S1E10: From Consulting, to Angel Investing, to Building a Fund Investing in Female Founders with Naseem Sayani (Emmeline Ventures) | Girls Into VC — Girls Into VC Podcast

Hi everyone, and thank you so much for listening to the Girls Who VC podcast. Girls Who VC is the first organization dedicated to bringing young women into venture capital. My name is Isabella Mandis, and I'm the founder and CEO of Girls Who VC. On this episode, I'm so excited to welcome Nassim Sayani. She talks about her experiences from consulting to angel investing to creating her own fund, Emmeline Ventures, where she invests in female founders. I have so much overlap with Naseem in our similar interests, and I'm so excited for you all to hear from her today. Thank you so much, Naseem, for coming on the podcast. I'm super excited to have you here today and talk about your experiences and venture so far.

Absolutely. I'm glad to be here.

Could you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. If we go back in time a little bit, uh, so I grew up in management consulting. I was, uh, I like to call myself a recovering consultant because I spent so much time on planes. But it was instrumental in so many ways in like the toolkit and my understanding of diligence and the things that I'm able to do now. So I was in consulting for, I would say, about 15 years, all digital and innovation focused. I got involved in that business in 2007. I'm gonna absolutely date myself. This is when we first had iPhones in our hands, which sounds like the world didn't exist before that happened, but there's certainly, it did. And then all of a sudden, you know, our clients were asking digital strategy questions and there weren't many people that knew what that meant. So it very serendipitously led me down the path of being in innovation and strategy and digital for a long time. And that has since turned it into, got into an incubator, worked at an agency, worked at a corporate venture capital fund. And now I run with my partners the fund that I'm at now. So it all, it all makes sense in hindsight. But, you know, I couldn't have told you in 2007 that I'd be running a fund in 2023. But here we are.

Amazing. Thank you. I love that in your journey. Touching on your career in consulting, what did you learn from these experiences that you think you've been able to apply to venture capital?

It's a good question. It's a couple of things. So the toolkit itself is really valuable. So the problem-solving skills, the, the hustle and the pace of work that you learn in that world and the, you know, what The client engagement, all of that translates really easily into venture because I lead a lot of our diligence. It's all the same toolkits. Client engagement turns into founder engagement. And then the pace of venture is quite quick. We have to get to decisions fairly quickly. We have to be looking a lot of deals at the same time. So that, you know, the working knowledge that I have to keep kind of front of mind all the time comes from having been trained to do that by way of, when I was in management consulting. So it all comes in handy pretty regularly.

That's amazing. And before you started Emmeline Ventures, you started angel investing. How did you first become interested in angel investing and decide to go into that space?

Yeah, there were a couple of things that happened in the same, I would say, 12 months. So I had been in consulting for a long time. I had gone from core strategy work into an incubator and we were launching startups and doing the zero-to-one build, so to speak, with our client partners. And all of that work was really interesting and I learned a lot, but it was, we were in such deep like B2B SaaS world during that time that we were building really interesting stuff, but it, it had nothing to do with women's health. It had nothing to do with impact. We weren't hiring enough women or enough diversity to run those companies. And so I just kept seeing this, this gap kind of end up in front of me. Also, when you grow up in those spaces, you know, there aren't— the diversity quotient is hard, right, in terms of gender and then even in terms of any kind of racial or ethnic background. So I was always the flag holder for diversity. I was always the one kind of talking about what it meant to promote women at the same rates that we were promoting men. And so— and then the third thing that happened was I went through a fairly adventurous, complicated fertility journey of my own. and it became very, very clear that there just isn't enough information about women's health. We just don't know enough, and the system doesn't know enough. And so all of these things converged into a space where I was— I went looking for female founders. I went looking for businesses that were building solutions to things that I had experienced or things that my friends had experienced, or, you know, things that could have some real impact on how women lived. Uh, and that's what kickstarted it, is I wanted to I wanted to be part of building the ecosystem around female founders that their male counterparts can so easily access and get involved in. And I felt like I could do more with the things that I knew. And if I was gonna put capital to work, it was going to be with female founders. It was not going to be with anybody else because that was important to me in terms of paying it forward and making sure that those businesses could have the capital that they needed to grow.

