Playfair Capital and Tech Nation announce nationwide Female Founder Office Hours (remote edition)
Collaboration is Queen. At Playfair, we believe in the power of bringing people together to solve issues and make us all stronger. As investors, we recognise the potential for entrepreneurship to improve society, but this will not be fully realised until we achieve real equality in access to startup funding. That’s why we have always been strong advocates of the power of collaboration. We are using this principle to address the continuing headwinds for female founders in tech.
(Update 09/06/2020)
We received so many applications for Female Founder Office Hours that we decided to put on a second event for another 100 female founders, with 30 more VCs joining Playfair Capital and Tech Nation on June 24th.
Playfair Capital and Tech Nation are bringing together 30 of the UK’s leading venture capitalists and 100 female founders across more than 300 remote office hours meetings on Thursday June 4th, 2020.
We are incredibly excited to be taking Playfair’s collaborative Female Founder Office Hours to the next level after co-ordinating a total of 400 individual meetings with 90 female founders and 25 investors across our previous two editions hosted at Warner Yard. Only by working together can we move ever closer to female funding equality.
100 female founders, from anywhere in the UK, will each have the opportunity to meet four investors for one hour of remote office hours to discuss their tech business idea, ask for advice (covid-related or otherwise) and pitch for investment.
Never before have 30 early-stage VCs come together in such close collaboration to provide this degree of nationwide access and support to female founders.
We recognise that there is no single quick fix for redressing the lack of funding for female founders; we need everyone to play their part (see more below). That is why we are hosting collaborative office hours with dozens of other VCs, diversity groups and advocates. We hope to build on their great work, helping to connect the dots between founders and investors.
We have embraced collaboration since Playfair was founded in 2013. That same year we opened Warner Yard, one of London’s earliest co-working spaces and home to hundreds of founders and investors over the years. We have seen firsthand the power of bringing people together — both in-person and remotely — who otherwise might not have had the chance. We hope these office hours continue to encourage collaboration throughout the tech ecosystem. We hope these efforts will help level the playing field for all.
Thank you to the Founders’ Network team at Tech Nation, to all the investors who have supported this and previous editions, and to all the female founders who have and will participate — we must all redress this imbalance together.
You can find full details on how to apply below. We look forward to meeting you on June 4th 2020.
Chris Smith, our Managing Partner, commented:
“I’m absolutely thrilled to see our third female founder office hours event come together with the support of Tech Nation and what must be one of the largest groups of VCs ever assembled in one (virtual) room. We know that it’s taking longer than it should to level the playing field for female founders and we hope that by bringing the ecosystem together at scale we can give a big shove in the right direction.”
Lauren Nicholson, Founders’ Network Lead at Tech Nation, commented:
“This is an exciting opportunity for all our female founder Founders’ Network members and we are delighted to be collaborating with Playfair Capital on such an important initiative. Female-led companies still only achieve 1p in every £1 invested in the UK and so Office Hour events like these are crucial to breaking down those barriers and creating opportunities for those teams to be supported by the investment ecosystem. We hope that this initiative will be a major step towards changing those statistics.”
Here is the full list of participating funds and investors:
Ada Ventures — Francesca (Check) Warner
Albion VC — Jess Bartos
Amadeus Capital Partners — Amelia Armour
Anthemis — Erica Young
Ascension Ventures — Emma Steele
Augmentum — Freddie Evans, Ellen Logan
Beringea — Carrie Babcock, Emma Biasiolo
Bethnal Green Ventures — Bethany Greer
Downing Ventures — Kathy Gromotka
Draper Esprit — Edel Coen, Diana Krantz
Episode 1 — Carina Namih
Forward Partners — Katie Kim
Frontline Ventures — Helena Cavell
Hambro Perks — Matilde Giglio
JamJar — Belinda Gurung
Mercia — Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot
MMC Ventures — Alexia Arts
Notion — Itxaso Del Palacio
Octopus Ventures — Akriti Dokania
Passion Capital — Robert Dighero
Playfair Capital — Alexandra Baranowski, Simon Blakey, Chris Smith, Joe Thornton, Henrik Wetter Sanchez
Samaipata — Carmen Alfonso Rico
Smedvig Capital — Peter Duffy
Soho Ventures — Monik Pham
Much has been written on the inequality and challenges for female founders in tech in the UK. We have summarised the issues we’re facing and our proposed solutions in more depth below:
What issues are we facing?
