Europe’s Female Founders — How a European VC Fund started a Meet Up to Help Encourage More Women to Become Entrepreneurs or Work in Tech.
A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Yannick Oswald, a Principal at Mangrove Capital Partners, when we both were speakers at another event for women entrepreneurs in Paris. He told us all about how he actively wants more female founders to raise venture capital and actually walks the talk, by setting up an European Meet up in several cities called Europe’s Female Founders.
Now many of you will have heard me mention so many times (either at TEDx or many other tech summits around the world) how the world of funding is more difficult for women entrepreneurs to navigate and break through, due to many factors including unconscious bias and lack of women investors on the investor side, and fewer female founders feeling comfortable playing the funding and pitching game that is heavily stacked in favour of men (as indicated by all the research done by Harvard Business Review, Pitchbook, Techcrunch to name but a few).
I didn’t just read the research, I conducted my own over several years. I have witnessed these challenges first hand, by personally interviewing over 120 people from around the world, on both sides of the table; successful female founders who got funding (so other female founders can learn from the and do it) and investors (male and female, so we can better understand what they are looking for). The $300 billion funding gap between men and women is real and there are systemic, behaviourial and cultural reasons to explain it. The fact is, this is a difficult problem to solve that will take many years, even generations, unless we take massive action now to move the needle forward.
“VCs need to recognize that their world is a closed ecosystem. More VCs need to get out of their comfort zone. It’s not enough to simply talk about diversity at classic tech events, you have to get out of your networks and learn how to understand unconscious bias. — Yannick Oswald, VC, Mangrove Capital Partners”
I couldn’t agree more! It’s great to actually see a male VC from a European Fund actively decide to take action to go and find the next phenomenal female founders to invest in, and encourage more women to come into tech or start their own companies.
I recently spoke with Yannick, to learn more about Mangrove Capital Partner’s Europe’s Female Founders initiative. Their motto at the firm is ‘dare to dream — empowering entrepreneurs’. They currently have 4 women-led firms in their portfolio and want to do more. This initiative comes from their DNA of taking action. I actively encourage more VC firms to follow this example, not to look good, or because it’s a hot topic in the startup world at the moment, but because they mean it and want to be part of the change to help unlock untapped talent, scale successful women-led companies, and make a great financial return. Learn more from Yannick here:
Why did you set up Europe’s Female Founders?
“I got fed up with so much hype around diversity without any concrete action happening in VC. I noticed that only 15% of the founders we funded since 2012 were women and decided ‘let’s do something about this. I seriously think that women-led tech startups are the single largest opportunity in the venture world today’.
The problem is very obvious — we need more women in tech. I felt uncomfortable as a guy in this unbalanced system. Mangrove is one of the top investors in Europe. 4 out of our 30 portfolio companies are women-led and this put Mangrove among the top 5 investors in female-led startups in Europe. (see independent research here, slide 9) This shocked me and led me to set up European’s Female Founders.
I wondered how we at Mangrove could as, a VC firm, go out and actively seek out potential female founders to invest in. I realized that I had to go out to where women entrepreneurs network or else create an event to help make this happen.
So I decided to found Europe’s Female Founders as a non-profit. I believe if we want to do something, we should just do it.
How did you design these events?
To make the magic happen, we decided to combine 2 ideas:
1) Give women entrepreneurs access to women in tech and female founder role models, so they can see that it’s possible
2) Create an informal setting, in a proven social network, where people can actually meet and get to know each other, instead of a huge conference with hundreds or thousands of people, where you just listen to speakers.
We decided to create our own Female Founder meet ups in several European cities, with a maximum of 130 people at each event. We want to keep it small on purpose, so that everyone can have an open discussion, have a drink with investors and female founders and actually reach out to each other in a positive atmosphere. We want the founders who come to our events to get lots of practical advice from women who are further on their entrepreneurial journey- all in an open and warm atmosphere, where they can actually chat with the speakers and investors. We will also be launching open office hours for female founders soon!
Where have you held events so far?
We have had 3 events so far in Lisbon, Barcelona and we are bringing it to Paris on March 22nd in partnership with Paris Pionnières. To date we have had over 3500 signups from across Europe for all our events. One of our participants actually found a job at the startup of one of our speakers in Barcelona! (Red Points) and we have had 10% male participants at our events so far.
What’s the format of the event?
· Introduction by Mark Tluszcz, CEO and Yannick Oswald, Principal, of Mangrove Capital Partners (investors in Skype, Wix, Wallapop, Red Points…)
· 1 local and 1 international speaker (both female founders) share about how they got started, what went wrong, what surprised them and what happened as their companies grew
· Active networking between participants, speakers and investors from Mangrove Capital Partners.
PARIS EDITION
When: 22nd March 2018
Timing: 6:30–9pm
Where: Paris Pionnières incubator, 35 rue du Sentier, Paris
Sign up here >> https://www.europesfemalefounders.com
Attendees: Maximum 130 people — places are going fast, so sign up now!
Free for everyone and investors and men are welcome too!
What do you want to be able to learn from these events in future?
In the medium term, we will be tracking to see which participants from our events eventually go on to either create or join a startup, to see what impact we have had on the ecosystem.”
I personally find it refreshing to see a VC firm organize an event series such as this and think it’s a great step in the right direction. Now we need more to follow suit!
I am looking forward to the Paris event on March 22nd and to meeting the outstanding female founders there and continue the conversation and movement, to move things forward. As the founder of Global Invest Her and a global advocate and catalyst to help close the Funding Gap, I live our mission every day. I hope to see you there at the event. Connect with me if you want to join me on this journey and tell me how we could collaborate. Let’s change the system, so that more female founders get funded.
Watch Anne Ravanona’s TEDx talk on Investing in Women Entrepreneurs and learn more about her @anneravanona or Book Her as a Speaker to ignite your event at www.anneravanona.com
Learn more about Global Invest Her www.globalinvesther.com @GlobalInvestHer
