7 advices to female founders (and 1 to investors)

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

I participated in number of startup programs, webinars and workshops, female-specific and without any gender restrictions. And sadly, not only the quality of advice is lower in female-specific events and programs, but also they fail to address the key issue — what we need to take into account as female founders when building a business. So here is what I believe these female-specific programs should be talking about and teaching, and what each female founder needs to consider when building a business:

1. There is a gender bias, whether you want it or not, and you absolutely need to account for it in your business strategy. Female founders get lower ticket sizes and lower valuations, that’s just a fact. And not just lower, DRAMATICALLY lower. That means that you cannot leverage general startup statistics to evaluate how you are doing in your fundraising. It would really suck if you pivot your whole team because you thought your vision was wrong just to find out that it was not about the vision at all. So when deciding on your fundraising strategy, the more specific you can be, the better — the industry, the business model, the traction. But always include gender in your modeling! It will help you be more realistic when evaluating offers.
2. Abstract yourself from unfairness and gender-bias of the business world. It is really heartbreaking to know that your gender is the biggest issue you’ll face in building a business. But you need to stay as cool-headed as possible (easier said than done). When you read the statistics that female founders get < 1% of VC funding, it is normal to get discouraged. But read those papers with the only question you should care about: what are the ticket sizes and valuations those 1% get? This is your bracket, this is your reality. If you get an offer that is on the higher end of this range, you are doing great, even if overall you in the tail of the distribution for all startups.
3. Get a male on your founding team if you can. Mixed teams increase their chances to be funded 3x or more as compared to all-female teams.
4. Learn to recognize prevention-focused questions from investors. And maybe try to give promotion-focused answers, or just walk away — this investor is already biased. Research shows that questions directed to male founders focus on potential gain whereas questions directed to female founders focus more on potential losses. So the moment investor starts steering the conversation into risk-aversion, you know you already lost. It is not about your idea, business or skills anymore, it’s about your gender.
5. Get to revenue ASAP. Users of your product or your service care much less about your gender than investors do. Have a plan to get your team paid purely from revenue as soon as humanly possible, even if its through consulting, even if it means building a bespoke solution for a single client. There is no question that you will be slower in building your vision than your male competitors, but if you have a learned market secret that no one else knows, it wouldn’t matter. Selling your company to investor for ridiculously low value will kill your business much faster than making a revenue from potentially non-scalable source.
6. Have an alternative B2C business model, at least at the start. B2B is much like investment — a dude’s world. Keep that in mind when launching and looking for early deals.
7. Collect user feedback from users, not customers. Especially if you are in B2B world, your gender will play much less of a role if you are talking to operational people who actually would be using your product. In fact, being a woman might even help you there, as you are perceived as less threatening, more trustworthy and empathetic.
8. Or just throw on a black t-shirt/turtleneck, put your hair in a bun or get a boy cut and start speaking in a deeper voice. Kidding, please don’t do that. It’s just ridiculously funny how often the look gets funded.

The most devastating part for me is not being able to ever tell for sure where it’s about gender and where it’s about the idea or the execution. But I often call tell when my gender plays a role in the dealing by a simple comparison question: is this a question/phrase that would have been asked/told if I was a man, considering rest equal. And here comes my advice to investors:

1. When get a pitch from a female founder, replace her picture in the Team slide with this:

How does that pitch look to you now? What would you like to ask this guy about his idea you just read about?

And when you get a pitch from a male founder, replace his picture in the teams slide with this:

How does that idea feel to you now?

I use this technique often myself where I start suspecting internal subconscious biases, and it helped to expose my own.

Have a happy business building everyone!