When Pam York and her husband decided to learn to fly planes, York quickly realized the aircraft wasn't built for her.
She needed cushions below her, behind her, and on her armrest in order to properly wear the seatbelt and reach the controls. And even then, she remembers feeling a bit nervous in the cockpit. It wasn't that she didn't think she would be able to successfully fly the plane. It was just that she'd have to work a bit harder because the plane wasn't built with her needs as a pilot in mind.
"It was this profound moment of, this plane was designed by men for men," she said. "This plane was not designed to fit me. It was this moment of realizing this is how women walk around in the world. We’re walking around in world designed for men by men."
"Our goal is to change the venture capital system so that it works for women"
It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling to York, who has worked her way to success in male-dominated fields throughout her career, including a PhD in electrical engineering, founding several successful high tech startups, building the tech transfer ecosystem at University of Iowa and investing in startups through Atasi Ventures, which she cofounded. Her colleague Sara Russick, an entrepreneur who led two startups in the waste and recycling space from launch to exit, then went on to found angel network Gopher Angels, had the same experience as she rose in her tech and startup career.
Now seasoned entrepreneurs and investors are launching a new venture they hope will help other women founders take off, with funding and a growth vehicle built for women by women.
York and Russick are the cofounders of Capita3, a new growth financing firm just getting off the ground in the Twin Cities. They're raising a venture fund to invest in women-led startups, and developing a leadership and business development training curriculum to help their portfolio companies achieve the business milestones needed to scale.
And while they're starting in Minneapolis, they have ambitions to make this a global vehicle for scaling women-led ventures in an environment that is conducive to women founders.
"Our goal is to change the venture capital system so that it works for women, and not just in Minnesota, but everywhere," said Russick.
York and Russick declined to go into extensive detail about their fund, given they're still in early stages of raising capital, only noting that they'll start with investments at the seed and Series A stage.
But funding is just step one to helping women founders grow their business. Over the last two years, the cofounders have been building a business development program that focuses on developing the CEO and team, creating a growth strategy, and sales acceleration. Their goal is to make the programming effective, efficient and scalable, so it can be deployed to women-led startups no matter where they're launching.
It also centers around creating an environment where women feel welcome, which in turn makes founders more honest, open and confident about their companies.
"Women, generally speaking, go about [building companies] a little different than men," said York. "We want to create an environment that not only honors that but realizes how incredibly valuable that way of thinking is. When you do this, women’s confidence naturally increases and their boldness naturally increases."
In a three-week beta test of the programming last fall with five local startups, they were able to see improvements in founders' leadership capability, ability to take in feedback, and growth in defining and executing key business strategies.
That has also led to tangible business outcomes, Russick noted.
"We’re an ROI-driven company," said Russick. "We’re not existing just to make women feel great about themselves. We firmly believe that when women have the right environment and the right financing and the right leadership growth, the companies will be significantly de-risked [and] the opportunity for ROI will increase substantially, because they’ll have the capacity to scale."
In the Twin Cities, there's been a growing conversation around supporting women in tech and startups, and York and Russick have already been actively involved. They're worked with women-founder focused organizations We* and NariMoxie. York is an investor in Sofia Fund, a woman-led fund investing in women-led businesses, currently deploying $4 million in capital.
But there's still work to be done: In 2016, just $23 million of venture capital investments in Minneapolis-St.Paul went to women-led startups, according to data provided to Minne Inno by Pitchbook. That's about 4 percent of the venture capital funding deployed overall in the Twin Cities last year. Nationwide in 2016, women-founded startups got just 2.19 percent of venture capital funding.
With that in mind, York and Russick stress that Capita3 is about adding talent and energy to the growing Twin Cities ecosystem, as well as the tech and startup world at large.
"There’s a lot of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that has just been coming to bear," said Russick. "[The Twin Cities] are welcoming to women, which is great. The best part about it is we have this amazing group of women entrepreneurs who are speaking more. We’re responding to them."