That's incredible. I love how that's such a priority for you since that's something that I'm also super passionate about. So I definitely love other women that are trying to support and specifically invest in women. Can you talk about the process and what that looks like for actually finding these startups and sourcing these deals to even conducting the diligence and making investment decisions?

Yeah. So the sourcing comes from a lot of different things, right? And part of running a fund and launching a fund means having access. And so when we, myself and my partners were launching and running what we call our pilot fund, which was the first round of investing that we did, we had to get involved in the ecosystem. We start to join events, you start to get more loud, noisy, prominent on LinkedIn. You start to tell the market what you're looking for, and then you meet one founder, you meet the next, you meet the next, and you can kind of pull the thread. And now we're in a world where we have a really rich community of female founders. We've invested in 19 companies. We have, I know, no less than 300 individual female founders across the country that I've spent time with or talked to. And whether we've invested or not, we've built such rich relationships with the community that we're getting probably our best inbound deal flow from the community. So a lot of our founders will refer us to other women they know who are doing something really interesting. And they'll say, oh my God, you have to meet Emmeline. And that happens all the time. And then it becomes, you pair that with presence. So it's getting on the ground at South by Southwest. It's being in the different femtech events. It's going to the female founder events and putting the name of our fund out in front of the ecosystem so that they start to go, oh, interesting, who's that? What are they doing? And so that drives a lot of deal flow as well. The third is that we are also plugged in across a handful of the business school programs around entrepreneurship. So I'm in LA and I went to UCLA. So I, you know, UCLA, USC were easy. We're also plugged in at NYU. I went to Stern, so that one is also accessible. Duke, and then my other partner went to Harvard. So we can plug into these networks in a way that's fairly organic. And then that gives us really good insight into what's happening at the earliest stages with, with budding founders that are coming out of either undergrad or grad school. And then of course, you know, there's the accelerators, the Techstars, the Y Combinators of the world that we can plug into as well. And so once you start to dig into being present and in front of the community of founders, it, you just have to build the relationships and it drives a lot of what we see come in.

So how do you determine how much funding you're going to be able to offer a startup and what that process looks like once you've raised initially from the LPs?

Yeah, so the size of the fund that you raise is often the strategy you pursue. So if you're— we're raising $10 million, uh, and so $10 million is not a huge number. We're considered a micro fund, uh, which is both loving and quite interesting. Uh, and so, but that means, you know, in order for us to get a big hit, right, we need— we're investing in pre-seed, seed. We want to have somewhere between 1 to 2% equity. Uh, so we can't invest in valuations that are bigger than $20 or $25 million, right? It's just too big because the check we'd have to write becomes too big. Uh, so we were going to write 25 first checks, let's say, into companies averaging $150K to $250K, and then we're reserving half of the fund for follow-on investments. So when our highest performing portfolio companies get to their Series A, we want to participate in that round as well. Uh, and so it Because we're a $10 million fund, the pre-seed, seed stages make the most sense because typically you're sub $15 million on the valuation. We can get reasonable equity with the first check that's $150K. If you're a $50 million fund, you're probably writing bigger checks. You're probably writing half a million to a million, uh, and you're looking for a different equity position and you're looking for different follow-on access. Uh, so you're probably seed Series A because you're just a bigger fund, so you're writing bigger checks. So it often comes down to you decide how much you want to raise. And line that, and hopefully that lines up with the kind of stage you want to invest in. The other thing that's important is how involved do you want to be as an investor? So we want to be involved, we want to be active, we want to be their first phone call, and that we can have the most impact at pre-seed and seed. So we can engage, we can join strategy meetings, we can look at budgets, we can help facilitate introductions for fundraising. And that's all, that seed stage growth for female founders is fairly pivotal. Because if they don't get through seed, they won't get to the Series A. And we feel like we can help the most at that stage. And that's why we've targeted the fund that way.

That's incredible. You mentioned helping the startups that you invest in. What does that look like? Where does a venture capitalist come in and help the startups? I feel like there's a misconception that people just kind of hand money and then let the startup work and then they like to check out. But what does that process look like once you're working so closely with them?

