[Gillian and Anne look at pattern matching beyond gender lens issues, reminding listeners that good pattern matching habits can be learned. While it is true pattern matching may keep investors from investing in women. But women can develop good pattern matching habits that will help move capital their way. That’s why they examine pattern matching beyond the gender lens. In other words, taking something holding women founders back and turning it around to work in their favor. It's about following the pattern of companies that have accomplished whatever you want to accomplish. Understand their path and the path of similar companies. Follow that roadmap – not slavishly, of course. But be aware and be mindful of what your colleagues are ‘doing right’ in the capital raise area of the business. In this episode you will hear specific actions you can employ to turn the tide your way./>
[Gillian and Anne talk about raising capital, because “How do I do that” is the question they get most. So they discuss how to hack, or leapfrog the process, starting with your deck. Or, rather , decks. As you will learn from your research -- which is your first step, of course -- you will need different decks for different potential investors. Hear how to meet your listeners where they are. Because the devil is always in the details, they share some hacks and tips that will optimize all the efforts you will make in getting your documents in order to get that capital raise. Fundraising takes a huge amount of time out of your work life. Minimize wasted time: get organized before the show. The best part about these tips is that they will serve you before and well after your capital raise. />
[Seattle investor, founder and startup advisor Dan Kihanya joins Gillian and Anne to talk about his new podcast “Foundersunfound.com” with which he expects to create greater awareness of underrepresented founders. “We will focus on storytelling. Under-represented founders have super powers,” he says. They deal with all the craziness that normal founders deal with and then on top of that, these founders face additional hurdles of disadvantage and bias. Dan and co-founder Deborah Drake believe that bringing out the stories will reveal the strength and resilience to form good business cases for support. Who are they, why they are solving their problems in the way they do? Dan’s father was Kenyan and his mother from rural Maine of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His parents taught him to work hard for what he wanted, and he believes being of mixed race heritage served him as an advantage. The podcast is live, with two new interviews with African American founders. />
[Gillian and Anne discuss a recent report in the Washington Post that power reveals who we really are and people with certain tendencies will gravitate to certain types of professions, examining what kinds of tendencies lead people to become entrepreneurs of lifestyle businesses, scalable but privately held businesses, and scalable funded businesses. Given that far more women resonate with looking at capitalization stacks instead of simply asking for equity investment to grow their companies, what implications does power have for startups and investors? Women are far more willing to look at the nuances of capitalizing their companies and women are FAR more likely to resonate with the idea of self-funding (what can I sell today to pay for what I want to build tomorrow?) than men. They want to use OPM (Other People's Money) with the limit of liability stopping at the corporation they are attempting to build. On the flip side, about 90% of women resonate with the idea that they may not have to raise equity. Women are far more concerned that they will be ousted by their male equity funders than men./>
[Gillian and Anne discuss the defining characteristics of a successful advisory board and how they will benefit your startup. In your early stages you will have ad hoc advisors to help get through the thorny startup underbrush. Advisors are valuable to a startup from the beginning. Whether they are experts in the field of your product, or markets for it, or financial management. All of these support founders by allowing a sounding board for decision making. Or providing a high level view, since we know day-to-day startup operation is usually deep in the weeds. Your advisors will be your counsel, your experts. Find ones who have done this before. 2. Your advisors will lend their good names to your efforts. Find the best you can. Reach high! In the early stages you call on them when you need them. Later you may formalize your group of advisors into a board with periodic meetings and reporting, and then you may be compensating them. />
[Gillian and Anne discuss the defining characteristics of a successful advisory board and how they will benefit your startup. In your early stages, you will have ad hoc advisors to help get through the thorny startup underbrush. Advisors are valuable to a startup from the beginning. Whether they are experts in the field of your product, or markets for it, or financial management. All of these support founders by allowing a sounding board for decision making. Or providing a high-level view, since we know day-to-day startup operation is usually deep in the weeds. Your advisors will be your counsel, your experts. Find ones who have done this before. 2. Your advisors will lend their good names to your efforts. Find the best you can. Reach high! In the early stages, you call on them when you need them. Later you may formalize your group of advisors into a board with periodic meetings and reporting, and then you may be compensating them. />
