen Funds funding optical and wireless equipment and software startups and not a single one of my investments had a woman founder despite my role as Co-Founder and Chair of the Watermark Board.
Of course the number of venture-backed women entrepreneurs and women partners in venture funds did increase dramatically during the 90s and we celebrated those women at Watermark.
But the numbers decreased again when the bubble burst in 2000 and the recession hit in 2008. Watermark began to focus more on women executives in large technology companies. I despaired until the millennials arrived in force.
Today women are 31% of STEM degrees, but only 14% of startups have a female founder nationally. We are making progress though. According to Crunchbase the percentage of female founders doubled in 2014. Most of these founders are millennial women.
According to First Round Capital, female Founders outperform their male peers.: Ten Year Project: companies with a female founder performed 63% better than our investments with all-male founding teams. And, if you look at First Round’s top 10 investments of all time based on value created for investors, three of those teams have at least one female founder — far outpacing the percentage of female tech founders in general.
Millennial women are fearless and talented and starting up hardware companies in droves. Kate McAndrew at Bolt, founded an organization, Women In Hardware, to connect female founders, engineers, investors, manufacturers, and marketers building the future of connected hardware. Women in Hardware has hundreds of members and is growing rapidly!
At CES this year, 3 of 4 CES 2016 Hardware Battlefield finalists had women founders. The winner? 6SensorLabs! The CEO/Co-Founder is Shireen Yates.
Other finalists included: Carly Fennell at Wiivv and Rosanna Myers at Carbon Robotics.
You’d think Silicon Valley would be at the forefront of all this progress. But with the numbers in Silicon Valley lagging the national averages, It’s no surprise that Stanford has a campaign for greater gender diversity in computational sciences and engineering. #30by30 is a campaign to rally companies, universities, and other organizations to strive for 30+% female participation in Computational Science and Engineering roles, at all levels, in their institutions by the year 2030. I support this initiative, but the goal is too low. How about #30by20??
There is much to celebrate today. Stanford launched it’s first Women in Data Science Conference this year and it sold out almost immediately. The caliber of technical talent and quality of the presentations was amazing.
Here’s some inspiring stories of some amazing women in hardware: PCH presents Women in Hardware. Let’s profile more of these women!
I’d also like to urge all you kick-ass hardware women founders and techies to join the organization: Women in Hardware. And let me know if you need help getting your startup from concept to launch!