So it, it can look a couple different ways. So we have founders where we have looked at budgets and like helped them put their operating budget together, really sanity check where they're putting their numbers and what they're spending. Uh, that is a form of help that often isn't easy to find. And because we're seeing so many companies, we can add really good benchmarks around what should marketing spend look like, how many hired, like what should you be paying in salaries, how much equity should you be using? To buffer the salaries so you're not out that much cash. So budgets is one thing. Team structure and hiring is another. So there's one of our portfolio companies is in the market for a chief operating officer. I posted on LinkedIn, hey, really great founding team is looking for a COO. Let me know if you know anybody. I got no less than like 40 responses to that post within the next 48 hours. Really high quality talent. that would've taken weeks to source. Uh, but because of who we are and what the market knows about us, we can source that talent really quickly for them. The other thing is joining meetings with the senior team. We do monthly check-ins with most of our founders just to see how's it going, what do you need, anything coming up that we should be thinking about. Uh, and so those regular check-ins make a big difference because it means that we're building a relationship continually. And two, like you get, it gets much easier to raise red flags when you spend more time with someone. So especially right now, given the environment, runway and cash availability is a big deal. And so we can get ahead of those questions because we're talking every couple weeks. So it's not like a cash situation is going to show up unexpectedly, hopefully. But you know, we're going to have some preview into where they are cash-wise before it becomes a big problem. So we try to stay engaged that way. Those are like the functional operational things. And then separate from that, if we're ever in the same neighborhood as a founder, then dinner, drinks, whatever it is, absolutely has to get done so that you get the, you know, the human time and you can just sit and talk about life over, you know, a glass of wine or something and not really talk about work. And those things make a big difference too, because it just creates a level of comfort that you often don't— you don't see happen enough in venture, I think. And it's just a behavior difference that we've been quite deliberate about with the founders we work with.

When you were an angel investor, how did that— how did you go about that process? Did you typically invest alone? Did you invest with other angel investors? How did you find these companies?

So I'll answer the second part first. So finding the companies kind of came through the initial network building. So as I was meeting getting involved in the ecosystem, joining different like meetups around founders, starting to, you know, my name was starting to show up in groups as someone who might be writing checks as an individual. Finding the companies was actually, it becomes interesting because you start to see quite a lot and then you really have to prioritize which passion space you're going to write a check around. And so, so the finding the companies was fun. You like meet a lot of founders, especially ones that are in LA are very easy because I can catch up in person, we can do breakfast or lunch something. So that part was— it's great. You start to figure out what you really, really care about and where there's real business model transformation that you want to be part of. So I have women's health in my personal portfolio. Of course, I also have music and the reimagination of IP and rights so that the artist keeps more of their own collateral and the IP from their work versus the record label. And I also have fintech because there's things around wealth generation for, for young people and for kids that's really important to me. And so I got involved in that one as well. So you kind of find the things that you really care about and that's your first filter. The second is you're writing checks, like more often than not, there's other angels involved. But if you get excited and you want, and they're raising, like you can write a $10K, $15K, $25K check. And if they're, whether or not they're raising, You know, if they like you and want you to be part of their team and there's value both ways, you can usually write that check and you don't necessarily have to have a lot of other folks involved, but it's typically during their fundraising. Like if they're active, they have a SAFE note or a convertible note open and you can get involved when that's happening.

So you talked a lot about your experience as an angel investor. Can you talk more about how you created Emilyne Ventures, why you created it, and what that process was like?

