Investing with Purpose: Women in Capital Making a Difference with Naseem Sayani, Co-founder and GP of Emmeline Ventures — How Women Inspire: Invest, Lead, Give

A lot of the companies we use every day, a lot of the apps we use on our phone, even the physical product we use has come from venture-backed companies. Google, Facebook, Teslas, et cetera, Uber, et cetera. Like we use these things every single day. We have picked up behaviors from these things that we now live by every day, but they're all male-founded companies funded by male VCs. And when you think about women's health, the reason healthcare doesn't work for women is because it's been largely designed around men and the system thinks that women are small men. There isn't a curriculum around women's health. There isn't research around women's health. And if there is, it doesn't include people of color, and it doesn't include enough diversity. So even if that small man is a female, she's a white female. And so you're still leaving out vast swaths of the population. So that has to get adjusted. So when we look at investing in healthcare, it is around things that are serving underserved populations when it comes to women.

Welcome to How Women Inspire, where women lead, invest, and give. I'm your host, Julie Castro Abrams, founder and CEO of How Women Lead and managing partner of the venture firm How Women Invest. Feminist, social justice warrior, mother, friend of 50,000+ badass women, and an expert at helping top executive women get on boards. And break down barriers for women entrepreneurs, investors, and social impact activists. In this podcast, we interview women influencers and leaders from across the globe who are in the C-suite, founding companies, investing, and agents of change. We'll share stories of how women lead. We'll provide insights and data, tips you can put into action, and get to know the women who have fiercely and unabashedly stepped into their power in leadership and opened doors for other women like you. We discuss topics ranging from the journey of getting a board seat, how we can counter cultural frameworks that change the way the world views women leaders, what we're doing to close the gender funding gap, and driving equity for women in all aspects of life and career. My goal is that after every episode, you walk away feeling inspired, unstoppable, ready to level up and step into your power and influence. I want to break down the cultural narratives that hold us back collectively and those messy messages you heard that are taking up way too much of your brain space. I want you to know you're invited in. Because I know that together we can change the culture, change opportunities, and create the future we want for our daughters and sisters and friends. This is our time. Are you in?

Today we're talking about the heartbeat of your investment. I just want to tell you how excited I am to connect today and have a conversation about women in venture capital with one of my favorite people, Brilliant intellectualist with a gigantic heart. Today we are diving into the world where every financial decision is a vote. It's a choice that echoes your values and your aspirations. Whether you're a seasoned investor or you're just getting started, get ready for an insightful journey. We're gonna explore the transformational power of investing with your heart. It's more than a transaction, it's a statement. Did you know? Hold onto your seat, consistently for many years now, we have bemoaned the fact that only 2% of all of the money that's being invested through venture capital is going to companies founded by women. Let's think about what the huge cost and lost opportunity is for all of us. And I wanna talk about that today. So I'm having a conversation with somebody who is just gonna knock your socks off, Nassim Sayana. She's co-founder and GP, general partner, which means she's in charge in charge of Emmeline Venture. It's a venture fund investing in founders who are building game-changing businesses that empower individuals, in particular investing in businesses that are helping women manage their health, build their wealth, and live in a cleaner, safer world. All these things you care about, this is literally what Nassim's committed to. She's aggregating capital and she's driving it to solutions we all need in our lives. It's great to have you here today. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you. Thank you. I love these conversations. I love hanging out with you. So this is brilliant. I'm, it's a good afternoon.

