Meredith Beuchaw and Chandra Shih of Lowenstein Sandler: Why We Need More Women Founders & Here Is What We Are Doing To Make That Happen
An Interview With Jerome Knyszewski
MB: We’re missing half the great ideas if women are not founding companies and getting funded. We need women because we are missing out on innovation if we do not have women-founded companies.
C.S.: Consumer spending is dominated by women — especially in households. Men are creating the products and making the decisions for women purchasers. If you look at universities, women are half or more of the students getting degrees. At the board level, having more women allows for more diversity of views and well-rounded discussions.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Meredith Beuchaw and Chandra Shih of Lowenstein Sandler.
Meredith leads M&A transactions and has counseled clients both on the buy and sell side through hundreds of deals for over 15 years. Her practice sits at the intersection M&A and innovation. Meredith counsels growth companies and startups as well as the venture capital, growth, and private equity funds that fund them in connection with mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, corporate governance, divestitures, and other related transactional matters. She also frequently represents the acquirers of growth companies and startups, including Fortune 500 companies and private equity funds. Meredith is a market leader in deal-making involving sellers with venture capital/growth equity backing.
Chandra works with growth stage and early stage startups and venture firms and other angel and strategic investors who fund them. Chandra provides legal and strategic advice to founders, investors and boards on corporate governance matters, debt and equity financings and mergers and acquisitions. Chandra also provides general legal and strategic guidance through all phases of her startup clients’ life cycles, from formation to exit and everything in between.
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? Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
MB: I was lucky enough to have many great mentors and brave enough to ask them a lot of what ended up being great questions when I was young. I asked them to get creative with me about what my skill set was and where it could shine. I always had a personal passion for writing, and when I talked to people I respected, I was curious about how to make a career out of that. Should I be a novelist? A teacher? Lawyers, it turns out, are professional writers, and I get to do more than that. I have developed a set of negotiating skills I can leverage in my deal work. Understanding my skill set and having the support network I could turn to is how I found my partnership path. I fell in love with M&A and stuck with it, and eight years into my legal career, I got into tech M&A and then startup work, and I fell in love with M&A all over again.
C.S.: Growing up in Honolulu, HI, I was completely unaware of all things startup and tech related. I moved to the Bay Area for college, and of course, living here you become saturated with all things tech and the startup world. I knew I wanted to go to law school and working as an emerging companies / venture lawyer afforded me the opportunity to meld those two worlds together. Like Meredith, I was lucky enough to have a lot of great mentors who supported me and helped shape my career path.
Can you share the most exciting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
MB: Having children was a pivotal moment in my career. At the time, I was unsure what my career could look like and assumed I would need to move into a part-time role. I did not have any female mentors to look to about this.
But when I raised the issue to my mentors, I was told, “you can go part-time if you want to, but please don’t think that you have to.” They let me know they could find a way to make it work full-time if I wanted to try it, they would adjust.
Even pre-pandemic, the legal profession has worked with me to allow more flexibility while remaining responsive to clients.
C.S.: One of the most exciting things since beginning my career has been the ability to witness and participate in the shift in thinking and the way that the legal industry and our clients (particularly startups and venture funds) approach and prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). I feel that my career has grown up alongside that movement, and it has put me in an exciting place. Internally at my firm, Lowenstein Sandler, I have had the opportunity to work with firm leadership on DE&I initiatives, including initiatives focused on hiring, supporting, and promoting diverse lawyers. I do not believe this would have been the case anywhere a decade or more ago and I feel lucky it is happening today as I’m passionate about this and want these efforts to continue in the future.
In terms of sharing a story about a funny mistake, it’s hard for me to think of an example. Maybe because I’m a lawyer and we always want there to be no mistakes because our jobs depend on it! For me, I always think about the fact that mistakes happen, they’re inevitable, and they happen more than we like. Accepting that mistakes happen and learning how to deal with them and grow from them is such a vital skill to have. For women especially, shifting from “oh my goodness, I made a mistake, and the world is going to end,” to “how do I correct this mistake and move on” is very hard but so essential, especially as you progress in your career. Take each mistake as an opportunity to practice developing that skill.
None of us can 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?
C.S.: One mentor I am immensely grateful for is Kathi Rawnsley, Managing Partner of Lowenstein Sandler’s Palo Alto office. Kathi served as an adjunct professor at my law school, and I happened to take her class on venture capital and startups. I loved the course and really enjoyed working with her and learning from her throughout the semester. At that time Lowenstein’s Palo Alto office had just formed and had never had a first year associate class. She let me know they were looking to hire their first class of associates and encouraged me to apply. I ended up getting a job at Lowenstein right out of law school and have had the opportunity to spend my career working with her and everyone on her team since. In addition to enjoying the work we do and the people I get to work with, it has been so fantastic to start and grow my career at a place where I could see women had a seat at the table at the highest levels of the firm.
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?
