Among all of the Forbes festivities sweeping Boston this week, a group of female founders at venture-backed startups took the stage to talk gender in a panel called Entrepreneurship: Gender, Adversity and Success. Throughout the course of the on-stage discussion, one unanimous struggle for female entrepreneurs shined through: Raising a round of funding from male investors.
The women of the hour included Hayley Barna, venture partner at First Round Capital and co-founder at Birchbox; Lisa Falzone, co-founder and CEO of Revel Systems; Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway; and Marcella Sapone, co-founder and CEO of Hello Alfred. The discussion started out relatively optimistic.
Barna of Birchbox said, “I grew up thinking I lived in a post-feminist world.” She “saw no impediments” throughout schooling, including her time at Harvard Business School.
But that all changed when she entered the startup world. Suddenly, Barna and her Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp noticed, “There were rooms where no one looked like us.”
That fact was most obvious when they were pitching VCs. Barna said most investors Birchbox have encountered are men who don’t feel the pain points the company is addressing. She added they often had to consult their secretaries and wives before continuing discussions.
Rent The Runway’s Hyman echoed Barna’s words, saying it could be “comical at times” pitching her women’s fashion startup to 40-year-old men.
And the award for most uncomfortable investor interaction goes to Sapone of Hello Alfred. After the panel, she told BostInno, “I once had a VC tell me to go to business school because I wouldn’t always look the way that I do now.”
That said, the panel wasn't all one big vent session for the female founders. In particular, Revel System's Falzone presented a couple of positive points about her interactions with investors. She told the audience she had more luck with VCs who have daughters and “want them to be badasses.”
She followed up with us, explaining, “I’ve had more luck with minority investors because they’re able to look beyond it… Investors who don’t have daughters or working wives can be difficult. They’re not used to women in the spotlight.”
In BostInno's discussion with Falzone, she posed a straightforward solution for that rampant problem: Having more female VCs.
"One of the biggest problems is the VC landscape," she said. "People talk about getting women into STEM. You need that to start a company, but not to be a VC. The most disturbing thing is that women just aren't there. We need firms to be equal with their partners."
