Stacy Kehren Idema of The Global Collective On 5 Things We Need To Do To Close The VC Gender and Racial Gap

Learn about the masculine and the feminine. Today’s investment system is steeped over in the masculine and barren in the feminine. But masculine doesn’t equal Man, nor does feminine equal Woman. The masculine is the structure, the process, the results-oriented activity. The feminine is innovation, inclusion, creativity, and flow state.

As part of my series about “the five things we need to do to close the VC gender and racial gap” I had the pleasure of interviewing Stacy Kehren Idema.

Stacy is the Founder and MD of the Global Collective, a social impact business ecosystem on a mission to eradicate gender bias in the thorny world of Venture Capital.

It took more than twenty-six years of transforming chaos to calm, at the helm of highly visible global programs in start-ups and large organizations, for her to decide: it’s time to do business differently. In 2021, after just a handful of months in London, she secured an Innovator Visa, sold everything, moved across the pond, and started the Global Collective.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the “backstory” that brought you to this career path?

I have done corporate. Tick, check, done, dusted. Twenty-six years of it.

Sat right in the innards of corporate companies, I experienced first-hand what it’s like to be a woman in business in the 21st century — from the inside out. The inside knowledge I gleaned from my multi-decade corporate business experience is usually swept under the carpet — but the carpet’s wearing thin and I’ve never been a particularly good sweeper. I couldn’t sit still any longer. I needed to make a change and entrepreneurship was the fastest route to market, in spite of my early childhood promise (to myself) that I would never be an entrepreneur. As the daughter of two small business owners, that naïve promise was smoldering the flame of a deeper desire for something bigger.

Witnessing the same issues with equality in Fortune 7 companies that I witnessed as a child, I knew there had to be a better way. It was time.

Firstly, my mission was to bridge the gender equity gap by empowering women to scale from $1–50M. I was quick to learn that focusing only on women won’t cut it — what’s required for real, long-lasting change is growth as a collective: men and women as equal parts of the equation.

Gender inequality today shouldn’t be a battle of the genitalia.

Rather than blindly chanting that men and women are the same, we should be preoccupied with identifying the unique strengths of each sex and harnessing these to a competitive advantage. That’s why investing in women is not simply a humanitarian prospect but also a very real opportunity for VC firms to make some coin.

Women are anatomically, neurologically and psychologically different from men. Understanding these differences and unique assets casts a spotlight on what women bring to the table.

Gender inequality impacts Men just as much as it does their partners, wives, sisters and daughters. Therefore, the mission of the Global Collective is to build a new business ecosystem that leverages and marries the unique strengths of all genders.

Can you share a story of your most successful Angel or VC investment? In your opinion, what was its main lesson?

Success with investments demands transparency: a respectful and transparent relationship with your team and stakeholders is non-negotiable. You only control what you control and there is a lot at play.

We rolled out an AI-powered healthcare initiative, aimed to change the way clinicians serviced their facilities and patients with regard to mental health. The pilot was intense: staggering rounds of training and implementation with one conglomerate, twenty (of twenty-five) departments and more than four hundred people. Expectations and emotions ran high for everyone. Despite business stakeholders feverishly challenging the status quo and legitimacy of the technology, the tech team knew the system’s strengths, weaknesses, and full capability.

The teams exhibited courage to the nth degree: answering challenging questions, managing expectations and persevering as realists in the face of investment euphoria. In the face of doubt, we chose professionalism: preparing for the best and the worst, devising a defined go-forward plan. Yet, when you communicate those challenges, mitigation plans, next steps and lessons learned — eyes wide open — you never know how your audience will respond.

Despite initial stakeholder frustration, impatience and increased scope requests, we knew our uncensored transparency was the best approach. And it worked. Stakeholders valued our honesty and were keen to increase investment and expand the AI initiative into other businesses.

Sure, we made mistakes, but thanks to our knee-jerk reflex to inform everyone involved in real-time, we had no choice but to quickly learn from them. So a spotlight was cast upon our agility, flexibility and knack for quick-witted adaptation; and ultimately, this gave us the edge.

Can you share a story of an Angel or VC funding “failure” of yours? Is there a lesson or take away that you took out of that that our readers can learn from?

Language matters. One person’s disappointment could be another person’s success — one of our major funders taught us this lesson.

Our oversight: we didn’t get curious enough to learn his “why”.

Why was he interested in our initiative? What would success look like for him?

We were so afraid of disappointing our major funder because, well, he reminded us time and time again not to disappoint him: taunting words that left their mark on our status quo methods. Transparency went out of the window. We scrambled to improvise new creative ways to skirt around conversations and language that we thought wouldn’t sit right with him.

Failing to ask for help and episodes of compulsive overpromising meant that we ultimately under-delivered. We didn’t communicate our pivots well, nor could we show progress in a way that tied back to our milestones… and his “why”. We failed to set ourselves and him up for success.

We did exactly what he thought he asked us not to do and disappointed ourselves in the process.

One of the biggest lessons?

Communicate!

Ok let’s jump to the main focus of our interview. According to this article in Fortune, only 2.2% of VC dollars went to women in 2018. A similar number went to minority-owned companies. Can you share with our readers what your firm is doing to help close the VC gender and racial gap?

The Global Collective’s mission is to remove the gender bias in the world of investment.

We do this by using two key pillars: education and technology.

