The hosts from France really liked this riff on Cyndi Lauper for the event title.
VivaTech Paris, the largest tech conference in Europe, will be focusing on women in tech again this summer. And once again they are hosting meetups to investigate a mystery: Where is all the money for women-led startups?
From the SF panel last night: “In Europe, funding for women-led teams has actually decreased over the past four years. Yet we also know that startups founded or co-founded by women outperform those founded by men. What’s going wrong? How can we fix it?”
Some advice from the panel:
1) unconscious bias is the hidden culprit that stalls well intentioned diversity efforts. Know what your biases are – we are all biased – and put systems in place to keep them in check.
2) being a solo founder, let alone a solo female founder, makes fundraising an even tougher process; be mindful of this, and consider whether adding a second or third cofounder would improve the odds of your company being able to achieve the mission, and
3) women (and underrepresented minorities) are undervalued assets; invest in undervalued assets for outsized returns (see First Round Capital’s analysis of 10 years and 300+ investments).
One factor, as was discussed last night, is investor diversity, as updated in today’s All Raise study: “Female representation in venture overall remains staggeringly low — 65% of U.S. IT VC firms still do not have any female partners.”
“Diversity is the only moonshot investment that’s a sure thing”
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