Coming Soon...The Capital Flex!

This is The Capital Flex. I'm Naseem Sayani. This show codifies the capital playbook because no founder should have to learn the hard way. We talk about what really happens behind closed doors, the bias, the breakthroughs, and the things no one says out loud. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the system wasn't built for you, you're in the right place. I have spent the last 5, 6 years hearing incredible and painful stories from female founders about their fundraising experiences. It's been one after another after another, and I will hear the same stories over and over again on the East Coast, on the West Coast, everywhere. And I just want founders to hear them and have the learnings from each other so that they're not going through the same things without knowing how to handle it. Ultimately, the podcast is for founders. I want founders to be listening, taking notes, learning, capturing the insights so that as they prep for their fundraising, they have insights into what could happen, what does happen, and what to be ready for. Because the venture ecosystem can be really beautiful and really painful. For the last 3 or 4 decades, maybe more, it's been a lot of wonderful men writing checks to other men, right? It's just the capital has been in a certain place, in a certain set of hands, and men have been writing checks to their buddies, building their businesses. They grow up, they exit, they write new checks to their buddies. And so there's a set of pattern recognition built into the system already. There's triggers and success factors that the system is built on. And as women and people of color, we have been coming into the system for maybe the last 10, 15 years. So we're relatively new to the system and the success factors and the qualities that identify success for us are different than what identifies success for men. And so if you were to ask me what those success factors are that I look for, and to keep it really simple, what my husband looks for in success, those things are vastly different in some cases. but if we don't sit at a table together to talk about that, you wouldn't know that they were different. But we have to sit together and talk about it and rationalize between us for us to understand that we're actually looking for different things in some cases. So until we have more women and people of color sitting together with the existing people in the system, we're never gonna put those pattern recognition ideas together. 2 out of every 3 times, the male founder will get a wonderful question about how big AOV can get and how much growth, more growth there can be on those revenues. And he'll get the opportunity to talk about vision and growth. 2 out of 3 times, the female founder will get a question about CAC and why it's so high and how she's going to work on getting CAC down. 2 out of 3 times. That question is a prevention question. They haven't even asked her about growth and vision. So she has to be ready to pivot that to a promotion question. And so you, and that is just because that pattern recognition is managing for risk with her, whereas it's driving for growth and vision with him. And that's the kind of thing we— that's the brokenness in the system that we have to fix and redesign and shift. The podcast is also for investors because the reason it's important for investors, specifically women, to listen to the podcast is to understand that if we had more women writing checks, we would also start to shift the experiences women have in the room when they're fundraising. And so that, that building that awareness for the allies is huge and goes a long way because they can be voices that are educating as well, and they can build those listening skills to hear these problems also. Because as soon as they start to hear it, they can also be a voice that's catching it. That starts to shift the ecosystem as well. The guests that we'll meet on the show will be founders who are seed stage through Series A. They are phenomenal women. I know all of them really well. They're building fantastic businesses, and the themes we'll go through will be everything from misogyny, predatory terms, the kind of disbelief around the opportunity or the tech or the kind of business that's being built that often happens in rooms. We get into the good, bad, ugly, and I really want the ugly. We won't drop names. I don't need anyone to get blackballed, but what I want is the story, the experience, the learning, and then how we do it better the next time. My goal with this podcast is that we become much more conscious of what the experience is for women in the ecosystem. And not just conscious on the female side of it, but that across the ecosystem, everyone is much more thoughtful about how we're asking questions, what the room feels like for every founder that walks into it. It's gonna be fun and we're gonna laugh and we're gonna learn. And we're going to be able to do fundraising better because of it. Thanks for listening to The Capital Flex. If today's episode hit home, share it with the founder you love and follow me on LinkedIn for more.