In this panel‑style discussion, a group of investors and women founders share concrete, experience‑based guidance for entrepreneurs seeking capital. The speakers stress the importance of confidence, clear and concise investor collateral, and a deep understanding of one’s financials, market, and problem space. They advise founders to be proactive in asking for investment, to choose funding sources that align with their stage, and to keep a centralized investor pipeline. Enthusiasm for the business, thorough sector homework, leveraging warm introductions, and mastering a brief elevator pitch are highlighted as critical tactics. The overall message is a step‑by‑step playbook for women entrepreneurs to present themselves professionally, manage the fundraising process efficiently, and secure the right investors.
Chapters
To get funded, one of the most important things is just to have confidence. Confidence in yourself, in your product, and the team that you've built around you. So that has to come across in your engagement with investors. If you put yourself in their shoes, they would invest, or you would invest, in somebody that had the confidence to get out there and do business internationally.
Sometimes you just have to ask. So we had mentors and we had advisors who we had been talking to all along and getting tips from, and, you know, we got to a stage with one of them where we really wanted him to invest, but we didn't know how to ask them or anything like that, and we ended up sitting in a room with him finally and asking him advice on how to ask someone, and eventually he just sat down and said, sometimes you just have to ask them straight out.
You do have to have good quality collateral, so you need a good investor memorandum that needs to be well executed. You need a good business plan and a good investor deck, so, you know, invest in a good designer to put those together for you. It needs to be very short, succinct, engaging.
There's so many places to get funding from. You need to make sure that you're going for the right place for you or you're taking the right route for you.
There'll be lots of people involved in the investment journey with you, so you need to keep all your investor funnel and the information in one place and we know exactly where we're at in the pipeline, you know, how much we need to raise, what conversations have been had.
You have to just be so enthusiastic, like above and beyond loving your own company, because how do you— how can you expect somebody else to be your advocate, which is basically what you want your investors to be, if you're not that yourself?
Really do your homework. Homework on the sector, on your future trends, and also on me.
Sell the problem, not the solution. The first thing that any entrepreneur needs to convince me of is that there's a high-value, unsolved problem for people that they're addressing with their solution.
Understand the money that your business needs. I think a lot of people don't understand the scale or the costs. Really, people do underestimate the costs.
Really be on top of your company information, particularly your financials, and be able to discuss that with your potential investor in a very comfortable way.
Know your industry and have a good grounding on it, and research then is a very important tip.
It makes a big difference if you can find that person that already— that I already know and respect to give you the introduction to me, it just jumps you up the queue instantly.
Have a well-rehearsed and very slick elevator pitch which clearly articulates what your idea or your business does without taking 15 or 20 minutes. You've got to be able to do that in a minute or less.
Understand that funding isn't this once-off event. What normally happens when you're funding a business is you'll fund it in stages. You need to understand each stage because a lot of the time funding is about getting it to the next bit.
