A Bay Area nonprofit has launched a national campaign to bring thousands of women into venture capital investing by matching firms with potential new investors.
How Women Lead wants to bring 10,000 women into the investing world through venture capital within a year, or sooner, via a campaign called "The New Table" that launched Tuesday.
The organization scouted out venture firms around the country that are led by women and will match participating firms with women who want to invest as individual limited partners.
"It's a power play to be a venture investor," CEO and founder Julie Castro Abrams told me, noting most women just aren't taught how to participate.
Despite the paltry number of women who are general partners at venture capital firms, more women than ever are launching and running their own firms.
But only 17% of general partners at Bay Area firms were women in 2021, just slightly above the national average, and Black women still only make up around 1% of all venture capitalists in the U.S.
"We now have the infrastructure with all these women-run venture firms, but they're tiny. They're undercapitalized and don't know how to find Silicon Valley tech women who've made real money in their corporate careers," Abrams said. "Those women want to find these funds and the funds want to find them. We're like the matchmakers just hoping to demystify and get everyone excited about the opportunity."
Startups founded by all-female executive teams also consistently raise a small sliver of all venture capital deployed nationally every year. Women-only teams raised 2.9% of the capital deployed in 2009 but that figure hasn't reached more than 2.3% since Covid-19 hit in 2020, according to PitchBook.
"This is a powerful moment in time for us to make change," Abrams said. "I want women to have access. And we might as well do it for ourselves and each other."
Abrams founded How Women Lead in 2011 to support women in leadership positions and has since expanded with a philanthropic arm called How Women Give.
The organization also launched its own venture capital firm in 2020 called How Women Invest, which currently has $30 million in assets under management and 13 companies in its portfolio, which includes Bay Area-based Bossa Bars, Hello Alice, Long Game and Slyvatex.
In addition to being primarily focused on scalable, tech-enabled businesses, the firm exclusively invests in companies with all-female founding teams, Abrams told me.
"When I first started building out my thesis for this fund, people literally told me women aren't starting high-tech, venture-backable businesses. And that is ridiculous," Abrams said.
Another element of the New Table campaign is boosting the number of women who are on corporate boards.
In 2018, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law mandating that public companies in the state have at least one woman on the board. Two years later, he signed another law which broadened the requirement to have at least two underrepresented directors from non-white or LGBT communities. Both laws were struck down by state courts and the decisions are being appealed, according to Bloomberg Law.
Boosting the amount of capital managed by women at venture capital firms will also help increase the opportunities for women to get on more boards, particularly at earlier stages, Abrams told me.
"If you want to talk about women getting on corporate boards, the first board members are venture capitalists," Abrams said. "Those are the people who decide who gets funding and which ideas and leaders get fueled."
Draft legislation is also being considered in the U.S. House of Representatives that would lower the barriers to becoming a venture capital investor.
Currently, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires that individuals have a minimum annual income of $200,000 or net wealth of at least $1 million be considered "accredited investors" and eligible to invest in venture capital.
Three Republican-sponsored bills in the House would enshrine those thresholds into law and create other opportunities for more individuals to qualify beyond the income and wealth requirements. Democratic House representatives are divided on their support for the proposals, according to Politico.
People should be able to decide for themselves whether they're able to invest in venture capital, Abrams told me.
The larger issue of diversifying the venture capital industry will require a multi-pronged approach, Abrams said, that includes bringing more women into the investment-side as well as getting more checks written to female founders, increasing the number of women on corporate boards and making policy changes.