Hey, listen, sisters in the fight to transform the landscape. The way we do our work together is so important. And I want to re— if you've been involved with How Women Lead, I'm reminding you of this, but if not, you know, I want you to lean in. This is really beautiful. Our culture's not great for women. And we have created a commitment to each other that's countercultural. We're going to be better with each other. We're going to create an environment that's where women really get to take off. So we ask you to be fierce advocates for each other. No mean girl behavior. We ask you to say yes to making introductions and helping each other, connecting each other with resources. If we connect all the powerful women, we can do anything. We can change any inequitable system. All we have to do is commit to doing it together and for and with each other. We ask you to reinforce her voice when she's being heard. Women's voices are not in, you don't see our voices in the media, financial article, they're not quoting us. We need your voice and we need to reinforce the voices of other women. So thank you for showing up today 'cause that's what you're doing today. And I would just say, tell 5 or 10 friends, this is a movement. We want every woman around you to know about investing, how to think about investing in venture capital and how it can be aligned with your values. And here's our final, the fourth credo that we ask you to commit to when you're involved with us, to be unabashedly visible. Be like Nesim, show up, take up space, share your voice and your vision in the world. And so with that, welcome in. We've invited you to join the new table. I just want to give a couple more data points on the landscape. So consistently the numbers have been around 2%. Nasima, I don't know if you've seen it, but I just saw a recent report. It's probably not final data for 2023. It looks like less than 1% of all venture funds went to companies founded by women last year. It's heartbreaking.

Yeah, it's terrible. And it's, that percentage has been about the same or lower for the last 10 to 15 years. It just, the pie has changed, but the percentage hasn't. And it, you know, there's one part of it is we can talk about the percentage and the problems with that percentage. And then the other lens is that if we actually, as we're doing and you're doing, can get more women and people of color involved in the ecosystem, that percentage will move. It will very naturally shift by just by way of who's inking the deals.

And well, in 2010, there were only 12 women-run venture firms. Now we have over 300. So we actually have a new day. So to your point, let's be hope— we can all feel confident that these new entrants to the market, these leaders who are showing unbelievable performance, So this is what's so interesting. Such a small amount of money has gone to companies founded by women, but women perform better for their investors. They make more money and you know, they're more capital efficient. And last year when money was tight in the venture world and people were struggling, the women-run companies cut faster and were still able to continue to grow and didn't give up. So this is a huge opportunity right now. Our goal today in addressing all of this is to get you up to speed. We want to demystify some of the terminology and the process surrounding venture capital and investing. Investing in venture. Okay. So I want you to lean in and know it's easy. You're invited. We're going to make sure you, you know how to get going. We want to share with you how investing in venture benefits women leaders. It actually has, it's a huge power play. We want to give you an opportunity to take action and invite you to join our network of 10,000 women who are investing in venture and we're changing the landscape for good. You think about all those companies we've all worked in and our friends and daughters have worked in, and some of the challenges we've had with cultural problems, with companies not supporting their female employees or losing them. This is how we make the change. We got to get more women in the room when companies are being started and we need to get more women founding companies. So, Naseem, as a venture capitalist, you're included in this New Table campaign and you're on this values-based investing tool. Can you talk about why that's important and what you, how you think about how your values are showing up in your investing?

Yeah, it's a great question. There's a couple, there's a couple of things. So, and this is across most of the female-founded or diverse-founded funds, is that there is, we are here to make money. That's point number one, right? Point number two is that we are also here to change the world and make things better. And so it's this combination of make money, do good that historically hasn't been allowed to live in the same place that we are all adamantly putting next to each other and talking about all the time. And that's why the value-based investing is so important because you may, like us, we're focused on women, we're focused on wealth equity and health equity and climate. And so those things are, those are values that we hold dear and have to be true in any company that we write a check to. Others may be more focused on certain lenses within ethnicity, and that matters to what they want to achieve and what they want the world to look like tomorrow. And so that tool is helping women identify funds that match their values. Instead of having to meet 100 or go searching individually, you can just sort and filter and the funds that live by those values get served up. And then you talk to 5 and you decide one check or 5 checks. Like you can decide where you want to put your capital, right? But it does a nice job of getting you to answers more quickly than what a lot of independent research might do. The reason that's really important is that when you think about how men have been investing for years, it's been It's because they're on golf courses every Friday morning with their friends, right? And they're talking about deals and they're texting things around and their value-based investing is driven by who they spend their time with. And so we need another mechanism to do that until we are also out spending more time together and we're getting really good at this. But at the moment, you know, we, you mentioned it earlier, but you know, women do things in community. It's a real superpower for us that we don't use, I don't think, as much as we should be using it. And so that. It's a little bit of a proxy for that community superpower at the moment, which is great.

Yeah. All right. You're talking about this, like you can find the firm that's right for you, but maybe even let's back up. What do you need to know if you want to invest in venture capital in the first place? How is it different from investing in like, just like a mutual fund or in your, with your retirement?

