Naseem SayaniInvestor | Innovator | Ecosystem Builder | Board Director

Misaligned Capital Is Still a No with Lisa Hillyard #femalefounders #podcast #founderenergy

Name: Misaligned Capital Is Still a No with Lisa Hillyard #femalefounders #podcast #founderenergy
Uploaded: 2026-02-06T17:01:12+00:00
Duration: 59 s
Channel: Naseem Sayani
Description: In this podcast excerpt, Lisa Hillyard answers a listener’s question about the two essential pieces of advice she would give to female founders before…

6 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this podcast excerpt, Lisa Hillyard answers a listener’s question about the two essential pieces of advice she would give to female founders before they meet venture capitalists. She stresses that founders must know their business inside‑out—so thoroughly that they can trust their own judgment over any external opinion—and that they should establish their own performance metrics to guide decisions. Hillyard also highlights the need for deep self‑awareness and a trusted circle of advisors who will provide honest feedback. Armed with this knowledge and support, she argues founders can confidently push back against VCs who misunderstand or misrepresent their model, even to the point of dismissing such criticism outright.

Chapters

If you had like two big ahas or must knows for other female founders, what would they be? Before you take your first VC meeting, know inside and out with every fiber of your being that nobody knows your business better than you, and that you're right about what you're choosing to bring into this world until actual metrics tell you otherwise, actual metrics that you set. Not some guy that you just got on a Zoom call with who's never met you. The flip side of that is it requires like a really serious amount of self-awareness. It's not about assuming you're always right. It's about keeping enough people around you that you trust to tell you the truth. It's about telling yourself the truth. It's about doing the work and putting in the research so that when you go into a meeting and a man chooses to tell you, like a VC I'm talking about, chooses to tell you that your model is wrong or that you are thinking about it incorrectly, you can just tell them to jump in the lake because they don't understand what you're building.