Tess Clarke talks about what’s really going on in venture capital

Have you noticed any progress since through all the various funding rounds you've gone through, have you noticed that anything is checked? Not at all. Not at all, no. So Sasha and I have been co founders of Odeo for a decade. We have raised five rounds of financing. There has been absolutely zero progress in terms of the proportion of venture capital funding that goes to female founded businesses. So it's. And actually, I think last year it went backwards. So it's always been roughly 2% of VC funding goes to female founded businesses, roughly 85% goes to male founded businesses, and the delta goes to mixed teams. So all of those office hours and sort of mentoring programs just are not working. And I'm absolutely convinced that the only thing that is going to budge this is when we have truly representative investment committees. Now, the only thing that has changed over the past decade is that a number of the VC firms have made progress in terms of recruiting junior female investment professionals, which is great. But what we have found is that unfortunately it just elongates our fundraising process and we still don't get the money. Why is that? It's because the junior female investment professional completely understands the problem we're trying to solve. They're really authentically excited by our solution, attraction our prospects. But then when they present internally to their investment committee, which is just the regular demographic of investment professional, they are then getting knocked back. And so we've just spent much longer working with that fund to still not get the money. And what's really quite concerning to see is that a lot of these young female investment professionals are now leaving the industry because it just gets exhausting for them to be constantly pushing a boulder up the hill, not getting their deals done. And so, yeah, they're going elsewhere.