Yeah, that's a good question. So venture capital, it's, it's a, it can feel like a black box because you can't, there's no ticker. You can't watch it on TV every day. You can't like look at your stock price daily and understand whether it's up or down. It's not like real estate that you can walk up to it and knock on the door and, and see what it looks like. Even, and so the alternative assets, which is where venture capital sits, which is different than public markets, which is different than real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and ventures sit in the alternative assets. And those are things that you put a check in and it's a long hold and you're gonna see outcomes on the other side, but you don't necessarily have direct insight onto performance at every minute. What you have is quarterly newsletters. You have an ability potentially to get involved with that founder and provide insight. But it's, it's been such a black box for so long that for women who are now coming into a lot of wealth, who are now coming into thinking about portfolios instead of accounts, uh, it hasn't been a room we've been in typically until now. And so now we're like, holy moly, there's a lot of money getting made over here. And we were walking in the door and going, oh, but it has, there's a different mindset required.

This is how big wealth is made in this country. And women today, we have, you know, most of us we've worked for 20 to 30 years, right? We have operational expertise. Most of us are super busy. We need like the easy, how do I get started and how do I walk across the line? That's why we asked everybody who's on the platform to make sure that the, the initial investment's sort of accessible. So if you're going to invest in venture capital, the one thing you have to know is there are some protections at a federal level that say you just have to meet a financial standard called being an accredited investor in order for us to feel like it's safe for people to invest in this kind of money. Because like you said, the investment is sort of held for up to 10 years and you can't really get it out. I mean, some, you know, we've had a fund that within 2 years returned money to people. So that's probably the exception. For the most part, your money is being used well so that you, but you can make big money on the, on the back end. So you have to make $200,000 a year or $300,000 as a household, or have $1 million saved in your retirement or outside of your home. So hopefully that's accessible to everybody who's listening here. And if it is, sign up for the new table. What we're saying is in the next 12 months, you're going to learn a little bit and you're going to start investing in venture. And you can pick a venture firm like Emmeline's that's aligned with your values. You don't have to know how to pick. Founders that are doing a good job, Emmeline Ventures, and that's how to do that. And I've been in the room with Nassim when she's talking about all of her diligence. She is such a disciplined, responsible investor and has such a great reputation. Everybody wants her to be investing in their company and being a steward of your resources. So I think that's how you want to think about it is, do I trust and believe in this person who's running the firm, that they know what they're doing, that they're aligned with my values? Then you just pick how much you're going to invest. It is not that complicated. Um, you can get involved in lots of ways depending on the fund and how they're structured, but really it's no different than putting money into some kind of, of a retirement vehicle really. And you can use a donor-advised fund or retirement funds as well as just direct cash. So can you talk about how your values are showing up? Like what does it mean when you're trying to make the world better, like resources available for how women lead their health.

And yeah, yeah, so our focus areas are healthcare, financial services, and sustainability. And we're focused on solutions that— technology solutions, products that are specifically helping women live and thrive. And that, that comes out in our healthcare bucket. It is exclusively women's health because women's health is so underserved, under-researched, under-supported. We all have stories, doctor stories and research stories, right? That's a whole different LinkedIn Live. And we want to help solve that. We want to change how healthcare works for women because there, there's something else that's related to why venture is important is that a lot of the companies we use every day, a lot of the apps we use on our phone, even the physical product we use has come from venture-backed companies. Google, Facebook, Teslas, etc., Uber, etc. Like, we use these things every single day. We have picked up behaviors from these things that we now live by every day, but they're all male-founded companies funded by male VCs. And when you think about women's health, the reason healthcare doesn't work for women is because it's been largely designed around men. And the system thinks that women are small men.

And so in order to not really have to worry, we're here to tell you, you are not small men.