Yeah, yeah. So the, the angel investing grew up, right? So, uh, we were writing— the three of us, myself, my two partners— were writing a lot of, a handful of individual angel checks. We all met through one of the angel organizations that we had joined, uh, and so we teamed— we met through that, their boot camp weekend, uh, so it was like 60 women all from different backgrounds and experiences This was early pandemic, so it was a big Zoom call for 3 days. And but we kind of found each other by way of the conversations that happened over that weekend. And we teamed up on diligence for one of the startups we met during that weekend. And we were, you know, the rest is history. We teamed up really easily, very common ethos, purpose, desire for impact, focus and interest around things like women's health and fintech and climate. And we started angel investing together. So our pilot fund is effectively like just a large angel portfolio that we put our own capital into. So we were just combining forces to write a bigger check than we could write on our own. And we were still building relationships. We were still getting involved. We were still trying to be a really important resource to those founders. And then we had a moment in like 2021, I would say, where we were having dinner and we leaned in and said, wait a minute, like, I think we can go big. I think we can do this with more scale. We can bring outside capital to this. We can have more impact. We can affect more founders. We can deploy more capital. And then we were off. We figured out a fund manager. We worked with Carta. We did all of our legalese and paperwork with Carta as our fund administrator. We got legal on board. We had to get accounting and tax on board. So we have partners for all of those major things. And then we started fundraising. And so there are, there's some operational steps you have to get in order before you can launch a fund. You have to register with the SEC. You have to make these decisions. Around what type of venture fund you want to be. And so we did all of those steps by way of the fund formation process. And then, and then it was great, let's go get the capital. And so then you just dive into fundraising mode. So all three of us are fundraising. We're looking at, we're fundraising with individuals, high net worth individuals, with family offices and with institutions. And you need a different MO for each of those groups, right? Your individuals are going to be people you know, people you went to school with, people you worked with. You get into family offices, those are usually coming through warm referrals. And then the institutions like the Bank of Americas of the world, uh, are usually coming through warm intros as well. The process takes longer the bigger the institution, right? So it's, you're in conversations for months with a big organization. Individuals you can convert in 1, 2, 3 phone calls. So across the 3 of us, we're focused in different places. Uh, because we can spread out that way nicely. But it, it's a lift, right? It's every conversation. If it's not a podcast or something like this, it's usually a fundraising conversation. It's usually someone or a team or a business that we're trying to get involved with the fund. So the, the fund formation part is not the hardest part. I would say the fundraising part is the hardest part because you're really communicating vision, trying to get people really excited about what you're doing, get them bought into the thesis that you have, uh, and, and wanting to put some capital to work. And that doesn't come without risk, right? Putting money into an angel investment or into a fund has similar elements around risk, uh, and so you have to be able to demonstrate that you're in a space that has value, that has growing value, that you have unique access to, that you know you're going to get some hits out of, uh, and so that creating that belief and trust with investors takes takes the most time and it's what drives the fundraising process.

You talk about your thesis. Can you elaborate on your long-term vision for your firm and how you plan to continue supporting female-led startups in the future since that is what you're hoping to do?

Yeah, so this is just Fund 1, and we're currently, we're $10 million as I mentioned, and we're focused on women's health, financial services, and climate. I like to call it the trifecta of things that affect how women live and thrive. So we're investing in female founders who are building businesses that specifically help women. And that those two things were important to us. It wasn't just— it wasn't female founders building anything. We really wanted to be targeted on things that support what women are able to do and the kind of agency we have on our health, our wealth, and the environment around us. As we grow into Fund 2 and Fund 3, which will be larger, hopefully in the 30, 40, 50 million range, uh, you know, we may decide to double down in one of those parts of the thesis, uh, depending on what the market's doing at the time. We, we will absolutely with the next fund be writing seed and Series A checks because we want to be part of that next step ecosystem because there's a fairly large drop-off, uh, in terms of, in, for female founders when they hit the Series A. So it's really hard at seed, especially, and this is probably more acute for women's health founders. Then you get to Series A and there's, there's not enough female checkwriters anywhere, but there's very, very few at the Series A stage. And so when you're trying to progress into the next raise, you need people on the other side of the table who understand what you're talking about, who understand, like, you can say the word pelvic floor and it doesn't freak people out, right? And, and that has to be part of the process. So Fund 2, Fund 3, we absolutely want to be writing Series A checks. So that we can be part of closing that gap on the Series A raises. And then we may double down on some part of the thesis, but we'll see how it goes and what's going on in the market at the time.

That's incredible. I can't wait to see how you guys grow in the future. You mentioned how much risk is involved in venture. Could you talk about how you manage risk in your investments and what strategies you use to try to mitigate it?

