#FourWomen
When I launched Seed to Scale, my hope was to help entrepreneurs solve their most pressing problems during the early phases of the company’s life. It takes a combination of a solid idea, passion, perseverance, and a fair bit of luck for a founder to get far off the starting blocks. That founder will play the roles of a product manager, a developer, a sales person, a marketer, a recruiter, a fund raiser all in the first year. The numbers show just how bad the odds are stacked against a founder. Studies say about 3% of startups receive any angel or VC funding, which is a common key early milestone for B2B focused software companies. When you peel back the onion of venture funding data, you find most startups are lead by white, Asian, or to a smaller extent Indian men. Women, African-American, and Latinx startups are just not receiving even close to their fair share of dollars.
One could point to a whole host of reasons leading to this white male dominated startup culture. Lack of representation of underrepresented classes at top CS programs (great stuff from two people who looked at data at…