But this is why, and you have to go all the way back into, you know, like clinical trials and into how doctors are trained when they go to school and there isn't a curriculum around women's health, there isn't research around women's health. And if there is, it doesn't include people of color and it doesn't include enough diversity. So even if that small man is a female, she's a white female. And so you're still leaving out vast swaths of the population. So that has to get adjusted. So when we look at investing in healthcare, it is around things that are serving underserved populations when it comes to women. So it's Black women, It's topics like maternal health, it's topics like mental health, it's looking at things like sexual wellness. These are things that we haven't said out loud in a long time. And so, but if we actually could invest in companies that are supporting those needs, that's gonna generate a lot of value, right? Menopause on its own is a $600 billion market. That's enormous because we're gonna spend half our lives in it and we're willing to spend money to sleep well and feel good. That's the, the health part of it. The, financial part of it is that women sit at the center of their families and communities. They are driving the spend in their households, 85% to 90% across big-ticket items, not small-ticket items. It's houses, and it's healthcare, and it's financial services, and it's cars. But a lot of what we interact with on a daily basis wasn't actually designed for us. So when you think about what we're spending on, we're not spending on things that resonate with our preferences. And our needs, and we are not by way of how financial services is designed. We are not the audience that financial services is marketed to. We are not the audience that wealth management is marketed to. It is marketed to our partners. And it's happened to all of us. If we have male partners and you go talk to a wealth manager, even if I'm earning more than my husband, that wealth manager talks to my husband. And that is just the mentality of the industry. And what we need to do is shift because if I'm the one driving 85% of my household spend, I'm also the one making sure we have savings. But what I— and Sally Krawcheck says this, and I've said it before, like she says, women have been the treasurer of their households and not the CFOs. And we've got to sit in that CFO seat with our partners. And so the financial services that we're after are things that are giving women the ability to have autonomy, access, and ownership around their financial means and around their ability to drive wealth generation for their families. Our third bucket, sustainability, includes all things food tech, ag tech, climate, clean supply chains, et cetera. Because health and wealth are so deeply tied for women, you can't do one without the other, right? One healthcare decision affects my finances. A financial outcome can affect my healthcare. I have to wrap environment around that because as far as climate change is concerned, we are more adversely affected than our male counterparts when it comes to climate change. So we, we have to do all three, and that's why we've combined them and specifically anchored it around what helps women, because if we help her live and thrive, her family and communities are gonna live and thrive as well. And that's what we're after. We're here to help everybody. We're just getting to the heart of the matter more quickly.

Awesome. I just wanna pause and give some additional information here. I'll give you an example. I'm definitely square in the menopause space, and it was just brutal finding an actual physician resource that understood stands menopause, you know, they'd be like, oh, I don't think you should do hormone replacement therapy because long time ago there was a misguided research that said it was cancer. And yeah. And so I find this company called MEDI, M-E-D-I. Everybody who's in anywhere close to menopause, check out this as a resource. Everyone I talked to who uses it, literally $80, get on a phone call. Within 20 minutes I have a prescription that changes everything. And, you know, by not having menopause solutions, and in this case what's right for me is hormone replacement therapy, women's heart disease, bone— oh, hot flashes are terrible for you. We don't even know this stuff, and we have all this misinformation because we don't have healthcare systems and organizations designed by women for women with women practitioners who really are trained in what we need. So to me, that is such a— and I didn't, I didn't invest in it because it was started when I wasn't investing. So, but it is an absolutely great example of a company.

Yeah, absolutely. We have two menopause companies in our portfolio, very similar, right? They're solving the knowledge gap, providing digital prescription services. And, you know, after you hit menopause doesn't mean life is over. It just means you're going to live for another 40 years in a different way. And that's okay.

So there's a question and it's saying, oh, what about the women who've done a bad job, who've lost people money? How do you think about a diverse portfolio that's balanced so that if somebody doesn't do a great job, if there's a company that doesn't, how do you handle that? Like, how do you support the company and make sure they're doing a good job? And then how do you think about it in terms of your financial modeling?

Yeah, so there's a, there's a couple of layers in there, right? So certainly there are female founders that have lost money or been less than truthful. I would argue there's male founders who have also lost money and been less than truthful. So to put the marker on it and say, 'cause this happened at a different conference I was at, somebody in the back said, well, don't we need more exits before we put more money there? And I'm like, that's fine, except that FTX and I mean, we can list the companies that have blown up billions of dollars. And so that's not the lens, right? And what the media does, the media does this like at length.