Yeah, it's a good question. So there's a couple of things. We as a fund are not exclusively B2B, B2C, or B2B2C. Uh, we invest across all three types of business models. There are funds that double down in, in one or the other. We have a mix of all of that. So that, that's risk mitigates in one way, in that we're not reliant on consumer behavior to drive outcomes of the fund. That we have, you know, business-driven business models. We have from the provider to the patient-driven business models. So that gives us reasonable risk mitigation just on business model. The other one is because we're investing in 3 different sectors in healthcare, in fintech, and in climate. You also just have different growth rates in those businesses. There's different existing multiples for comps and exits. Uh, so we, it should help us balance what the overall return for the fund will be. Um, because we're not exclusively investing in just one space, we have 3, so we can manage risk across those 3. And then the third is, you know, because we're involved and we spend time with the founders and we, we're getting to know their businesses fairly well, we're hopeful that our ability to, to identify trends, to help problem solve, to help look around the corner is going to add that third layer of risk mitigation for the fund.

I love how that's something that you're thinking about now and trying to avoid. Are there any specific challenges or roadblocks that you face in your experience building this fund, and how have you been able to overcome them?

Yeah, so there's probably two, maybe a third, we'll see. Two, the first one is I mentioned fundraising being kind of the hardest part of this job. And a lot of that comes from, you know, the market to date, venture to date has invested in a lot of like pure tech or B2B SaaS or things that like there's lots of metrics around that are changing businesses in fairly obvious ways. Women's health is still one of those spaces that, yes, we're talking about more and yes, there's a lot more visibility, but there's not yet enough belief across the ecosystem that there's going to be value creation in big, big ways. Right. We have to be able to point to the exits. We have to be able to point to where the unicorns are happening. And we are seeing more and more of them, right? Maven, Incredible Health, EverlyWell, Kindbody. Like now we have the examples in women's health of companies that have hit that unicorn status. So that helps the fundraising process, because otherwise you're, you're proving an opportunity that nobody's been able to see, uh, and you want them to take the leap with you. So that's probably the hardest part, is that it's— this is not charity. This— we are here to make money, right? That bottom line. But we are going to do some good at the same time. And I think communicating that in consistent ways, in a way that people believe it, can be a hurdle, because the doing good and making money those two things haven't lived next to each other for a long time. If you're doing good, you're usually a nonprofit, and if you're making money, you're usually fairly capitalistic, uh, in negative ways. And so we're, we're bringing those two things together. So that, that takes a few turns for folks to believe in. Um, the second one is that, you know, we need diversity in all parts of the venture ecosystem. Uh, and you can, you can kind of characterize the current capital flywheel as being a lot of Stanford hoodies who got their exits, who then poured their money back into other people that looked like them. And so now we're trying to ask that same capital flywheel to put money into people who don't look like them. And so we'll go to events and it'll be like a mix of male and female VCs, a mix of different sizes of firms, and we'll talk about what we're investing in and, you know, the categories we care about. And one out of every two conversations, we'll be like, oh my God, You should tell my wife about that. You should tell my daughter about that. Oh, I know this other female VC. She's over there in the corner talking to someone else. You should go meet her. And, and that has to change, right? We can't, we can't put all the diversity together on that side of the room and all the, the, the other folks on this side of the room. We have to merge these groups, right? And I don't, I don't need to talk to the other female VCs. I know all of them. We're all friends. We're all sharing deal flow. I need, I need the white male VCs to stand next to us and say, this is important, and you should put money in their funds. And so that's, we're pushing that kind of all over town. Every fund like us is doing that because we need the, we need the allies, right? We can't, we're not going to leave that behind, but that we need those relationships to open up other capital. And I think bridging, bridging those conversations is probably the other moderately hard thing to do because it's, it's pattern recognition and it's behaviors that are pretty ingrained and we're asking people to think differently. And that, that takes a few turns.

I find it super insightful how you mentioned the allies. That's something that really surprised me when I was starting Girls Who VC is the amount of boys that reached out to me and said that they were there to support, which I think is super awesome. On a happier note, what are some success stories of female-led startups that you've invested in that you want to talk about, or any female companies that you recommend people check out?

