Bringing Tech’s Playbook of Scale to The Women’s Movement: #WCW Pam Kostka, CEO of All Raise
Welcome to All Raise’s Women Crush Weekly (#WCW), a series where we highlight genius women who are funding or founding tech companies. Please come back to the All Raise Medium blog weekly to find a new profile of an awe-inspiring female VC or founder. This month, we’re introducing the All Raise team in preparation for our annual VC Summit, including our CEO Pam Kostka who joined us in April.
In April of 2019, Pam Kostka joined All Raise as our CEO, with the mission to accelerate the success of female funders and founders. Now, six months later, All Raise has expanded to two new markets, brought on five key hires, recruited over 220 mentors (resulting in over 1200 one-on-one mentoring sessions) and can point to 45 investments made through the Founder Deal Flow Network. Under Pam’s leadership, we are making good on our mission to accelerate the success of female founders.
Why? Because women control 70–80% of purchasing power in the United States, but only 11% of decision-makers at U.S.-based venture capital firms are women and only 12% of venture funds go to teams with a female founder.
Women face real challenges in the tech ecosystem. Female VCs in our network talk about being left out of deal flow and mentorship that men in venture gain access to. And female founders report longer timelines, bigger hoops and pitching investors that don’t get their vision. We believe that having more successful women in the venture-back tech ecosystem gets more ideas funded by removing the obstacles female founders face. Obstacles both explicit, like sexism and misogyny embedded into a culture, and implicit, like pattern-matching and bias. This lets us build a more accessible community that reflects the diversity of the world around us.
I talked to Pam to hear her take on All Raise’s mission, our growth and how she’s adopting the technology playbook to deliver on our mission and vision for female funders and founders:
What have you learned about scaling technology companies that you are applying to impact work at All Raise?
All Raise is set up to operate a lot more like a start-up, as opposed to a non-profit where the pace can be slower. Given who our founders are, both in venture and CEO founders is about being a tech company, tech culture is in our DNA. We see this in the way we organize ourselves with precise objectives — called OKRs — that help us keep laser-focused on outcomes. But after that, we pilot, experiment, test and refine our initiatives to see how different strategies can move the needle. It comes from the culture of being unafraid to fail, realizing that we learn by doing. All of these principles of working come from tech and are part of our DNA.
It’s also interesting to look at the principle of “know your customer, know your marketplace” which is the idea of being intimately close to the problem you’re trying to solve. We knew the problem, the pain points, of inequality in business from the perspective of founders and funders. We have an intimate sense of understanding what problem we are trying to solve so we can see the existing framework that isn’t a level playing field for women. By understanding what exists today, we position ourselves to blow that framework up and create the movement, which leads to disruption.
What problem does All Raise solve for women in tech? How universal are these problems?
All Raise exists to amplify female voices, accelerate their success and create a tech culture where women are leading, shaping and funding the future. Our current system is built on pattern recognition and moving fast. Venture capitalists want to lower their risk as much as possible so they are comfortable with the patterns of success they’ve been exposed to. It’s a psychology issue of how people operate. This impact of this is that women have to work harder to move through the demands of being an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist. She gets told no more often. She is left out of deals. She has to work harder and longer, which makes her less effective at doing her job. Our goal is to offer guidance, support, and access to our network. We believe that this will compress the cycle of work and lead to more women-led companies and women funding those companies.
The problem we need to solve is complicated, nuanced, and universal. If it was one thing, we might have solved this a long time ago. But it’s not. It’s a nuanced problem with no quick fix. It’s also a universal problem that impacts, not only women but marginalized people, people of color and people of difference from all walks of life from tech, to policy, to politics.
What have you learned about inclusivity and intersectionality over the last year? How are these learnings impacting your strategy?
I learn every day. Every day is a process of education, having conversations and learning how my own white privilege blocks me. I am lucky to have an incredible staff, volunteers, and mentors and I ask them to hold me to account. We set goals for the representation we want to see in hiring and in our programming and if we aren’t meeting those goals, we stop. We ask the question and we figure out how to do it better.