[Gillian and Anne chat with Seattle investor Dave Parker, founder of ‘6 Month Startup -- Ideation to Revenue’. Dave breaks down the three components of a startup in to creating value with your product or service, delivering value to customers, and capturing value, i.e. profits for your company. In this interview he talks about the third, capturing value by describing a dozen-plus of common ways to make money with your product or service, including four to avoid. Listen in for a fresh helping of clarity on finding the right revenue path for your startup. />
[Gillian and Anne discuss the differences between management and leadership from a metrics perspective. Metrics seem to be all about management. But leadership is setting the metrics to be tracked by the company teams. What metrics matter? That’s a good place to start, with tips from frequent muse Mark Suster, General Partner at Upfront Ventures and a brilliant author on the subject of launching, growing, and managing tech businesses from an investor’s viewpoint. (Bothsidesofthetable.com) A few months ago, he published a Twitter stream that addressed the difference between vanity metrics and what leadership should really be thinking about as they grow their companies. Gillian and Anne unwrap and share each Tweet. Suster’s wisdom is well worth a good listen./>
[Where to find capital is the number one question heard from founders at almost every stage of entrepreneurship. For that reason, Anne and gillian keep an eye on progress toward gender equity in venture funding and the numbers coming in for 2018 ain’t pretty! TechCrunch reported in November that women led startups received 2.2 percent of funding. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that is the same number as 2017, reported then by PitchBook. No progress. This despite a decade or more of data indicating that diverse teams and women founders outperform the men-only ones, by large margins – by 63 percent more in a well-known report from First Round Capital. Fewer than 10 percent of VC decision makers are women. Fully 74 percent of US VC firms have no women investors -- stunning, considering the volume of voice around this subject this past year. Anne and Gillian discuss what can and must be done to remedy this situation, and increase the flow of capital to diverse founder teams to improve outcomes across the board./>
[Every entrepreneur dreams of selling the company and cashing out. It is almost a trope that founders need to have their exit in mind from the earliest days of their startup. While many are on a mission to solve a problem and make better ways to live and work together, the business of business is business, i.e. making money for the owners. If you have investors, they expect a return on the money they put in your company. Sure, they have gambled on a highly risky asset class, but they do so anticipating gains on their money. Gillian and Anne outline the basics every founder needs to know: when and how to prepare for sale, whom you need to engage for support, and how to find a buyer and pitch your startup./>
[Gillian and Anne chat with Amy Margolis, founder of The Initiative and The Commune, an accelerator and coworking space for women launching cannabis businesses in Portland, Oregon. Noting the lack of women on boards or management teams in the emerging cannabis industry, she set out to provide women a comfortable work environment, business management coaching, and access to capital from a carefully curated set of investors, including institutional funding. Ms. Margolis has been an attorney for more than 17 years and is the founder of the Oregon Cannabis Association, one of the largest state cannabis trade groups in the United States. She has been recognized Cannabis Business Executive(CBE) on their Political 100 and is recognized as one of the 50 Most Important Women in Cannabis. Elle Magazine refers to Amy as “Pot Power Woman” and Herb.co lists Amy as one of the 10 Most Influential Women in the Cannabis Industry. />
[Anne and Gillian talk about different dimensions of financial models -- or more clearly, how to paint the best financial portrait of your startup -- you need more than one dimension. This is not a one-size fit all situation. In fact, financial modeling is like a Rubik’s Cube. You know, the puzzle that starts with four colors all jumbled on all four sides, which you have to sort so that each side is its own color. There are at least three different ways to look at your startups’ financial situation: current customers, potential renewals, and sales pipeline, A clear financial picture of a startup comprises at least three different approaches that should be expressed separately in different sets of books. The point is to have better information on which to base decisions. />
[Anne & Gillian review the critical elements for your pitch decks, and the two most often included by novice founders that are unnecessary, and sometimes even counterproductive. Too many times founders present their marketing message for customers instead of the information potential investors want to hear -- specifically, how will you make money for them? Or social change, if the impact is their focus. Listen for step-by-step tips on how to build your deck for maximum effect./>