Oh gosh, the entire portfolio. Everyone should go look at every company in our portfolio. Start there. But I'll call out a few. So we have a company in our, our pilot fund called Another Tomorrow based out of New York. And what she has done is she's built a brand and products, high-end consumer fashion that is fully sustainable from the farm to the consumer with an upcycle option as well. You can scan a QR code inside of every garment and see the provenance of that garment from where it started to how it was produced to the, the equity metrics around wage, around fair treatment of animals, around climate. And you know exactly what you can do with that garment when you're done with it. So if you want to sell it back into the system, she has an option to do that. So The apparel value chain and supply chain is probably one of the most damaging to the environment on the planet. And she has completely reimagined that supply chain and actually embedded sustainability into it in a way that's working really, really well. She just closed her Series A and we've been invested since pre-seed stages. So we're, we're big, big fans of everything she's doing. The other one I'll call out, which is in our current portfolio, is a company called Luna Joy. That is in the mental health space and specific to women. So if you think about mental health solutions— BetterHelp, Headspace, etc.— they're completely non-gendered. They are one-size-fits-all. There's no gender lens to them at all. The physiology of men and women is different, and the way women deal with stress, the way they deal with, you know, the burdens of life, with work, with childcare, with all those things, actually creates a different mental health support system needs to be in place for women. And what this, this founder team has done— they're both clinicians. They both have richly educated in psychiatry. They've built a model, uh, that is a fully tailored, female-focused mental health solution. So from adolescence through to menopause and beyond, they can be your mental health partner all the way through and plug into your primary care at all of those stages. So it's a really, really compelling solution because we're all now much more aware of our mental health, and now there's a place for women to go specifically that understands us in a different way than other— what other platforms might be doing. So big, big fans. And then one more I'll give you just because I'm excited about them. There's a— it's a food tech company called Dough. And what the founder has done is reimagined snacking and desserts specifically around female snacking behaviors and millennial Gen Z audiences in particular. And she has— she's reimagined cookie dough. And she combines very simple ingredients with supplements and nutrients so that it tastes good and it's good for you. Like there's pomegranate in it, so your skin's going to look good. It's like things like that. And she launched the company in 2020. We invested in late '21 and she went— or mid-'22 maybe, and she secured national distribution in Sprouts last December. So she's in 1,200+ doors across the country and the company is only about 2.5 years old. So it's incredible to have that kind of access to retail and growth. You can buy it online. It's D2C to start, but if you want to go to Sprouts and buy it off the shelf, you can. So it's exciting. It's exciting to see companies in like an apparel, in healthcare, and in food really see the kind of growth that they were aiming for happen in really good ways.

Those are some awesome companies. Also, this is super random, but when you go on your website and look at your portfolio companies, you're able to actually see like what they are, what they do. Yeah, sorted them, which is something I really appreciate because on a lot of, uh, venture firms' websites, when you look, it's just like a logo and logo, they know anything from that. So I really appreciate how you're able to go on that and read and learn about these startups, which I find super insightful. Could you talk about how you see the landscape of female entrepreneurship and investing in female-led startups evolving in the future and what you think that's going to look like?

