Why this tech executive started a #binderfullofwomenfounders

Asking VCs to open their wallets for women-led businesses

Chia-Lin Simmons is CEO and co-founder of Red Helicopter. She’s also founder of a “mini-movement”:#binderfullofwomenfounders, a crowdsourced project to direct capital to women business owners. She talked with me for my newsletter, Talk Story — subscribe here.

Why did you decide to leave the corporate world and make the leap to startups?

Google has been considered one of the top companies to work at in the U.S., and I’ve been so fortunate to work with some of the smartest people in the world. Making the plunge from corporate to entrepreneurship was certainly not an easy decision. I’ve actually worked as an executive and VP of Marketing for a number of large corporations such as Amazon, Audible, Harman…but I’ve also worked as an executive for a number of startup companies. When one takes a step from being a corporate executive to being a founder, it is such a profoundly different experience. Suddenly, rather than being someone who is making very high-level strategic decisions — but ultimately, it’s not just you, it is a very big corporate entity that is owned by thousands and thousands of shareholders — it’s suddenly a situation where you and the company have very little distinction. Every positive movement and every negative setback becomes much more personal.

I think that being able to learn to ride the emotional roller coasters of being an entrepreneur is so crucial. But it is an amazing experience, and I would recommend any women to make that leap. From as young as someone who’s coming out of college, to someone who’s 50 or 60, if they feel they’re financially capable and emotionally ready. There’s nothing like feeling like you’re building something from scratch. I find that that sort of sense of hands-on experience of building a business to be really one of the most profound experiences, second to having my daughter and getting married.

Tell me about how and why you started #bindersfullofwomenfounders.

I’m sure some folks will know that in the 2008 election, Mitt Romney stated that he was trying to bring more women and minorities into his cabinet, (and that) in fact, he had access to “binders full of women.” And yet, none of these women never ended up in his cabinet when he was governor of Massachusetts. This really started out as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke around “binders full of women,” and came out of a Twitter experience I had with a VC. The venture capital world can be incredibly myopic; their question is, “We want to be supportive, so where are these lists of women founders that we can access? We’re not seeing the deal flow pipeline.”

The reality is, women own 29 percent of businesses in the US. But they are not funded through venture capital. That number is not what we see in Silicon Valley and in the venture capital world. Venture capital puts around $114B to work and 90 percent of that money never sees a woman founder. A lot of these women are bootstrapping out of their kitchens, they’re raising money from friends and family — like, literally, “here’s $1,000 from my cousin.” In my case, my mother left me gold, as any good Chinese family members do — gold jewelry pieces I would never wear — and I’ve sold gold to pay for my product.

We all believe that the list of women founders is so small they can be gathered into a list. I pretty much said, “There is no such list. There isn’t one, but I’m going to make one.” I’ve generated a list of women founders — over 100 women and growing — with how much they’re looking to raise, stage of funding, where they’re located, what their business is about, how much they’ve already raised. I’m emailing these lists to venture capitalists. I want to hand over the list to people who can write the checks. There are so many things happening in Silicon Valley right now, so much rhetoric, so much business built around the idea of helping women and minority founders. But so little of it is doing the thing that is the single most important thing to any founder, which is raising capital. We’re giving each other hugs, and commiserating about how we’re not raising money. And it’s great, but I’m paying $25 to basically hug it out with another woman at a conference. Or people are giving rhetoric about how they’re supportive, but I’ve never seen a check out of their organizations. My feeling is, I’m doing my part as a woman founder and a longtime tech executive in Silicon Valley, to say, “Look, here is this VC who I’m handing over a list of names to, and I pray to God these folks will open their wallets for their firms, or individually as angels, and write a check to these women.” That, and #changetheratio — bring more women into venture capital.

Some VCs say that founders who aren’t getting discovered don’t have enough hustle or a standout product that’s finding customers. How do you respond to that?

It’s clearly untrue. The reality is, let’s take a look at the makeup of how people get to know each other in Silicon Valley. For example, a certain sort of VC was starting a tiny incubator program, and they have an associate leading this. Amazingly well-meaning people, but one of the things that came out during my discussion with them was that they got a call from their male friends from McKinsey who said, “Ok, we’re leaving McKinsey, we’re starting a startup. We need a place to land.” They ended up in this little incubator project where they got support from the VCs. Because they’re friends, and because they knew each other thru McKinsey, and grad school, this is how they got it. Not in an open call the way they might have on Shark Tank or America’s Makers. (Those shows) are making a call for women and minorities, because they want to see diversity. There’s no such call necessarily from VCs.

So the question is, how do you access these people? You can’t just cold call. So if you don’t have access because you didn’t go to school at Harvard, you’re out of luck. When we talk about hustle, this is not a fair assessment. You could spend all your time trying to find the right network. I think that is a very challenging business, to access the rarified field of 40-something white men who are very, very, wealthy. It’s not everyone’s norm.

I can’t tell you how uncomfortable it is for me to see, when I go to networking events in the Valley, clusters of white men gathered together, and of course maybe one of them is a VC, or a powerful VP. You see this uncomfortable social and physical maneuvering of women and minority founders trying to jockey a space to chat with them. We live in a world today where we’re incredibly unaware of our physical space, and the social norms of good conversation. So you don’t see the expansion of that circle. They’re very intent on having their conversation. I’ve had an urge to take a photo and call it “isolation.” These circles are non-expansive and non-inclusive.

Tell me about an object that brings you peace or pleasure.

My violin. My parents bought this incredibly expensive, wonderful violin for me when I was 13 years old. It made me feel like a grown up and so responsible that they had so much faith in me to invest in this violin and my playing. I was the orchestra geek growing up, playing at one point in three orchestras. When I look at that violin, touch it and play it, the richness of the tone makes me happy. It also gives me a sense of security from my childhood. This idea that so long as I play in tune with my group, and we worked together, we would make beautiful music together. I sometimes play with my daughter, who’s learning how to play the violin and viola. It’s fun to play together and I hope I can get back to it again sometime soon.