They love to tear down women.

Showcase the failure of women every day of the week. And yet when a, when a man fails, it's almost celebrated and he gets another chance and he gets another $450 million. We can't listen to the media narrative, right? We have to understand what we're being told.

And furthermore, in my funds, basically my portfolios are between 10 and 20 companies. So you bake in diverse portfolio with, you know, knowing that not everybody's going to be 100% successful.

The other thing on that point is that the fund structure actually creates immediate diversification, right? And so it's 25 to 30 companies. They're not all going to be hits and that's totally fine, but 3 to 4 of them will be on average. And that's what's going to be drives your return. If you've got 30 angel investments, all 30 could go to zero and you would lose all that money. But you put it in a fund, it's not likely to go to zero just by way of the process, right?

Well, okay, let's talk about the process. So you as a venture capitalist— I just did a thing this morning with you where we were talking about all your due diligence processes. So you really evaluate the companies and then you support them over time. Can you talk a little bit about the value that a venture firm adds by bringing all those resources forward?

Yeah, absolutely. So the check, of course, is important. The big and second important thing is access to expertise and network. And so I have two co-founders in the fund. We come from different careers and different professional backgrounds. So I'm the strategist and the numbers person, my— and, or at least the, the business model person. Azeen, our partner, is a talent professional. She's also been investing for 30 years herself. And then Lakeisha is deep operations and has built global teams. And so for early stage founders when they have questions in the zero to one when they're building, the three of us have pretty much seen everything that they could come across. We can cover all of it. So that's really helpful because when it comes to problem solving, and this is again a comparison to male founders who can text 10 people and get answers very quickly, female founders don't often have like their text list built on who they're gonna call when they have a question. And we very quickly put ecosystem around them. So it's the three of us. And our entire investor base has expertise. And to the extent that our LPs want to be active with the fund and involved with the founders and provide expertise or be an advisor, we're lighting that up as well. So like we have PR people, we have tech people, we have payer provider people, we have fintech people, and that's all expertise our founders can access and it's quick. So they don't have to spend all weekend spinning. They can call me at 10:00 PM on a Sunday and say, my gosh, I've got a payer meeting tomorrow. I need someone. I'll be like, great. Talk to so-and-so because she did that for 20 years. And so that's the benefit that we can bring to founders very quickly that we're very proud of because that means that we can help them grow and make sure they can do that well.

So you used an acronym, you said an LP. An LP is a limited partner, which is, that's an investor. So if you invest in venture, you are a limited partner. You are partnering. We're in business together. There's a question also in the chat about should you only invest the amount of money that you're prepared to lose, which is kind of an interesting question. Do you want to, do you want to opine about that?

Yeah. Yeah. So venture is high risk, high reward. So any money that you're investing anywhere in the market, you should be prepared to lose. Right. And so, but in public markets too, they go up, they go down. That's what I mean. Public markets, even real estate, right? Especially if you live in California, we have fire season every year. Like you could lose your house. If there's a fire, it goes to your neighborhood. So you, you have to be ready for that to be— it cannot be daily expenses, money you need to buy food. Like that's not the right money to use. And that's why the IRAs are really interesting because if you have retirement money, you can reallocate what is otherwise static capital anyway into a fund and it doesn't affect your daily expenses. It's not liquid cash. So you have to be ready to lose that money because it's going to also, it's going to be in a hold. For 7 to 10 years. So be ready for that.

You know, not be able to access the money for 10 years, yes. Be ready to lose it. Well, anything you could lose at any time, right? As you said, but these are diversified portfolios with professional managers who know what they're doing. So the likelihood that all 30 of the investments in a portfolio tank and everybody loses money is pretty thin. You know, anything can happen, but that would be unlikely, especially what you're doing at Emily Ventures is you have diversity. So you're not all women's health, you're women's health and climate and financial technology. So you've got quite a few different areas in the, that you are investing in, which gives you some safety as well. There's diversification in what companies and what industries you're in.

Right. Yeah. We're, we're both B2C and B2B. We have 3 sectors. Those sectors have different exit rates. And different outcomes, and it's good. It gives us a couple layers of diversification very quickly.

