The Power of Collectives

When we set out to start #ANGELS five years ago, our focus was on angel investing — finding the most compelling founders and companies and backing them. Along the way, we’ve discovered the opportunity for us to extend the sense of community we feel among the 6 of us to a wider audience of women founders, operators, and investors across the industry through a variety of events.

We didn’t set out to do events — it feels like there are so many already. But alas, we keep coming back to them being a powerful way to activate change and embolden all of us to push through systemic barriers to equality in our industry.

To date, we’ve hosted over two dozen events with hundreds of women in attendance in total. We maintain a spreadsheet of women we’ve invited to these events that we affectionately call our “binder of women” which has turned out to be a valuable resource of potential candidates for our portfolio companies and high-impact roles across our industry — even our own successors! We’ve also used this list to syndicate angel investing opportunities to trusted operators in our network who we know will be incredibly valuable to founders.

What we’ve found through this community — what our friend Christa Quarles has aptly referred to as a “sisterhood of women” — is that we are all hungry to find community and partnership around the issues that matter most to us. For the 6 of us #ANGELS, the constancy of a group of trusted women in a partnership that blends business, purpose, and friendship has been an anchor for all of us for the past half-decade and will be for decades to come. We wish for all women to have such a group.

We haven’t shared much about our events because we’ve found they work best when they are small in size, but we wanted to do so now because we’ve tried some approaches out that are pretty replicable for other groups who want to convene, and be conveners, in their communities.

We have found it valuable to be fluid in our topics, target attendee criteria, and format for our events. In 2015–2017, a lot of the women in our industry simply didn’t know other women in similar positions to them. We held a series of events where we convened women operators, and brought in a VC partner as a sponsor (thanks to many firms who partnered with us!). During that time, we identified a need in the market to connect great women with VC firms and vice versa.

During these dinners, we discovered that conversation swung between angel investing and operating at scale to egg freezing, breastfeeding, and skincare regimens freely. For many of us, these dinners presented some of the first opportunities to bring our full selves to an “industry dinner” and the results were magical.

Next, we shifted more toward topics that mattered to our industry at large but created unique spaces for women to learn and share. Our Negotiation Summit with Lightspeed & Carta and our Crypto Summit with A16Z are examples of this format, which were larger events with a full slate of content programming.

In 2019 and 2020, we’ve found that many of our peers are, like us, looking to go beyond business to talk about topics which might have previously been too taboo for group discussion. Women face unprecedented responsibilities in their professional and personal lives, and we can’t talk about our careers and financial equality without talking about the other items on our plates.

Last November, we hosted 25 women for a first-of-its-kind salon about Maternity Leaves — bringing together women who’ve been through it and others who will soon. Our discussion focused on how to balance significant leadership responsibility with the practical needs and desires of bringing a new child into the world. While parental policies are improving for many women, there is no playbook for how to manage continuity for your organization and business let alone finding a new rhythm for work upon return from your leave which makes space in evenings and weekends for caregiving and connection at home.

And last week, we brought together a group of women with a range of sophistication and experience with philanthropy. We spoke openly and learned from one another about how to act on the pull we all feel to have a broader impact on society (in spite of aforementioned limitations on our time and resources). We learned from Sasha Buscho, COO of Google.org and our co-host, Caroline Barlerin, the former global head of social impact at both Eventbrite & Twitter, and each other valuable tips on how to go about making philanthropic giving a part of our practices.

We’ve often said that the reason we focus on gender equity and #TheGapTable is that the wealth creation in our industry has broad-reaching societal impacts: it dictates what kinds of founders, ideas, and spaces get funded. But further still, equity-fueled wealth creation influences which political candidates and philanthropic causes get backed. As equity ownership shifts (very slowly) in the favor of more equality, the responsibility to use these gains for impact will increase as well — and women will find themselves in a new set of rooms which are unfamiliar for many of us.

Five years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the “market demand” for these topics. By tuning into the community of women around us, we’ve discovered that simply creating the space for candor, curiosity, and connection is one of the most important things we can do to serve our own community. We hope you might find a similar approach proves valuable for the communities to which you belong.