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Episode 6: Defying Investment Odds and VC Bias for Underestimated Female Founders
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The problem: For women entrepreneurs, the #1 structural barrier is attracting investment. If you’ve been paying attention, the recent $350Million investment to Adam Neumann, a white male founder, well networked in the VC community, and former founder of failed IPO, WeWork, sent ripples across a startup community that has long been accustomed to disproportionate investment funding.
These stats continue to be echoed time and time again: less than 3% of female led founders and less than 1% of female minority founders receive venture funding.
Dominic Madori-Davis of TechCrunch encapsulated the plight of the underrepresented founders– the women, the visible minority founders who have journey through a relentless search for equity, and who have personally experienced this regression from being unable to break this glass ceiling – to now an impenetrable concrete one:
“One cannot out-educate, out-network and out-assimilate the systemic barriers designed to discriminate against them.”
In this episode we speak to 2 Underestimated founders, Stephanie Lipp, Founder of MyCoFutures NA (a company a next gen materials cleantech startup, developing a durable textile using mycelium, the root system of fungi) and Azar Azad, Founder of AI VALI, a startup developing AI-powered GI endoscopy video image analysis and speech recognition services for the clinical space. Both Azad and Lipp are passionate in their pursuit to disrupt the clinical space and the fashion industry.
We will also speak to Bryan Duarte of Black Tech Capital and Giselle Melo, GP at MATR Ventures, who are building equity in a system that has done little to support emerging female founders.
What keeps these founders up at night and how do they overcome their challenges? For emerging fund managers, is it possible to disrupt a system that has seemingly worked for years, and change the “hearts and minds” of the majority and make way for necessary change?
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