C.S.: I’m currently reading Stacey Abrams’ book Lead from the Outside. It is a book that focuses on the challenges that women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ community might have in starting their career, as they are told to advance you must be a leader but may not know where to begin because the system, they’re trying to advance in was not built for them. Stacey shares her personal story and actionable tips on what underrepresented people can do to achieve their goals. One thing that stood out to me is that she talks about making fear your friend. This resonated with me, as it is so easy to tell yourself no and hold yourself back because you are afraid. Stacey herself is an introvert, but she wanted to be a politician and realized no one would vote for her if she did not share with them what she stood for. This is something she had to overcome to meet her goal, and it is something I work on every day. When I feel uncomfortable, I push myself to say “yes” as much as I can to make fear my friend and to really find new ways to challenge myself and grow.
Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?
C.S.: Yes, my favorite is “to get more, you should give more.” Offering yourself to people and seeing where you can be helpful (personally or professionally) is frequently the best way to make connections with people and can lead to getting help yourself later when you need it. I find the most meaningful connections in my life are made when I’m not approaching the relationship with expectations; rather I seek ways to be helpful to others and that helps create a natural, longer lasting connection that can sometimes pay dividends down the road.
MB: I love Michelle Obama’s quote, “When they go low, we go high.” It is about not letting others’ poor behavior be an excuse for our own. This is especially important as we see more women on boards and in decision-making positions. Sadly, most of us have been at the received end of bad behavior along the way, but it is important not to let that be the standard for our behavior now and realize we can bring our moral high ground with us.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
C.S.: I have always tried to use my career experience and life lessons to mentor the next generation of attorneys and clients / startup founders — guiding them any way I can on their path. Many of them have great things they want to do for the world and being part of that story and helping them in any way I can is the best way for me to help.
MB: I have focused on making the world a better place for a few individuals by mentoring and sponsoring them professionally and personally. Helping other people is essential from both a professional and personal level.
Ok, thank you for that. Let us now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this E.Y. report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects excellent historical progress, but it also shows that more work must be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
MB: There are a couple of related factors at play here. We have not enough women founding companies, and we also have not enough women who start companies getting funded. We need the venture community to invest both in mentoring and sponsoring women and in funding them at greater levels. It’s hard to get started when the people you see achieving successful outcomes consistently don’t look like you or share your background, and this is something that will take work to overcome. We must do outreach at every level to encourage women to take the leap to start a company (schools, social settings, incubators, the Venture Crush program that Lowenstein leads that has had numerous successful women-led Alums), and we need to continue outreach to the venture community stressing the importance of betting on women and other diverse founders. Venture funds committed to investing in women and other diverse founders are increasingly on our radar. Society offers an uphill battle, but progress is being made, and we can make more.
C.S.: Being a founder is hard. It is hard to put yourself out there when there are no financial guarantees. Women founders may not have the support to take risks. We need to normalize the idea of women founders, and we need to take them seriously. Women have ideas that can get turned into viable products. Getting more women funded and seeing more women succeed will create a domino effect — it’s the whole idea that representation matters.
MB: I was working with a woman founder who had a healthcare product, and she warned me she would be met with resistance because it was focused on a women’s health matter. I was talking to a banker who said to me, “I’ve never thought about that.” There is still a lot of bias — conscious or unconscious.
Can you share with our readers what you are doing to help empower women to become founders?
MB: I spend a lot of time on mentorship, women’s issues, and parenting issues (keeping that gender-neutral).
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?
MB: We’re missing half the great ideas if women are not founding companies and getting funded. We need women because we are missing out on innovation if we do not have women-founded companies.
C.S.: Consumer spending is dominated by women — especially in households. Men are creating the products and making the decisions for women purchasers. If you look at universities, women are half or more of the students getting degrees. At the board level, having more women allows for more diversity of views and well-rounded discussions.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Can you please share 5 things that can be done or should be done to help empower more women to become founders? If you can, please share an example or story for each.
C.B. and MS:
- Access to capital for female founders and female funders
- Access to mentors / champions (men and women)
- Eliminate the double standard of assertiveness considered bad in women but positive in men.
- Provide coaching for women to overcome biases: What do I do when someone talks over me, or when someone takes my idea, etc.?
- Increase the number of women at the board table and on investment committees — in positions where they are making decisions about where venture funds go.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, V.C. funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the U.S. with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might see this if we tag them.
C.S.: Serena Williams. We see her show up on cap tables as an investor more and more every day. She’s well-known as the most dominant tennis player in U.S. history and she is the greatest of all time in her profession, but she has expanded beyond that by getting involved in so many different business ventures. I admire that she launched her own venture fund, Serena Ventures, that invests in diverse founders. I have enjoyed seeing her use her money and voice to help underrepresented groups and would love to have a conversation with her about her work.
MS: Cheryl Sandberg. I was becoming a parent at the early point of Lean In. It would be exciting to look at and discuss how women’s roles in tech have evolved.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
How can our readers further follow your work online?
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-beuchaw-31305b37/)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandra-shih-71b558b/
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
