Did you know that more than a third of the companies in SOSV’s portfolio have at least one female founder? We’re very proud of all our founders, but on March 8th, International Women’s Day, we celebrated the women in our portfolio by hosting a panel with Vu Van of ELSA (upper left), Neha Suyal of Woovly (upper right), Maria Solveychik of SyntheX (middle), and Shelby Yee of RockMass Technologies (lower right).
The panel was moderated by Gwen Cheni (lower left), who recently joined SOSV as a principal partner at IndieBio.
The founders discussed the lessons they had learned as founders, and there were definitely some memorable ones. Here are a few excerpts, but we would highly recommend watching the entire discussion!
- Have internal conviction to drive yourself forward because you’ll be hearing “no” externally. — Maria Soloveychik
- Fall in love with the problem you’re solving instead of the solution. That’s how you’ll stay focused. Consumers don’t care about how amazing your technology is, they care about solving their problem. (And don’t run out of cash!) — Vu Van
- For B2C founders who are running a consumer based company: Talk to your users, and keep talking to your users when you’re building the product. Instead of launching new features to almost everybody just by your own gut feeling or conviction, launch it to a small set of users to understand how they are using it, what their reactions are, and then try to do a lot of A/B testing and work with that. — Neha Suyal
- Be resourceful. Look at all the ways you can do something. At the beginning of COVID, like many industries, the mining industry was on a bit of a pause for a month, and we wanted to bring in some cash at our company. We also realized that there was a PPE shortage in Canada. So we actually turned to our engineering team and a couple of other startups and we said, “Hey, we’re gonna 3D print face shields using this kind of manufacturing method that we drummed up.” So I think there’s always going to be opportunities, and you have to just be resourceful to go get them. — Shelby Yee
Watch the full 24-minute video to learn more insights from our speakers and hear their plans for the future.
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