Yeah. And we're, as venture capitalists, we're looking at financial modeling all the time. Every change you are going back to the model spreadsheet, whatever it is, and making sure that you are going to get— to me, our measure is, can I see a 10x return from every single investment we make? And I am driving to that and beyond on a daily basis. Okay. So everybody who's joined us today, you're invited to the new table and this is what you're going to get. You get more education like this, whether it's articles or, or events or different things that we will do to help you build your journey. You also get access to meet venture capitalists like Nassim, but in different modalities. You can contact them directly and have a one-on-one conversation and talk about investing in their fund. So education, a searchable values-based index tool that you've done such a beautiful job of describing. But we also, you know, if you're in Dallas, Texas, we're having a party, someone's hosting a party for all the investors in Dallas, Texas. We're having events where you can build community, which is so important to most of us, right? And it's also a power play. So we haven't really dove into that very much, but you talked about inviting some of those limited partners or investors to help give their expertise when it's appropriate. I want to extend your thinking, everyone who's listening here, to think about like when you are out and about in the world, you're thinking about your own career or getting on a corporate board or whatever your part of your journey is, or even if you're absolutely winding down on the day-to-day work, but you want to keep having fun and learning about innovations, investing in venture, even just as I put $25,000 in, talking about that in your day-to-day life, people treat you differently. It gives you access to different rooms that you get to go into and times when you really get to flex your own power and influence. It's a game changer. So I want to encourage everyone here to be thinking about this as also an investment in your own professional development because you get a different lens. You know, if you hang out with Nassim, you are getting a whole different view of the world and also the innovations that are coming. Like how fun to like, what deals are you hearing about? You know, it's great.

It's a lot of fun.

So I think we're out of time, which is such, it always goes too fast.

Yeah.

One of the questions, the final questions is what's a minimum amount to invest? And it depends in different venture firms, but with you, what's a minimum investment?

So our minimum right now is $50K. We did have $25K spots earlier. They all filled up. We're at $50K now. A couple of things to keep in mind though, and this is, these are important education details, is that it's not all due at once. There is what's called a capital call schedule that spreads that capital over about 3 years. The first call is 25%. That's what's due at signing. The rest of it will be much smaller chunks, 10 to 15% every 3 months, 3 to 4 months. Every fund does that a little bit differently, but that's what's true for us at Emmeline. We are fundraising. I'm actively converting people daily. So if you're here for it and want to talk, please, please reach out. I'd love to have everyone. And we are after some really great stuff. So if you want to chat about it more and understand pipeline or hear about some of the companies, I am happy to share because I'm very excited about what we're looking at. And I'd love to have more people in it with us.

And even with a $50,000 commitment, it sounds like those can be in $5,000 and $10,000 chunks depending on what—

I mean, that first chunk is the 25% of the first chunk is 12 grams. So, yeah.

So, and in our venture firm, our minimum investment amount's $25,000 and it's spread over 4 years in equal amounts. So finding sort of the right pacing that's right for you, but also, you know, the leader that you trust and the values alignment for you, we think is the, is the right formula. We've done research and found that that's generally the case. Do we accept investors outside the United States?

Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Fantastic. Not everybody does. It's a great question to ask. On this note, everybody who's joined us today, you're invited to join us at the new table of power, wealth, and influence where we are setting the stage for the future companies that are being developed so that they meet our needs. And we're so excited to have you along with this journey. This is your invitation. We're going to create a ripple effect for the world to make it better, safer, and, and have better solutions for all of us. And we're going to make money while we do it.

We're going to make loads of money. It's going to be a ton of fun. I'm seeing a lot of I'm interested in the chat. You can find me easier than I I can find you, ping me on LinkedIn. We can share emails or something, but LinkedIn might be easiest and we'll get it done. We'll talk more.

Excellent. We can't wait to partner with you. Have a great day, everyone.

And with that, I want to thank you all for listening to today's episode of How Women Inspire. And because your inspiration should not stop when this podcast ends, head over to our website, howwomenlead.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at How Women Lead and subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app to find out how you can proactively take charge and step into your power through our workshops and activism in our loving network.

We want to propel you.

See you next time, ladies, and remember to be unabashedly visible.