Female Founders — Are We Doomed?
I recently attended an event with female investors on the panel giving tips to a room full of female entrepreneurs at Google’s office in San Francisco. It was an event hosted by ivy-league alumnae.
At some point somebody asked
“What else can we do other than making up male co-founders to get responses?”
This came after one of the investors shared a story of a female-founded company who invented a male co-founder and started sending emails from “John’s” account. As a result, the response rate doubled.
To me the subsequent question was outrageous. It reminded me of a movie from the 90ies starring Whoopie Goldberg called ”The Associate”. I watched this movie as a German teenager and remember how outraged I was about the bias and racism.
The movie description on IMDB reads: “A comedy about making it on Wall Street. Prejudices are hard to break and Laurel Ayres quickly learns that in order for people to take her seriously she has to work for an older white man or be one.”
Quintessentially, the message 22 years ago and today is: “If you want to make it, be as male as possible”. This is also the feedback I heard at other pitch meetings, panels and recent discussions including female founder office hours at large VC firms: Be more assertive, do not blink when you project $100M in revenue, stand on stage, arms raised, and don’t get lost in the actual details of implementation and milestones.
Really?
That’s the founders we want to see lead our future Amazons, Ubers and Facebooks of the world? The assertive guy who buys lap danced for his employees and finds himself thrown out of the Tardeshift Lounge at a WEF event in Davos?
I don’t think I can be that guy. I will work on my vision, I will teach female entrepreneurs to think bigger and sell the best-case and not the worst-case scenario. All points taken. I will NOT accept that we don’t take the chance NOW at the dawn of a movement when #Time’sUP to think creatively and truly solve this problem.
- It’s the problem of not enough women starting VC-backable businesses
- It’s the problem of total Venture $$$ not getting allocated evenly between genders or minorities
- It’s the problem of investors hearing different things when they listen to women or men
- It’s the problem of 93% investors being male and their connections and networks tend to be male
- It’s the problem of us defining leadership based on a patriarchic system
- It’s the problem of us believing we have to turn male to be successful
We have a chance as women and men to redefine which companies we want to see in the world. We have unlimited access to communication, new technologies will revolutionize the way we attribute value and how we invest. Blockchain technology gives us the means to break transactions and ownership into pieces and diversify our investments. Crowdfunding allows us to vote with our dollars, artificial intelligence can battle bias in decision making if we use it cautiously.
At the GUILD we thought about our impact and our contribution to a new future in which female entrepreneurs succeed at the rate they should; In which consumer dollars spent are reflected in the portfolios of VC funds and on Wall Street serving the demographic making the buying decisions.
We decided to launch a pilot and see whether our AI can make smart suggestions and introduce female entrepreneurs to investors. http://www.letsguild.com/investor-entrepreneur
The investors in the pilot agreed to give advice to the founders they got introduced to. The entrepreneurs applied by filling out a profile and telling the GUILD about the industry and the stage of their company as well as the expectations they had for an investor introduction. Investors told the GUILD about their investment thesis.
In week one, the first introductions were sent out to meet for a 30–60min video chat meeting. We’re now in week three out of four of the pilot (March 14th) and the first feedback from entrepreneurs is overwhelmingly positive and filled with gratitude. Investors remarked how impressed they were with the caliber of the founders and the alignment with their thesis.
While we don’t know yet, if we have the resources to continue the pilot, it seems like we have successfully used technology to connect investors and female entrepreneurs. We provided female entrepreneurs with introductions that gave them the access and the confidence to pitch and ask for advice. We proved that there are many investors in the ecosystem who are very interested and open to support female entrepreneurs.
If we all take small steps like this and creatively think about the problems and what we can do to address them AND if we collaborate and combine our resources, I see a bright future for companies getting found in new ways, funded in new ways and led in new ways. Perhaps that will send a signal to more women and minorities telling them that the hurdles aren’t so high, that there are role models who made it, that they are surrounded by a supportive eco system and that it is ok to lead with the heart and the brain as supposed to other body parts.
I don’t think we are doomed, but it will take a while and many efforts until the day when John decides to send his pitch email from Lucy’s account.
