The Launchpad2X program mentored female founders for a decade, before reaching its end in July. One program alumni is refusing to let women entrepreneurs in Atlanta be left without such a resource.
Atlanta entrepreneur and investor Holly Pezzano founded Vaxa Factor in September to replace and mirror the longstanding Launchpad2X nonprofit with a new business model.
Similar to Launchpad2X, Vaxa will be a community program that includes an accelerator and mentorship sessions for female startup founders in Atlanta. Members will have access to expert panels on different areas such as marketing and finance.
Vaxa will charge for memberships and be completely digital, which is different from Launchpad2X. The program’s website and curriculum are finished, and Pezzano has started to look for participants. At the beginning of 2023, Pezzano will start fundraising for the program and plans to start the first cohort by that summer.
In conjunction with Vaxa, Pezzano will establish a nonprofit to provide loans and micro grants of up to $10,000 for women founders whose companies are at the pre-seed stage or prior.
So far, Pezzano has self funded Vaxa but says Southeast investor conference Venture Atlanta and nonprofit Goodie Nation have expressed interest in becoming partners.
Once Vaxa grows, Pezzano hopes to duplicate its model for similar programs focused on LGBTQ, Native American and rural communities.
Former Launchpad2X President Christy Brown told Atlanta Inno the program was ending because of a lack of funding, decrease in applicants and non-willingness to adapt to needed changes.
The nonprofit, founded in 2012 by Bernie Dixon, was a founder-to-CEO, two-year accelerator for female entrepreneurs that provided lessons on business practices, membership events and monthly workshops. Startups out of the program have had a $1.4 billion economic impact in Atlanta and employ over 260 people, according to the nonprofit’s 2021 State of Women’s Entrepreneurship Report.
The closing of Launchpad2X came as gender pay disparities have increased in Atlanta. A recent study found that Atlanta women in tech earn 83.7% of what men earn while little over 25% of its tech workforce are women. In 2021, Atlanta women in tech made about 88% of what men earned and about 27.1% of its tech workforce included women.
After Pezzano went through the program, she became an advisory board member to Launchpad2X before becoming the president of the program's alumni board in September 2021.
“Things didn't look the same when the program started 10 years ago. We needed to rewrite the curriculum, find new speakers and teachers, and that takes time,” said Pezzano. “We just couldn't get enough people engaged to help us find money that we needed to be successful.”
Pezzano’s startup Happy Hour Confections, a company that made alcohol-infused cupcakes that had Ruth's Chris Steakhouse restaurants as customers, went through the Launchpad2X program in 2013. The program helped her think about how to grow the company with marketing, Pezzano said.
Pezzano also believes she can be an effective liaison between investors and women founders. After Happy Hour Confections, she became the co-founder of private equity firm Homefield Equity. She is a founding partner of Atlanta companies including Go Connect Inc. and automotive startup Shift Atlanta.