Yeah, I am very, very hopeful, and I'm fairly certain we will see much more activity in the spaces that women care about. And it will happen for 2 or 3 reasons. The first being the awareness and the demand around, especially in healthcare, for solutions that better serve us as women. That demand is going way, way up, right? And you could argue that like my mom's generation took healthcare on the surface level, right? The doctor knows, the hospital knows, I'm not going to ask questions. You know, if I'm feeling different than what they say, that must be me. Like, it, you know, it was a very different experience, right? And now, now we're like, no, I, you know, I have a crew of girlfriends who are all doctors and they're like, that's not supposed to hurt. And you go, okay. So now when I go to my doctor, I can say, that's not supposed to hurt, why does it hurt? And so we're just asking better questions now. We're sharing more information with with our peers and amongst our girlfriends that, that we weren't sharing before. And we're saying words like menopause out loud and we're saying it a lot. And that also was not happening, right? So that just the sheer demand around better care is going to drive up the innovation. And the second thing is going to be, you know, there is an arbitrage opportunity around female buying behaviors and the kinds of things we look for when we purchase. Women drive 80% of household spending. 80 to 90% of that is on healthcare. It's on food, it's on financial services. And it's things that we, the market doesn't take stock of right now. The companies that are out there aren't always built around more gendered preferences, more female buying behaviors. And as we lean into that more, there is a whole other set of solutions that could get built. And it's something like $26 trillion worth of market value could be created if women were fully participating in the economy. That's the opportunity we have to be after, right? That, that unlocking that $26 trillion. This is— there's a McKinsey report you can go find it in— is, is what we need to go be building for. And so the more attention we put on it, the more we see the mavens of the world, the Stacks, you know, the Hello Sunshines of the world, the more we see those things happen, the more attention is going to go towards those spaces because The behaviors, there's no solutions around these behaviors and we're just going to get better at doing it.

I love that and that priority that we need to shift and focus on. What unique challenges do you see female founders facing in the startup world and how are you trying to address them in the investment process? What do you think we can do as a society as a whole as well in order to support them?

Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a couple of things. One is, and this has been— there's data and research to support it. Female founders by way of unconscious bias get asked more risk-based questions when they talk to VCs. Their male counterparts get asked more vision-based questions. They'll talk about growth and opportunity and what's coming next and what's, you know, how much money you're going to make. Women get asked, what about, what about, what about? And so we, the venture system will often put women on the defensive right out of the gate. And so if you end up in a room where you're getting asked those like risk-based questions, you end up answering defensively the whole time and you don't get enough time to talk about vision and growth and opportunity and like where you're headed. So when we meet, when we meet companies for the first time, we will always lead with vision questions. I always want to know, what do you want this to be when it grows up? What is the scale? What influence does it have? What role does it play? And then tell me the things you're worried about and then tell me where the risk is. And it's just flipping how we ask the questions makes all the difference in the world. Because you don't want, you don't want to put female founders on their back foot out of the gate, right? You want to lean in, you want to be in the same room, problem solving at the same table. So we're very deliberate about how we ask questions in those first and second phone calls with founders. The other thing is awareness and language and semantics around what women are dealing with are things that are not, our male counterparts don't know, right? This is the pelvic floor example like that. Those words don't mean much to men, right? Because they don't experience it. They don't have to deal with it. And so if you don't know what that is or what happens to a woman's body when she gives birth, then when you hear a solution that's meant to rebuild a woman's pelvic floor, a man's going to go, I don't know what that is. I don't think my wife dealt with that. Is that a thing? And so we have— this is why the language has to get talked about more and we have to understand the physiology on, on both sides of like the gender table so that when of women's health founders in front of a male VC, his response should be, oh my gosh, that's right, my wife and I talked about that, I remember she went through that. Right now it's, oh really, I should ask my wife, I'm not sure what that is. And so we have to bridge that gap. And I think if we say the things more, we communicate our needs, we, you know, don't be shy about what goes on with women's physiology, we're going to start to have more awareness and just it's going to get more into the lexicon of what we talk about normally without there being stigma. And I think that taking away the stigma, stigma is gonna make a big, big difference. And then the third is there again, there's, I, I live in data, right? There's also data that proves, points to female-founded companies perform better on average. Business results, 15 to 20% higher exit outcomes, 1 to 2 years sooner unicorn status, 1 to 2 years sooner. This is— we can point to it, right? And so we just have to go where the money is and believe that it's there, right? And not try to ignore what can be really powerful data. Also, diverse teams perform better. This is— this study has been done across like large Fortune 100 companies. Diverse teams have higher business performance and we need to lean into that more collectively for the industry. And I think as we invest in more female founders, as we invest in more diverse teams, The business outcomes are going to prove the thesis and we're all going to look smarter at the end of it. Right. And that, that, that those things have to happen. And then the industry will, will really be moving in a much more healthier, more inclusive direction.

