How we can better help women in startups

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 5 years ago

Opinion

How we can better help women in startups

By Holly Stephens

Female-led companies are a better investment. Why? Well they return more than their male counterparts. On average female tech entrepreneurs generate a 35% higher return. Even if you know little about investing, the numbers are compelling.

So why is so little being invested in their businesses and how can we support them better?

Holly Stephens is the founder of Triangles.

Holly Stephens is the founder of Triangles.

Several reasons have been put forward as to why women raise less money. They include: - lower projections, underselling the opportunity, female-focused products that male venture capitalists have less experience with, and an overall availability bias. Many VCs have been shown to make decisions using their gut and with fewer successful female entrepreneurs in their portfolio, they turn down the opportunities to invest.

If VCs would like to beat public markets on return on investment, which they haven’t in the last two decades, this needs to change.

Events are one way to do that.

One of the authors to the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Women’s Report, suggested that women are more likely to start a business when they have peers and role models doing the same thing. This is why I created Triangles, a network connecting women looking to take their first steps to start a business supported by mentors. And it’s why events like Female Entrepreneur Week at Tank Stream Labs in Sydney are so important. Running across this week, it will feature more than 50 speakers who will highlight the importance of females and our roles in business.

Loading

The most important thing to me is community - finding like-minded people on the same journey who will support hopefully both you and your product. It’s how you can find people to join your team or cause. It’s something still fresh in my mind having started new in Sydney two years ago. I had to network. So if you’re considering starting a business, go along and meet new people, there are events morning, noon and night most weeks.

My advice for new entrepreneurs is to be a sponge.

Advertisement

Read everything. This isn’t female-specific. Apart from MySmallBusiness, read the Medium posts from founders who have already been through what you’re experiencing. Learn from their own personal start-up blogs. Investor blogs. Subscribe to newsletters from co-working spaces. There’s podcasts, my favourite coming from Tim Ferris, but also check out How I Built This, Startup Playbook and the just-released Cut the Cliches. Also join Facebook and LinkedIn groups - Sydney Startups on Facebook is a good resource with over 13,500 people for questions and support.

Upskilling would definitely fall into this category too. There are programs that can help. Tech Ready Women provides women, who are non-tech aspiring founders, with the essential skills to get your idea off the ground - online training programs, accelerators and workshops to get them off the ground running.

Look for opportunity gaps

 The GEM Women’s Reportrevealed there were higher rates of female entrepreneurship in regions where there were less barriers to entry. And this, I think, is a key point. Emerging sectors have less institutionalised bias by their very nature. Having worked in blockchain for about a year now as chief marketing officer of Beam, I found there was fantastic opportunity to affect a market which was still defining itself.

Startups are often thought of as geeky coders, very dev focused and working on complex solutions. But not every founder is technical. In fact many aren’t. Just look at the data from the Startup Muster report and you’ll see only 22.3% of founders in 2017 considered themselves strong in software development. You can plug holes in your experience through your team. Encouragingly, Startup Muster reported that of those that responded to the survey as being interested in becoming a future founder, 37% were female. Which is over double where it was just three years prior.

We’re closing the gap but we need help.

Even if you’re not considering starting your own business, you can help within your organisation by championing the support for local startups. Not every company will have the resources but if you do, why not dedicate space to hosting events for women in business? The more visibility for female role models, the higher the number of women-led startups. An improved local economy will be the result. And hopefully these startups graduate into scaleups and emulate the success of unicorns like Canva.

Holly Stephens is the founder of startup Triangles. 

Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Most Viewed in Business

Loading