Kt McBratney: Why We Need More Women Founders & Here Is What We Are Doing To Make That Happen
An Interview With Vanessa Ogle
Challenge limiting systems. Think critically about how systems of power, capital, and access contribute to the gender gap where you sit. It will be different for each of us, but examining and challenging these where they limit opportunity and outcome is where you can identify the weak points to poke through to make meaningful changes.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kt McBratney.
Kt McBratney (she/they) is obsessed with disrupting the status bro. As a General Partner and Head of Community at Renew Venture Capital, she’s passionate about shifting how we invest in and build companies toward putting more good in the world. She brings her experience as a founder, operator, and longtime marketing leader to her work, overseeing the experience for portfolio companies and investors across the firm’s venture studio, strategic impact fund, and Purpose Rounds® expansion capital offerings.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’m proud to share that my path to venture capital is definitely a non-traditional one. I graduated with a journalism degree, which honed my writing, storytelling, and question-asking skills. I began my career in marketing for nonprofits, a digital agency, and e-commerce before moving into early-stage startups. I co-founded a company in 2020 that was acquired in 2023, and that put me in a privileged position of being able to reflect on what I wanted to do in this next season of my career. I was introduced to Renew VC’s managing partner Mark Hubbard during this time, and we quickly realized a shared vision for community as a strategic and vital component for a firm rooted in purpose.
Working in venture capital wasn’t on my bingo card, but my experience as an operator and founder building for and through community has proven relevant, transferable, and valuable. In this role, I can be a bridge from funder to founder, generalist to specialist, and purpose to profit. That’s really special.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m grateful to so many people who have helped me across my career! In particular, I’d like to thank the often invisible team members who are essential and underappreciated: the janitorial and maintenance staff when I worked in office settings, the folks who organize team celebrations and make sure people feel valued on their work anniversaries and birthdays, the people who pushed for policies like work from home, flexible schedules and inclusive language who I never met or even learned their names. These people have made my work and how I work possible, and I hope to pay it forward to the people I work with now and who will come in the next generation of changemakers.
My first job after college was at a zoo. On my first day, my manager told me that if I saw a piece of trash on the grounds, it was my job to pick it up and not walk past it. We’re all responsible for caring for the Work, and sometimes that means picking up an empty juice box. All work is valuable. That’s a mentality that I use to this day.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I joke that I’m a borderline book hoarder, so asking me to choose one is so hard! While I’ve read most of the conventional business books out there, I find the ones that have impacted my career the most fall blissfully outside that category. One I regularly turn to is All About Love by bell hooks. Her exploration of what love is and where it may be present or absent in communities and systems we live in profoundly resonates with how I want to show up as a leader and collaborator. I believe in relationships, not transactions. This book, and hooks’ work overall, deepens my commitment to avoid extraction and create value in our growth-above-everything culture. All About Love is a book I can open at random any day and find a gem of truth I can apply right then and there to big and small actions.
Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?
I’ll summon the magic of Dolly Parton here, with a quote that I discovered later in my journey: “Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.”
As someone who has never neatly fit into boxes, especially in a professional world, I felt the pressure to fit in for as long as I can remember. I also care very hard — if I do something, I am going to really commit and do it. Those two realities sometimes meant I worked very hard to mold myself into what was needed of me versus who I truly was. I needed to feel this quote to practice it, and I got that opportunity after being unexpectedly laid off. I vividly remember walking to the parking lot, blinking into the fall sun with a head full of worries and thoughts, when it clicked — I knew who I was, and I was only going to do it on purpose with regard to my career. That led me to working exclusively in mission-led companies, and it’s a decision I don’t regret to this day.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We know representation matters. As a nonbinary person working in VC, just existing out loud in an industry known for pattern-matching can make a difference. I try to use any platform I have to share my nonlinear path to this season of my career in hopes that it may help someone see a new possibility for themselves.
Also, this idea of making the world a better place through the kinds of companies and founders we back is at the heart of all we do at Renew Venture Capital, really. It’s what I get to do every day as we work to produce excess returns for investors and change inefficient, ineffective, and exclusionary systems. For example, with Purpose Rounds® — strategic rounds of funding for women, historically excluded, and impact founders leveraging Regulation CF and Regulation A — I help founders mobilize community to grow their business and impact, while also democratizing access for non-accredited and accredited investors alike to put their money where their values are. Being able to work with impact founders and historically excluded and overlooked founders to drive purpose and profit is one way I aim to make the world a better place.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
The issue isn’t that women aren’t founding companies — it’s that they aren’t getting VC funding at remotely proportionate rates. From 2019 to 2023, women-owned businesses’ growth rate outpaced the rate of men’s 94.3% for the number of firms, 252.8% for employment, and 82.0% for revenue (Wells Fargo).
There has been a dip in the number of tech companies founded by women in the past year or so — for example, the percentage of women education founders fell from 24.9% in 2022 to 18.8% in 2023, per Carta — but that percentage (13.2%) is still significantly larger than the amount of funding they receive from venture capital, which was 2.2% for the first half of 2024 (Pitchbook). It’s crucial to note that numbers are even worse for women of color. So while we need to continue this pipeline of women and nonbinary founders, we need funding to catch up and keep pace.
In addition to increasing the overall VC investment in women-founded companies, we need to innovate as investors as well. This means having more women and nonbinary people in investment roles, as well as thoughtfully acting on missed opportunities and gaps in the existing capital stacks. For our team at Renew VC, this includes operating our venture studio to work with companies typically before institutional capital and our unique financing mechanisms for Purpose Rounds, in addition to our strategic impact fund.
Can you share with our readers what you are doing to help empower women to become founders?
