‘Manvising’
I’m the CEO of a seed-stage startup called Kapwing. We bootstrapped our online video editing platform for six months before raising money in June and transitioned from having no advisors to having more than ten investors on our cap table. In this article, I wanted to describe the term “manvising” and propose a better approach to giving advice.
How do I do X?
As a first-time founder, I have a thousand questions about the logistical and strategic issues I’ve faced in growing Kapwing. Investors give advice because they have perspective across their portfolio and want to add value. Even if they’ve never been a CEO before or only understand your question on a surface level, some investors jump right into a recommendation.
Manvising is the act of a male investor explaining to a female founder basic information without contextualizing the advice for the startup’s position. For example, I asked an advisor who is an expert in business development to talk to me about strategic distribution partnerships. During the meeting, he gave me surface level information about partnerships and instead said things like “Have you thought about Instagram influencer marketing?” Of course I’ve thought about social marketing….Classic manvising.
Another example: I’ve recently been asking people about whether we should run a 409A valuation. One seasoned male investor I talked to on Wednesday said absolutely No, it’s a waste of money and time, and it’s unnecessary for a business in this stage. Another I asked yesterday said absolutely Yes. He said that, since Kapwing is a venture-backed company and this is what most venture-backed companies do, I should spend the $1500 to run a 409a without any hesitation. Neither investor took the time to understand where I was coming from, why I was asking this question, or what information I was considering. They didn’t talk about the business tradeoffs of one approach or the other or give me any information I couldn’t have read on Wikipedia.
That’s manvising. In both cases, I politely nodded and left the conversation.
A better method
We now have a female investor who does the opposite of manvise. When I ask her for help on a topic, she thoroughly researched the issue, reaches out to the portfolio company CEOs to get their advice and resources, and sends me a full memo on the topic. She sends me lot of valuable information that I can review on my own time, and she usually doesn’t make a specific recommendation. Her support enables me to make faster, more informed decisions with the full context.
There may be no relationship between her gender and her method of advising. But given my experience with “mansplaining,” I feel like there’s a correlation here.
By definition, my investors put thousands of dollars and their reputation on the line for my startup, so they clearly don’t think I’m dumb. But sometimes investor advice is oversimplified and lacks substance. If the issue wasn’t complicated, I wouldn’t need advice. Female founders: beware.
