Creating solutions for female tech founders
As we all begin to realize, almost every industry on the planet is affected by technology in one way or another, resulting in the boom of tech as a whole.
Well.. what less people know, is that an interesting group, which forms a small minority, is thriving in this booming tech sector . This group is special: according to research, its members perform remarkably well in almost every business function: from taking initiative and driving results to managing money, fostering teams and company performance.
And when you look at profit, guess what? while at the TOP, leading, members of this group bring the most returns.
Soooooooooooooooooo..
“Woo-hoo for women entrepreneurs!”
as Geri Stengel put it in Forbes piece three years ago.
Now, even though studies say women perform better than their male counterparts, female founders are having a hard time navigating the entrepreneurship landscape which is, sadly, mainly formed of men.
“The chasm”?.. They have to overcome a lot: from understanding important gender differences to the bias they encounter among investors or the fact that they literally have to “catch up” to be competitive. If you add the low access to mentor-ship and you look at how low the supply of mentor groups is, you can double on the “pretty hard time”.
So, even though there is a huge untapped pool of female founders that could successfully start/lead tech companies in the next couple of years, there are plenty of issues to be solved. On the other hand, the current efforts made towards solving those issues, like talks and leadership sessions, seem small and scattered.
Since 2013 I’ve been fortunate enough to work with and to get to know some amazing women entrepreneurs from the Valley and I’ve closely observed this group while advising and helping a non profit activating in the area.
I believe there are a lot of ways to increase the chances for women founders to “make it” but what I envision, is a 3 step scenario. I think this would help future women founders cross the gap and find their way to success, with everyone that’s part of the ecosystem ending up happy:
I. First: Build a knowledge library and a specialized network
As most of the catching up involves an understanding of how things work and what is different for women, I would prioritize building a knowledge library and the instruments to help founders move forward. The library would include:
- A specialized curriculum created with gender learning differences in mind like the one Equita, a non profit and a micro-fund that aims to advance women in technology, is currently building.
- A specialized mentor network to support the curriculum and the way it’s delivered. The increasing number of successful female founders can create the network and they can contribute to the library with real life examples and advice for future entrepreneurs.
II. Build integrations to overcome the bias
Female founders, as PG mentioned, still encounter bias among investors, even though the YC model(similar to Techstars, Angelpad, 500startups etc) is successful in curating companies and getting them founded by awesome VCs. My intuition tells me that investors do know how successful women founders can be, but again, there’s this “gap” that accelerators aren't able to fill yet.
Of course there are many reasons for which this gap exists but no one needs another niche accelerator.
Here, I envision a world where current accelerators integrate with the knowledge library and mentor network above. First, by separating the library from the funds, whoever will build the library will position themselves as an expert and help founders, without having the pressure to make the right investments. This benefits the accelerators and increases their chance to cross the gap as the middle man between investors and female founders.
Let’s take YC. The companies that go through YC(13% founded by women) are usually backed by top tier of VC firms. YC has enough great people for company/founder curation and mentoring(6/21 people are women). Also, they recently started to scale, having enough data to tap into new territories like international entrepreneurs, women founders, hardware, renewable energy, biotech or new production models. By building integrations with the knowledge library they would prove to female founders that they understand them and to VC’s that they’re positioning as the gateway to the untapped pool of future successful women entrepreneurs. This would happen very fast.
Being a woman founder doesn’t change your perspective on which accelerator to pick, as the list of factors that influence you are the same as of a male founder trying to get into YC, but the accelerators that have the integration in place would immediately jump on top of the list for most female founders.
There’s plenty of well founded accelerators on the planet, so disregard of what founders choose, they should be able to integrate with point 1, thus assuring the distribution and scaling of the knowledge library.
III. Achieve what was impossible before
I believe that running a company with the sole purpose of gathering financial resources and returning them at a multiple is flawed. And yes, it turns out that, in 2017, you can build a BIG business, by focusing as much on social impact as you are on profit and there are plenty of examples out there to prove the fact that money and social impact aren’t necessarily designed to sit on opposite sides of the table.
Do you know which group of entrepreneurs, that share the values above, have proved to successfully merge profit and good? Well, they’re primarily women.
BECAUSE THEY F&$%G CARE MORE! They are more empathetic and they react, FASTER and MEANINGFUL to other people joy / misery / grief / problems.
But there’s no systematic way today to discover and help female entrepreneurs (by investing, mentoring, guiding). The knowledge library and the integrations make the process easier, so whoever’s gonna do this will end up creating a global university for new entrepreneurs, which can nourish, accelerate and fund their companies. That pool we’ve been talking about, has the biggest chances to build the next billion dollar company with focus on local community models and huge social impact. So why not maximize the chances for this to happen.
Combine that with the fact that corporations, though their CSR programs or their impact funds have to search and fund initiatives like this(support women impact entrepreneurs). This would make for a proposal that can easily climb the corporate approval process. Besides, there are plenty of people to share the exact same values and also work in professional investing firms. They could also help. I bet that traditional VC firms have a budget allocated for those type of deals.
I see this as the third step in building and scaling the tech women entrepreneur ecosystem.
The future of American growth is in the hands of women, says Kauffman Foundation study released on Women’s Entrepreneurship Day during Global Entrepreneurship Week.
This is true on a global scale, so why not do something to make sure it happens. I know there are a lot of parties actively working on creating solutions. What I’m proposing here is a 3 step framework that might spur results.