Backing women founders is baked into our theses at Renew Venture Capital, and we invest in women and historically excluded founders across all aspects of our firm. Getting to work with women founders is one of my favorite parts of the job. This takes many different forms, from sharing my journey as a nonbinary founder to being a thought partner to proactively connecting founders to things like speaking opportunities, partnerships, and growth channels. It’s pushing up my sleeves and asking women entrepreneurs what they need at that point in time — and actually listening to what they say instead of trying to force-fit some one-size-fits-all solution.
For me, it’s not about empowerment as these women are fully capable of taking action. It’s about clearing obstacles and highlighting opportunities. For example, the founders of All Better Co. knew they wanted to grow their company with community. They didn’t need us to empower them, but by helping them launch a Purpose Round to turn their community and customers into owners and advocates, we support their power and show another example of women founders building innovatively, thoughtfully, and with purpose. That helps them directly, but also shows aspiring entrepreneurs another path to consider in their own journey. That’s powerful.
This might be intuitive to you but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Let’s start with the data: companies founded or co-founded by women generate more revenue and are more capital-efficient (BCG/MassChallenge). McKinsey found that the greater the representation, the more likely a company is to outperform (McKinsey)
And because no group is a monolith (we’re talking about half the population here, roughly), it’s key to note that when I say more women and nonbinary founders, I mean that in a way that intersects with other aspects of identity including race, ethnicity, socio-economic background, and more. Diverse management teams, including gender and race/ethnicity, are more innovative overall (BCG).
In addition to outperforming teams without women founders, women choose to become founders for the same reasons people of any gender do — to solve a problem they have a unique perspective on, generate wealth, take control over their career, and challenge themselves in a new way. Entrepreneurship offers many upsides, and it’s something that women and nonbinary people should consider and participate in on par with men.
Can you please share 5 things that can be done or should be done to help empower more women to become founders?
These are all very interwoven and individually nuanced, but at a high level:
1. Invest more in women and nonbinary founders. Money talks, and addressing the gender gap in VC funding incrementally shifts substantial capital into the hands of women founders and operators right then and there. That requires investors to address our own biases and processes to ensure gender parity, including the kinds of questions we ask. There’s a fascinating report from HBR on how we tend to ask men founders promotion-related questions and women founders prevention-related questions, for example.
2. Increase the number of women and nonbinary investors. The more gender diversity involved in investment decisions, the more we can advocate for the missed opportunities that venture capital is built to capitalize on. Representation matters on all fronts, not just on founding teams.
3. Challenge limiting systems. Think critically about how systems of power, capital, and access contribute to the gender gap where you sit. It will be different for each of us, but examining and challenging these where they limit opportunity and outcome is where you can identify the weak points to poke through to make meaningful changes.
4. Advocate for policies that support women in the workforce, including childcare and parental leave. Not all women are parents, and it doesn’t take a parent to know the difference accessible, reasonable policies make in supporting a well-performing team. Supporting parents and caregivers makes business sense. The U.S. loses $122B annually due to child care challenges according to the First Five Years Fund, for example. While women are still the default parent in many families, advocating for parents and women in the workforce are ways we can build critical infrastructure that women founders and the economy as a whole need to thrive.
5. Be intersectional. When you’re talking about half of the population, acknowledge that we all hold multiple intersecting identities. There is no one way to experience the world as a woman, so there is no one singular path or perspective for women founders. Women and nonbinary founders (and investors!) bring unique lived experiences and backgrounds to the table, which is a huge asset. Avoid generalizations that diminish the diversity women reflect as a massive and greatly heterogeneous group.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’m fortunate that this is what I’m literally doing with my career — changing how we build and back companies to make the world a better place. I’d encourage everyone to look at how they can align their resources of time, talent and money into businesses that drive profit and purpose. That might be shifting some of your investments from fossil fuels to climate tech, amplifying and supporting historically excluded and overlooked founders, or starting your own company, but it can also be as simple as looking at how your professional and personal work factor into the world you want to see. Ask questions. Be curious. Think critically. Then go from there.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Alie Ward, the creator and host of Ologies, feels like an old friend I haven’t met yet (to paraphrase one of my favorite Muppets). She’s an expert communicator and community builder who intentionally uses her platform to educate, inspire, and connect the dots without compromising on her values and purpose. I’m sure we would go down so many wondrous rabbit holes in a single conversation, and I’d welcome the chance to talk with her about her entrepreneurial journey and how we could pay it forward together.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
- Follow my work and participate in the community at renewvc.com
- Tune into my weekly conversations with founders, funders, and changemakers on our podcast, Founded On Purpose
- Connect with me and let me know you found me from this interview on LinkedIn
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
About The Interviewer: Vanessa Ogle is a mom, entrepreneur, inventor, writer, and singer/songwriter. Vanessa’s talent in building world-class leadership teams focused on diversity, a culture of service, and innovation through inclusion allowed her to be one of the most acclaimed Latina CEO’s in the last 30 years. She collaborated with the world’s leading technology and content companies such as Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and Broadcom to bring innovative solutions to travelers and hotels around the world. Vanessa is the lead inventor on 120+ U.S. Patents. Accolades include: FAST 100, Entrepreneur 360 Best Companies, Inc. 500 and then another six times on the Inc. 5000. Vanessa was personally honored with Inc. 100 Female Founder’s Award, Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and Enterprising Women of the Year among others. Vanessa now spends her time sharing stories to inspire and give hope through articles, speaking engagements and music. In her spare time she writes and plays music in the Amazon best selling new band HigherHill, teaches surfing clinics, trains dogs, and cheers on her children.
Please connect with Vanessa here on linkedin and subscribe to her newsletter Unplugged as well as follow her on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and X and of course on her website VanessaOgle.