Education

Step one for change of any kind is accepting that there is a problem. The VC gender gap is stitched over with vibrantly optimistic statistics of female entrepreneurship growth and hopeful individual success stories. There is a commonly held belief that the gender gap in business is something of the past: an antiquated phenomenon that has no grip on today’s economy.

Many would shake their head in disbelief and doggedly refuse to believe the statistic that only 2.2% of VC dollars went to women in 2018. Our aim is to change that by highlighting the systemic barriers that women continue to face in the hunt for funding. Many are also oblivious to the untapped financial potential of investing into women-led businesses; recent studies are putting in a shift at uncovering this.

In a study involving 350+ startups, it was found that businesses started by women deliver over double the revenue of those founded by men. That means that VCs missed out on $85M over a period of five years, had they simply invested equally into men- and women-led startups (Forbes, 2019).

Changing how women entrepreneurs are perceived while inviting new ways of doing business that are more inclusive and increase competitive advantage.

This is the overarching goal of the education pieces that we put out on the Global Collective platform.

Technology

The gender gap in business is complex and multi-faceted. Zooming in on just women provides only half of the picture. As I mentioned earlier, empowering women mandates bringing men along for the ride.

The Global Collective is an ecosystem of support for budding female entrepreneurs as well as (often) male-led investment firms to create secure roadmaps to healthy ROIs. Not only does our tech platform empower businesswomen, it grants investors a chance to focus first on the business, the idea, the product, then the founder behind it. The what and how, before the who.

At the same time, we know the person matters. Investors invest in people, just like people buy from people. We also know the current investment process is steeped in unconscious gender bias — a fog that shrouds good business opportunities and good people from the voracious eye line of VC firms.

Ultimately, our technology aims to sanitize the investment intake process by creating a setting for investors to make efficient decisions about where their money is going, whilst actively positioning themselves one step ahead of the gender bias.

Today, we are actively seeking investors to help make the blueprints a reality and build out this ecosystem.

Can you recommend 5 things that need to be done on a broader societal level to close the VC gender and racial gap. Please share a story or example for each.

1 . Change the narrative — Language matters. For example: when women are met daily with restrictive terminology, such as ‘glass ceiling’, society gives life to a perception of limitation, which then only embeds itself deeper into the subconscious. Instead, be mindful of your word choice and promote conversations about opportunity and strengths to change the narrative and own it.

2 . Include women in your boardroom and on your executive team from the get go — Today, 70–90% of consumer buying decisions around the globe are made by women. So give me one good reason why it makes sense to exclude this demographic from the big decisions. When you fill a room with men to make decisions for your customers, who are in fact mainly women, you are doing a disservice to your business.

3 . Educate yourself — Dear men: understand the gender differences and the fallacies that arise in that discussion.

How does society perceive gender-specific qualities and characteristics? Take risk-taking, for example: seemingly since forever, men have been deemed to take more risk than women. However, risk, in the way it is referred to today, is typically associated with masculine activities: think rock climbing, sky diving, American football. Yet, a higher percentage of women die from giving childbirth than men do from sky diving. So, which is really the riskier activity?

Dear women: throw yourself at acquiring new skills that will fast track your confidence and simply ask to be included in rooms you never considered to be on your horizons.

4 . Change your investment process.

Some investment firms have raised the window banners stating, “we are now investing women owned-led businesses”. Like the semi-annual sale on your high-end name brand shoes.

But real change is more than a performative box-checking exercise.

When will the memo arrive that women aren’t a liability in business? Their unique strengths are what drive higher revenue and greater ROI per dollar invested than their male counterparts, in a study of 350 start-ups (BCG, 2018).

You maximize business potential when you change the process and include the collective — because what got you to where you are won’t get you to where you want to go.

5 . Learn about the masculine and the feminine

Today’s investment system is steeped over in the masculine and barren in the feminine. But masculine doesn’t equal Man, nor does feminine equal Woman. The masculine is the structure, the process, the results-oriented activity. The feminine is innovation, inclusion, creativity, and flow state.

They exist alongside each other in all of us.

Think of Lebron James, American Basketball legend. His masculine energy is in the structured practice, the stringent training regime and repetitive conditioning that facilitates his peak performance. But when he slips into game mode, he is in his feminine — or the flow state, the zone, call it what you will. He utterly trusts his body and leverages his intuition over the logical game tactics that are tattooed on his memory.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

The rise of the feminine in Venture Capital.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Quote: My own — Business is always personal.

My entire life has been in and about business. When you are raised by two business owners, business permeates your DNA and you learn the trade in ways many don’t understand. It’s not just work, it’s a lifestyle. I promised myself I would never own a business and believed corporate life was my path forward, to be able to bask in the knowledge of being able to clock out and have a double life. However, I learned that if you’re passionate about something and making real change: that will follow you wherever you go.

So, business is always personal.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Oprah Winfrey. She has been the agent in her own journey to success and led with unequivocal conviction and inner strength. Her perseverance and devotion to her work, in spite of her challenging beginnings and the added barrier of piercing the industry as a woman of color, is clear to see. She assigns no blame and gives unconditionally to those around her. When I see her picture, I see a provocative, inspiring, and inclusive woman who has only herself to thank for where she is now. Millions have been empowered by her and it’s safe to say that I live in constant awe of her continued evolution. Her strength combined with her unapologetic feminine presence show that the two are far from mutual exclusivity and are qualities I aspire to make my own as a woman in business.

This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.