The Secret Sisterhood of Female Founders: The Way Women Pull Each Other Up May Surprise You
You can’t win without a good support system. That holds true in games, and it’s also true in business. As a woman who has always been more comfortable working with men (hello, 9 years at ESPN!), I’ve been most surprised by the fact that as a female founder, other women have been my MVPs.
There is a longstanding belief that women climbing the corporate ladders don’t reach down and help one another up. The “Queen Bee” phenomenon in the workplace has some merit: women feel they must compete aggressively against one another for a handful of seats at the top table. Rather than challenging that perception, or making that table wider, we fight like hell for the few spots specifically flagged for our gender.
But in my current world, startupland, I’ve had a very different experience. Even though this space is very much dominated by men, it’s the female founders who have each other’s backs. It’s women who are willing to share investors, or make introductions, cheer each other on, or drop what they’re doing to be a sounding board.
Every startup is a roller coaster. As another female founder, Samantha Smith, articulates so well: when you’re the founder, you feel the peaks and valleys acutely. With over 97% of startup funding going to men, it would be reasonable to assume that female founders assiduously guard their contacts and investor networks. I have found the opposite to be true. Instead of fighting for crumbs, we fight like hell to work together to expand the pie.
Several years ago when I was under the gun of a particularly aggressive fundraising deadline, another female founder opened her rolodex, made some calls, and got me an intro I had been coveting. That it led to investment makes the story all the more sweeter, but that it was another woman, managing her own “keep the lights on” crisis who took time from her schedule to give me a push, shows who is really in your corner when you need them.
It’s not just early-stage founders who support one another. I have had the privilege of meeting with female founders of two unicorns (startups with billion-dollar valuations). I didn’t know them, and I didn’t have second-degree connections for an intro. I leveraged my best asset — my brain — into emails and DMs designed to get their attention. And my reward for spending hours painstakingly crafting these notes? Priceless time spent with brilliant and accomplished women whose advice I still reflect on, even years later. Oh, and one of them even invested in my company and has generously shared her network in ways that continue to astonish me.
Even the pandemic, which has affected all of us in different ways, has not adversely impacted the spirit of generosity among female founders. I don’t want to lump all women together and pretend that just because you have the XX chromosome means that any woman should be willing to clear her schedule and meet with you. To be clear, some of our male investors have been our greatest advocates, and we have many male ‘friends of Babyation,’ without whom there wouldn’t be a growing company. But I can’t think of too many C-level executives in the traditional corporations that would reply, much less be willing to collaborate and mentor in this way.
So what’s different about startups that allow for such collaboration? In my experience, it’s because entrepreneurs create their companies out of a desire to make the world a better place, and that problem-solving attitude extends into improving the male-dominated tech world. We also know that when people invest in women, they stand to gain more in return. Quick PSA: Ladies, if you are able to invest, please consider investing in female-founded companies. There are never enough female angel investors. Companies led by women are more capital efficient and have higher revenues than comparable companies led by men.
This is more than a simple return on investment, and it’s certainly about more than email etiquette. Despite all of the firms created to fund women, there are still more founders than funds. And what I think is unique about female founders is that they get the struggle, and are therefore uniquely inclined to pay it forward.
As Linnea Roberts, founder of GingerBread Capital said, “I tell my founders, ‘My goal for you is simple. I want you to get rich, and I want you to put it back into the system.’
Consider Esther Crawford’s brilliant piece about how the cap table matters for both equity and wealth creation. As she vetted potential investors for her startup, she considered this: “What it would feel like to know that at our IPO each of them would be that much richer and more powerful because of us? Who would they invest in next? What causes might they fund or fight?”
We’re not going to change the startup gender-discrepancy overnight. But we can set a new industry standard on how women treat one another: not as adversaries, but as potential partners. And perhaps the boardrooms of corporate America can take a page from the startup culture here: when women look out for women, we all stand to gain.
Samantha Rudolph is the co-founder and CEO of Babyation, a parent-tech company that is unapologetically for moms.