1. Lack of funding and support for female founders in tech
Female founders face greater barriers to accessing and securing investment for their tech businesses than their male counterparts. Brilliant organisations such as Diversity VC, the BVCA and the BBB have pioneered research and shone a light on what needs to change. The well-recognised infographic below highlights the key stats, with the full report available here.
We were shocked and inspired by these terrible stats to take real action ourselves. Leading the largest ever raise by an all-female founding team from EF with Vinehealth also brought these stats to life for us on a personal level and we have been committed to this office hours initiative ever since.
2. Lack of access to investors, especially outside of London
London may be the financial centre of the UK, but entrepreneurship can come from any corner of it. In a pre-covid-19 world, a majority of investors were physically based in London because most founders also seemed to be based there. However, 87% of the UK does not live in London and we don’t think that makes them any less able or investable.
This is our solution
1. Collaborative office hours give access to anyone
Privileged connections should not play a part in your chances of securing investment and building a great business; your strength and passion as a founder and the power of your technology and brand should.
Relevant cold introductions ≥ Warm introductions
We believe relevant cold intros can be as powerful as warm ones. We’ve already invested in two fantastic founding teams this year who inbounded us completely cold with expertly crafted messages.
We hope that by bringing 30 other investors together with the same openness to meeting founders ‘cold’, we can change the odds on a grand scale.
2. Remote office hours
With the world embracing remote working and meetings, we see no reason why geography should be a barrier any longer. Our Female Founder Office Hours will always include a remote option regardless of global pandemics.
3. Women and men working hand in hand
Some brilliant, inspirational women such as Eileen Burbidge, Francesca (Check) Warner and Sarah Nöckel have pioneered efforts to support female founders reach equality in a male-dominated tech ecosystem. They started speaking out and working to resolve the issues before anyone else, so thank you.
They couldn’t have built better foundations. Now more than ever we need everyone — both women and men — to row together in the same boat to get over the equality line.
We recognise that diversity goes deeper than just funding and that VCs must continue to make efforts on their investment teams too. We are proud to have had Georgia Taylor Foster as our former Managing Partner and worked with Francesca Baillieu and Alexandra Baranowski. We are committed to playing our part to bring investors, founders and capital together and improve our tech ecosystem. We are also passionate about improving outcomes for younger people and we are driving forward initiatives such as the Playfair Academy to effect real change from the earliest stages.
Details on how to register
Our third, remote edition of our collaborative Female Founder Investor Office Hours builds on the success of our previous events in February 2020 and November 2019.
This time, we’re going fully remote to broaden access to female founders across the country, supported by Tech Nation and 30 investors from the UK’s leading VCs alongside the Playfair Capital team.
The primary aim of this initiative is mentorship & support, and secondary is fundraising. We hope that with time, the two will go hand-in-hand.
We welcome applications from any UK-based female founder whose business is tech and pre-Series A. We will do our best to accommodate as many founders as possible and provide support to all regardless. Applications open today Wednesday 22nd April and will close at midnight on Sunday 24th May.
We’ll be publishing a follow-up post detailing what to expect from office hours and how to make the most of the time with investors. Keep an eye on our blog.
Please register at the link on our events page.
You can follow the Playfair team on LinkedIn, Twitter, Vimeo and here on Medium. If you’re a male founder and would still like to pitch us, please submit your application on our open-to-anyone pitch page.
You can follow Tech Nation on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re a founder, you can register for the free Founders’ Network programme.
