Female Founder Spotlight: Katharina Unger of LIVIN Farms

LIVIN Farms, the makers of the LIVIN Farms Hive, are making it easy for consumers to grow their own sustainable food in the form of insects in their own homes. A recent HAX Accelerator grad, LIVIN was founded by Katharina Unger, an industrial designer who was born and raised in Austria.

We want to highlight the success of Katharina and LIVIN, especially because female-led companies currently exist in much lower numbers than male-led companies. One way to close the gap is to inspire other women through the stories of people like Katharina, who have great advice for succeeding in business. We asked her a few questions about her journey.

Which women have had the biggest influence on your life and/or career?

KU: As for most people, the first women would definitely be my closest family members, my mom and my aunt. My mom is a superwoman, she is a multi-tasker and has seemingly endless energy. Although she is not a particularly career-driven woman, she certainly has traits that are entrepreneurial: she is resourceful, creative and can immediately socially connect to people of all sorts of backgrounds. She is a natural born businesswoman, you could say, and has a great and very generous heart. She gave me the strength and courage to pursue anything I want.

My aunt is a single English and history teacher and would use any holiday to take me away to exhibitions, buy me loads of books (typically in English) and would always encourage me to ask questions and think why things are the way they are.

Finally, my women teachers. Much more than the male teachers in my life, I had at least one teacher or professor in every stage of my school time who specifically supported me. They would typically find opportunities for me to tackle, and would think ahead as to which opportunities might be appropriate.

Have you experienced any challenges along your career path due to your gender?

KU: I am unsure whether my gender would usually affect the challenges I faced, but I am a petite and young-looking woman, and my physical size sometimes certainly led to people underestimating my position or my skills. While this was usually a challenge, I actually mostly see it as a huge opportunity. It often gave me this surplus of motivation and chance to prove to people what I can achieve professionally; maybe more than people who already make an impression by their physical, tall, appearance. 😉 People are then positively surprised, and I found that they remember this surprise very well.

As a woman, especially a petite one, you sometimes have to prove much harder than a man that you are able. But that´s a great motivation.

Do you feel pressure to look or act a certain way when you’re pitching your company?

KU: I’m an industrial designer by trade, and a creative at the very heart — therefore I am not used to business attire or the business world as such either. I had to pick up everything from scratch: business pitching, business development and how to speak about my product as a business rather than a design project. I am permanently in a challenge to remain creative, and also to develop the product, while thinking about it in economical terms too. I notice this conflict in my mind every now and then while I am giving a pitch. I think our company has something quite unique: we are not going for a mainstream approach at all, which makes us maybe seem a bit naive, but at the same time it is this idealistic drive that differentiates it and could have a very large scale impact on the long term. I try to keep this in mind: stay true to our original drive while keeping up economic interests.

On a more personal note, I have very short hair since I started the business. 😉 It is often said that women change their hairstyle when they make a big change in their lives. I think there is a bit of truth in an outside transformation of how you look once you prepare for a new path to walk in your life.

I feel that the short hair gives me a very practical and quick everyday routine because it is so easy to keep. From an emotional point, I perceive it myself as very straightforward — I have nothing to hide (behind long hair). My family says I look a bit more mature and strict with it, which is probably also good as a businesswoman. 😉

What do you wish you could you tell your younger self as you were starting out?

KU: My start was not that long ago, but there is still a lot that I learned. To be honest, I was quite stressed and anxious when I joined HAX. It was a big challenge to tackle. Nevertheless, I now advise new people at HAX that they should take it a bit easier. Take some weekends off, go home in the evenings to watch a show or read a book. I didn’t allow myself to do anything apart from building the business, and this had at times burnt me out. I now keep reminding myself that it is a marathon, not a sprint, that I am doing. Next to growing your “baby“, it is equally important to keep developing as a person, to learn things outside of your current project. This is sometimes hard to see or accept when you are so deeply focused on this grand challenge of building a business. Also, I think it’s important to meet people who are not in your field and are not entrepreneurs, maybe doing social work. It is good to maintain a healthy view on the importance of your work and how it might affect or not affect other people outside of your entrepreneurship bubble.

What can men do to support the growth of women in technology?

KU: Challenge us! Sometimes gender can affect the way we treat each other — sometimes men would accept that a woman cannot exercise a certain task, while they would not accept a man to not be able to do the same (and also vice versa from the side of women). It’s important to keep challenging each other to go beyond our capabilities and achieve extraordinary things.

Also, sometimes the opinion of women for what I would call very testosterone-driven projects can be underestimated. Women do have valuable insights for a drone project such as men do have valuable insights for a tampon project (happening in current HAX batch for example 😉 ).

Follow Katharina at @KatharinaUnger1, and LIVIN Farms at @Livinfarms!

Originally published at sosv.com on April 6, 2016.