Last year, we hosted our first Women in Venture Summit and it was historic. 300 women in venture coming together for the first time ever. We learned through that summit that having a panel on diversity and inclusion was not enough. We needed to have diversity and inclusion represented on every panel, every program and on the team designing the program. This year we will host over 600 women in venture and with our team supporting us on program design, we’re going to make good on this learning from last year.
How have you seen All Raise grow since you joined as CEO?
It’s hard to believe it’s only been 6 months, we’ve hardly had a moment to take stock everything has been so fast. We have brought on over 220 mentors including female founders and VCs and they have hosted over 1200 one-on-one mentoring sessions since we started in 2017. We’ve also seen 45 investments made through our Founder Deal Flow Network.
But I’m most proud of the things we can’t quite quantify — like the compression cycle I was talking about earlier. For example, in August we hosted a virtual boot camp which included a month of training and a mentor-match. I saw one of our founders at an event in October and she told me that she had 23 VC meetings on books for fundraising and would likely close the round by Thanksgiving. And that female VCs from the network were funding her. This is the acceleration I’m talking about. We want to tear down the barriers so she gets a lift faster. We want to accelerate that success, that impact so founders can focus on building their companies not trying to keep their heads above water.
How does your website redesign support your strategic vision?
In the beginning, we were just focused on founders and funders, but we realized pretty quickly as the volunteers started raising their hands, that we had a third key constituent in our movement: allies. They wanted to know how to plug-in, how to help. We needed a redesign that answered those questions to let people connect with our brand, our mission and become part of the movement. I’m really proud of the “warrior voice” that we landed on, colors that feel more inclusive and that every photo on the site is from an All Raise community member event.
All Raise has just expanded to Boston and Los Angeles. Why do these markets make sense for the All Raise movement?
It’s a movement, you have to be where the need is. We kept seeing women from LA and Boston flying out to our events so they could meet us in person and realized there was clearly enough demand and it was important to give these women support where they lived.
We also need to be where the venture dollars are flowing. With Boston and Los Angeles, we now have in-market coverage where 70% of the venture dollars are being invested. There’s still a lot for us to learn and we have our eyes on greenfield opportunities in places like the midwest. There are entrepreneurs everywhere.
We just hired five new people. As a non-profit, how do you decide which roles to hire for and which ones are volunteered?
Just like in technology, were informed by looking at the initiatives. We know we have product-market fit because the demand for our All Raise has been so enthusiastic. Now we need to move the needle on our objectives and get the initiatives off the ground. Each hire we make is critical to our vision, but we are also letting ourselves be inspired by the people we meet and finding a role for them based on their talents.
Like Dominique. We didn’t interview Dom, we saw the incredible work she has done with YC and then met her and realized that she needed to be on our team. So we spun up a role that made sense for her ambitions and for our needs: Director of Engagement. She now owns our community programming, events, and engagement for our funders and founders in four cities (soon to be more).
We are so lucky to have so many volunteers in our network. People with important day jobs who are so fired up about All Raise that they devote four to ten hours a week. This isn’t like a political campaign where you get people to come out for a day. These are women who are working diligently on All Raise as if it were a product. There’s something about our culture that we haven’t been able to name but we definitely want to bottle. It’s the idea of intimacy, the personal rewards you get from female comradery and helping each other be successful. It’s powerful.
What have you learned in your first 6-months at All Raise?
I heard Gwenyth Paltrow once say, “Grab on to the tail of the company and let you take it where it will.” There is so much momentum, so much passion around what we’re doing. It’s a movement, not a moment. I look at the passion of our volunteers, women who invest time weekly to offer their talents. I look at the program participants getting funded by our women in VC. I’m staying close to them because this is how the movement gets built.
Also, when you’re building a movement, there’s always going to be more people to serve and people who need to be taken care of. You have to practice self-care and make sure we don’t burn out on our own passion and mission.
