At my age, it takes a lot. As many of you know, I’ve often followed my inspiration.
I went to work in venture capital as I was inspired by what it can do for entrepreneurs. I was one of the first pre-MBA associates in the field 25 years ago.
“Inspired” by never seeing women in my VC meetings, I moved to the 1st women-led, women focused VC fund in the country and started a network, (“Venture Chicks”) for junior VC women.
Out of VC, I researched funding barriers/gender gap for women (Diana Report 2014, Beyond the Bucks, 2019, articles on bias) only to be inspired to action by former VC investor Jill Kravetz, a beauty entrepreneur struggling to raise VC funding.
Together we started and ran a women’s VC conference, (Capital W) in Boston for 3 years. The anger of the women who attended faithfully year after year and still couldn’t raise funds – (or get a job in VC) – inspired us to start a VC fund on women’s markets.
Un-inspiringly, we experienced the same biases as women entrepreneurs. We gave up.
This week, I have found new inspiration.
The Girls into VC Conference at Harvard was a revelation. An organization started a few years ago by (then) undergrad Isabella has blossomed into an event of untold impressiveness. It was no surprise to me that Isabella was voted as a “Forbes 30 under 30” for building this motivating and moving entity. Led by superstar CEO Sarah Phillips. The inspiration will continue.
I served as a pitch judge and had the joy (and pain of having to pick a winner for the $2K funding prize) of watching 6 impressive pitches by women entrepreneurs including:
(I won’t even say the winner since they were all so good).
Even with the sad state of affairs for US women today, highlighted by – Cornell, the national leadership, the McKinsey partner – and I’ll go so far back as to share my sadness of our country NOT voting in a capable, intelligent woman President not once but twice – …I left Girls in VC feeling inspired. Hundreds of young women all there to get their seat at the money table.
The future looks bright for girls. We now have more women than men in med schools, law schools, and undergraduate degree programs. Research now shows that women make better investors, shown in a hedge fund study, and I’m convinced this would be true for VC investing too. If we had more women VCs to study.
It was the young women journalists at Cornell who were the inspiration we can glean from that horrific story. The numbers displayed at the front of the conference were inspiring – in a different way. I took my daughter to inspire her: she was. We need more women in venture investing. Girls into VC will get us there.
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