What Do Female Founders Talk About?

You can just ask me yourself on Elle’s Facebook page.

1. What it’s like to convince a room full of men to invest in organic tampons. (You also have to explain to them that tampons come in a variety of sizes.)

2. How we usually end up at the same dinners, where we talk about what it’s like to be a female founder.

3. Term sheets, how to approach VCs for different funding rounds, pivoting business models, hiring pitfalls and marketing spends.

4. How much we want to talk about number 3 more often.

To make good on talking about number 3 more, I’m now hosting a show on Elle Magazine’s Facebook page called… wait for it… “Female Founders on Facebook Live”.

I have one goal with this show: make you walk away thinking you can build the company, the product, the code or that dream career you’re still gunning for. What you see on screen is a group of *normal* women who are getting stuff done — and most of the time it’s pretty ugly.

We’ll talk about what happens when you spend months building a product that ultimately sucks or raising money from people who might want to sell your company off to the highest bidder the first chance they get (hot tips on how to avoid those VCs).

If you’re having trouble visualizing this, then watch the video below of last week’s show when I spoke with Alex Friedman, the CEO and Co-Founder of LOLA. Alex is revolutionizing the tampon. She shared with me what it’s like to explain to a bunch of dudes that there’s a huge market in a product that women must use every month for about forty years (now you know where number 1 came from). Apparently some of these VCs took the tampons home to their wives — user testing is important.

Next Wednesday (8/24) I plan to host Minibar cofounders Lara Crystal and Lindsey Andrews at approximately 2pm ET on Elle Magazine’s Facebook page. In addition to talking about managing burn as you scale your team, we’ll be mixing summer cocktails. Yes — conversations about spending money and drinks always pair well. Start thinking of questions (or drink requests).

See PowerToFly’s latest tech job openings with companies like The New York Times here.