The golden rules for being an accomplished woman founder
This article is for every woman who thinks about entrepreneurship but hesitate to make the jump, who dreams about building their own company but doesn’t think they are skilled enough or even who is currently founding a startup but wonders what a successful female founder should look like.
Trigger alert: there is not only one answer to all the questions you might ask yourself, but for the purpose of this article, I have used the story of Joanne Kanaan as an example. She is the accomplished co-founder and CEO of Omini — a biotech startup funded by Entrepreneur First Paris. She shared her learnings with us when she spoke to an audience of budding entrepreneurs at a Female Founder Friday event we organized.
What does being a woman founder mean today?
If you are a woman who founded a startup in France lately, congratulations: it means that you are part of the 15% of the startups created having at least one woman in their co-founding team according to a study published by SISTA (a women’s network arguing for more equality in startups funding). Yes, it is a pretty small amount compared to the 85% of the startups founded by men only.
Being a woman founder would also mean asking yourself lots of questions about whether or not it impacts those business or investor meetings you have. “Am I smiling too much? Am I being too nice? Should I dress more soberly?”, these are the types of questions Joanne admitted frequently asking herself. Even though it becomes rarer and rarer to have to deal with direct discrimination, “stereotypes are still well rooted in people’s minds”, as Joanne noted when she started fundraising (wait for it, more is coming below).
Therefore it is part of the experience of being a (woman) founder to question yourself and have a lot of doubts when it comes to decision making, which is the core part of a founder’s role. But as Joanne underlined, these are not issues that only women founders face. That being said, there are still a few topics women founders struggle with more than men, such as fundraising and networking into which we will deep dive below.
Fundraising as a woman CEO: just be yourself!
As Joanne Kanaan mentioned the last startups to raise funds coming from the EF programme where the ones led by a woman. This is a recurring problem, when we know that the fundraising distribution for the last 5 years in France looks like this:
Although most investors do not express clear and direct apprehensions when assessing a startup project led by a woman, there are always some stereotypes stuck in the back of the mind. Therefore women CEOs tend to be asked more questions about the risks, their ability to face failure or to manage their company’s finances: “what happens if you don’t get this grant? Or if you don’t secure this funding?”.
Lots of women also asked themselves if they should change their behaviour during investor meetings, dress more soberly or smile less. Indeed women are more likely to be assessed and receive comments on their physical appearance, with women politicians at the forefront.
So how do we prevent this you ask?
Just stay true to yourself. This is Joanne’s piece of advice, as she faced all these situations and this feeling of self-doubt:
“Investors should invest in my project only if they believe in who I am, this is the way I am leading my company and I don’t want to change my behaviour just to please them”
She is an optimistic smiling person, and this is what helps her to get her job done everyday.
Surround yourself with precious support
As Joanne mentioned several times during this conversation, getting the right support is key.
Her first support was Entrepreneur First, who believed in her as a future talented founder even before she had a team or an idea. Then came her personal network and community, which can help with finding useful contacts for your company (especially for foreigners such as Joanne who could rely on the Lebanese community). Getting the right support also requires going out of your comfort zone, networking and meeting new people through events or people asking you for help (even if right now it might not be a good timing for mingling with the crowd I’ll give you that). She also mentioned the usefulness of enlisting a coach or a mentor to learn from their experience and get valuable advice.
For women founders more specifically, you can have access to different women networks and communities, who can help you with hesitations or doubts you might prefer sharing with your female peers. On her side, Joanne was included into two Female Founder programmes, one at Station F and one which was part of a European initiative.
She also acknowledged that women founders nowadays benefit from a spotlight on female entrepreneurship that they should not be afraid to leverage. This has been a big opportunity for her to get some media coverage for her company at a time when the product was still not released yet.
What does it take to be a founder
So how to know if you are ready to be a founder?
What really motivated Joanne to take the leap into entrepreneurship was the diversity of tasks and challenges that a founder has to manage:
“Every day is different when you are founding your startup, you are learning and challenging yourself all the time”.
Therefore if you don’t like dealing with the unknown, it might not be for you.
For Joanne, jumping into entrepreneurship after spending a few years in academia (she did a master research and a PhD in biochemistry) was the opportunity to wear the business/strategy hat, to be a decision maker and to still be able to grow up on a personal level. Indeed most people in academia have a ready-made path: after the PhD you do a postdoc and then you keep doing research for the rest of your life. Entrepreneurship was a good way to make a transition towards an unknown but nonetheless thrilling future.
The golden rules to be an accomplished founder
So here we are! The moment you are all waiting for, the priceless tips Joanne gave to our audience on that day to be an accomplished founder. I am happy to share with you those as I have no doubt they will be useful for many of you:
- Organization is key: you will need to handle tons of different issues all the time, so it requires some management skills.
- Take decisions quickly: one core learning for Joanne was about making decisions faster. The pace of entrepreneurship is very intense, and every decision taken too late might have a lasting negative impact on your company and its employees. Time is a major issue for entrepreneurs as well as being able to prioritize and assess the impact of these decisions.
- Accept praise: yes, praising and being praised is good for your health, allelujah! As Joanne underlined, women tend to question themselves a lot on whether or not they deserve this compliment and that compliment. Please spare yourself some precious time, accept them all and celebrate yourself.
- Look for support: as stated before, wonder women do NOT exist! Surround yourself with people who will be able to support you in difficult situations, and especially for women with children who might struggle with the balance between work and personal life.
- Last but not least: give an important share to your personal life. We sometimes hear that entrepreneurs have to dedicate themselves 100%, but if you want to be there for your company in a sustainable way you have to keep some time for your personal life, and women learnt the hard way how to do both. So manage yourself, take a deep breath and value your personal time.
Why choose EF to make the final jump?
Joanne highlighted several reasons why Entrepreneur First has been really helpful for her when taking the leap:
- First thing is that coming from academia and being quite unfamiliar with entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur First was the “ideal sandbox”, the best way to derisk her entrepreneurial journey: “It was the perfect opportunity to focus on entrepreneurship for 3 months and see where it goes”. She knew she would get support from a team of experts, helping her to find a co-founder and an idea. Indeed when you don’t have a specific idea yet on what you want to work on, it might take longer to make the jump.
- Finding the right co-founder is what made her experience at Entrepreneur First very valuable, because it enabled her to build an impactful and meaningful startup. She mentioned that to choose Anna, her co-founder and CTO of Omini, the intuition and the fit were crucial. They started working together and really got along well. But it is also the EF’s focus on “Edge-fit” aka the complementary skillset that really helped her to realize that Anna and her could build something great together, now called Omini (you can read more about how to build strong co-founding teams from scratch here).
- Finally Entrepreneur First also provided her with a stipend, a small safety that helped her to reduce the financial risk that entrepreneurship represents. However she underlined something very interesting that I think every entrepreneur can feel which is that “the more you get into your project, the less you care about your personal revenue”, meaning that financial risk becomes less and less a problem when you concretely start building your company.
Want to join our programme? We are looking for the next generation of honeybadgers who will join our cohort starting in April 2021. Applications are open here. We run our programme in 6 different cities around the world: Paris, London, Berlin, Toronto, Bangalore and Singapore.