[Marcia Zaruba O’Connor joins Anne and Gillian to talk about how startups can best approach hiring and benefits and how to build your staff and compensate them, when and what benefits to offer, and how startups need to think about planning protection from legal liabilities in staffing, especially in our current #metoo days. They look at what happens after a startup attracts the necessary talent, what can they do about compensation and benefits, especially, early stage startups that are pre-revenue and likely not yet funded. Listen for equal parts encouragement, hard truths and scary legal stuff in a wide-ranging conversation, including when and how to let new hires go. Marcia is CEO of the O’Connor Group, staffing consultants based in the Philly area, who advise companies nationwide on how to create a recruiting and/or HR function or improve their processes, starting from company culture and core values./>
[Gillian & Anne chat with Eveline Buchatskiy, co-founder of One Way Ventures, a fund for investing in startups by immigrants. What was the business opportunity she and her co-founder discovered? While managing TechStars in Boston, they noted their most successful investments were founded by immigrants. They decided to focus on the persona – the immigrant, especially founders whose immigration experience is highly formative. The very fact that a person has left their home to immerse themselves into a new language, culture, and environment creates a character. Dealing with a lot of ambiguity adds to the character. You have no Plan B. You develop the ability to cope with change, grit, determination, drive to succeed, and you work with limited resources in an optimized manner. You do a lot with very little — all positive things required for entrepreneurship./>
[Now seems like a good time to address keeping your team motivated. Near the end of Q3 post-summer spirits may be flagging, especially if your company is progressing more slowly than you thought it would back in the enthusiasm of Q1. Gillian and Anne talk about how to revive employee motivation. You start the year with a plan, and sometimes the execution doesn’t go according to plan, or you discover your assumptions were off the mark. Or you hit a period of rapid growth, a mark of success for sure, but so unsettling for your team. What to do to keep your team motivated? On the bus? With the program? On track? Gillian and Anne have plenty of tips, with help from their friends at First Round Review, and researchers at Google. />
[The National Bureau of Economic Research reports there’s “robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age.” Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, they also found that there is “considerably less” evidence of age discrimination against men.” Anne & Gillian explore another discouraging trend and take a look at whether that is true in tech, where the majority of employees are young and male, as well as whether the same can be said about startups. Is age the new ‘culture fit issue? With some surprising observations, they talk about how to deal with age discrimination, and why you want to. />
[Blockchain is surely one of the hottest topics around these days, but how does such a tool help a startup build a better way to address life’s events among consumers? Gillian and Anne’s guest Alexis Williamson, co-founder of Life.cafe, explains how her team is using blockchain as a tool to fund their worldwide consumers’ life events, whether they have cryptocurrency available to them or not. Life.cafe provides customers access to experts in their upcoming events, such as a wedding or buying a home, and then funds each plan using a time-honored system of ‘lending circles’. Blockchain allows efficiency in connecting and making resources available at the right moment. “A Loan from a bank is just money, says Ms. Williamson. We offer money plus expert guidance to accomplish each goal.” />
[What makes you tick? Where are your team members happiest and most productive? These are questions you must understand, first about yourself and second about your team. In the beginning, everyone has to wear many hats, but as your startup grows your team expands and so does opportunities to focus on the work that really makes the most of everyone’s talents. Enter your organization chart, which may be a new concept to you as an entrepreneur. Some on your team will aspire to leadership roles, while others will prefer to be Individual Contributors. Both are valuable and will contribute to your success. Gillian and Anne discuss how to determine who is which and find the right seats on your bus for everyone. />
[There is growing evidence that indicates that impact investing supports the conventional bottom line with better returns for investors. In other words, investments in impact companies are returning higher ROI to their investors than companies that don’t take into account the social impact of their work.Early VC firms seeking for-profit companies that provided a social benefit were largely investing in environmental sustainability. There were notable exits: Tesla, SolarCity, NestLabs and 7th generation. Since 2001 such companies have invested $13 billion, and $10 billion of that since 2010. The trend emerging is funding not verticals, but demographics -- underserved races, regions and economic levels, like TPG Ventures and Breakthrough Energies, both with backing from Bill Gates, among other leaders. Anne and Gillian take a closer look at impact investing in 2018 and reflect on what they have discovered. What is the ‘double bottom line’ and why is it important? How does entrepreneurship support national security? Who are the leading impact investors active today? What does this mean for founders? />