Those insights are incredible. The part that you mentioned about the questions that you ask female founders is something that I'm definitely going to try to focus on, especially even like unconscious biases that I might have when I speak to female founders. So I really appreciate that. I want to turn to close this out into asking for some advice, both for female founders and also people that are interested in pursuing a career in venture capital. What would you tell them?

I would say don't be scared. It can, it can feel really big and foreboding and only smart people do it, or I don't know the words or whatever it is. It's not true, right? Like you can, You can learn the language, you can get involved, you can— once you're in a position where you can write some small angel checks, start to write some angel checks. Uh, ask the questions, right? I always say like we all walk around with some level of imposter syndrome every single day, so it's not just you that has that question. Likely the person two seats over has the exact same question, and if nobody asks, nobody will know. Uh, so ask the questions, do the research, You know, find things that you care about, but don't be afraid to try it because I think there's a lot more potential in having more diversity in the ecosystem. And it's great, right, that for what you're doing at the life stage that you're at is tremendous because there's— I wasn't thinking about venture when I was in undergrad, but now there's a whole crew of women and diversity thinking about it. And I think that's going to make a big difference as well. So try it out. Do the reading, ask the questions, find people that'll sit down with you for coffee for 20 minutes and just tell them, you know, tell you what they do all day. You're just going to learn a lot by way of doing that. So just jump in. There's no way, there's no reason not to.

That's incredible. And for female founders specifically, do you have any advice for them when they're seeking funding and looking to build their company?

Yeah, uh, so, you know, there's a, there's a perfectionist problem with with women generally, right? We always like, everything has to be twice as good for us to feel like we're as competent as our peers. Uh, and I don't think that's gonna go away, but I think keeping in mind that you need to talk about vision, you need to talk about influence, you need to talk about what your business will be when it grows up, and then dig into the business model and then take me through assumptions and then tell me where the risk is. Don't, start out on the defensive. You need to like, best foot forward, tell me why the market needs what you're building. What are the trends? What's happening in the world? If we spun forward today's economy and today's trends around inclusion, mindfulness, et cetera, if we spin all that forward 5 years, what does the world look like? And where does your company sit in that world? If you can start there and it's compelling, I'm probably going to believe you on the rest. Right. We'll have to dig in. I need to see financials. But nonetheless, I'm going to trust that you've connected the dots on what's going on in the world and you're building a solution for tomorrow, not just today. And we don't get trained enough in how to do that as women because we're just not in the same circles or having the conversations that our male counterparts are having. So think about it that way and you can do all the homework and write all the other pages, put it all the appendix, right? We need the vision to end up front and center, and then you need to tell me why the market cares about it. The other thing is that, you know, there we— so you saw our website. We have a pitch us button at the bottom for any female founder anywhere can pop their information and send to us. I will tell you, and it drives me crazy, for every 2 female founders that I get an inbound from, I get 3 male founders also submitting. Up and down our website it says female founders, up and down our website it says health, financial services, and climate, I will get, you know, biking solutions from a male founder who thinks that we're the best fit for their company. And I'm like, you haven't even read the website. You have not read the website and you're still submitting. So it makes me, it frustrates me on that. But then it frustrates me more that I'm not getting, for, for every 2 female founders, I should not be getting 3 male founders. I should be getting 4 female founders and 1 male founder, right? And so I think still female founders are hesitating from submitting their pitches every possible place it can go because we want to be perfect before we submit. Don't do that. The boys are not doing it, right? Submit it everywhere. Find all the firms, send it to everyone. Don't be shy. Ask for the introductions, pop into LinkedIn and send it to people. 'Cause I also get inbound from male founders on LinkedIn. Like, you literally haven't read my profile. So that it— we have to— the female founders have to lean in heavier than they are because you're— the boys are showing up in ways that they always have. We have to show up, right? Otherwise you're not going to find the capital that you need.

I love those insights. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing everything. I really, really appreciate it and learned so much. So I know the whole community is going to gain immense amounts from this.

Thank you. This was fun. It was good to catch up. Yeah, I'm excited. This will be fun to listen to when it comes out. I'm excited.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast and supporting Girls Who VC. Make sure to check out our website, girlswhovc.com, and follow us on social media @girlshovc. See you next week.