Not another VC podcast
Not another VC podcast you think. And honestly, I can’t blame you for feeling jaded about the prospect. It seems like nowadays everyone has a podcast and VCs have embraced the format with open arms. But if you look closely at the VC hosted/oriented podcasts out there, they seem to suffer from the same problems that the entire industry is, notably — a glaring lack of diversity. According to Breaker’s data shared with Protocol in 2020, the most active VC podcast guests were Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Balaji Srinivasan, Jason Calacanis, Keith Rabois, Arlan Hamilton, Semil Shah, Chamath Palihapitiya and Ravikant. You see a pattern here? And if you take investors-talking-to-founders format, the stats will be equally skewed towards men considering that in 2020 only less than 10% of global funding went to female co-founded teams. And despite some progress being made and a lot of talk about diversity, these stats aren’t budging.
Enter our Found/Her podcast. Conscious of the fact that the best way to actually support female founders is to write them a check we’ve started the Found/Her series in order to give female founders a platform to pitch, reach a broader audience and hopefully secure funding for their ideas. The formula of the podcast is simple: for each episode we invite one female co-founder at an early stage of building a company and we ask her to present it in front of a Calm/Storm team member and a female co-host / potential (co-)investor. This is supposed to mimic closely the typical VC pitching experience and we’ve also included a part where the two co-hosts evaluate and discuss the opportunity in public between the two of them. We hope that through this, female entrepreneurs will not only experience first hand what it’s like to pitch your startup but also get valuable feedback from investors what is important when pitching to investors as well as reach a much more broader audience.
I’m proud to say that the episodes that we have recorded so far included some amazingly smart women building some really impactful and exciting things.
Because that’s the thing — women are often solving problems that we like to consider niche or taboo but when you think about it, they rather often pertain to female health and wellbeing and have simply been rarely attempted to be solved. Take our first guest for example, Tess Cossard from Béa Fertility who is working on an at-home fertility device that increases the chances of couples conceiving before having to go through an expensive IVF cycle. Ariadna Maso from Sanno has been so frustrated with lack of available treatment for chronic gastrointestinal issues from which she has been suffering from herself, that she has decided to create her own solution called Sanno. Our most recent guest, Madison from Leda Health is tackling the particularly gnarly problem of sexual assault. While more than a quarter of college-age women experience some form of sexual violence in the US, thousands of rape kits can sit untested in police storage. Her company is critically examining the way sexual assault survivors receive care and advocating for greater solutions by making rape kits better and more readily available to survivors.
But Found/Her is not only about femtech products. Emilia, our third episode’s guest, is working on a mental health assessment tool for early depression diagnosis. Lucia from Exakt Health is building an app for sports injury diagnosis and treatment. And one of our upcoming episodes will feature a founder coming after the Gen Z men market. We have also been extremely lucky in securing some amazing female investors to serve as co-hosts on the podcast, such as Deepali Nangia founder of Alma Angels or Triin Linamagi founder of Sie.Ventures. who have often long advocated for female entrepreneurs and started their own initiatives to get more venture capital flowing in that direction.
Whether you’re a woman who wants to build or is already doing it, an investor looking for a more diverse dealflow or you simply want to hear about amazing women embarking on an adventure, I hope you will tune in to listen to our next Found/Her episodes. We’re just getting started and hope to get better with each episode (I swear I will master Descript one of these days). Come join us and if you’d like to be a guest or a co-host yourself, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at marta@calmstorm.vc!
