[MUSIC]
For as long as I can remember, or at least since I was four years old,
I wanted to start a company.
By the age of eight, I had launched my first somewhat successful venture.
Which involved reselling my mom's Evian bottles
from her fridge to construction workers in our neighborhood.
>> [LAUGH] >> She purchased these at around $1.50
a bottle, and I resold them for $.50, and they sold out great.
>> [LAUGH].
>> But, this was an early lesson that even when your mom is an investor,
it's important to generate a positive return on capital for
the business to be sustainable.
>> [LAUGH] >> Fast forward 20 years, and
I got that call, the call that we all know well,
that I had gotten into Stanford Graduate School of Business.
It feels a lot like winning the lottery.
We all know the stats, less than 7% acceptance rate.
Which means that a lot of very qualified people who deserve to be here
don't get the chance to, so I felt pretty blessed, and
I was very excited to be starting my entrepreneurial journey.
That is until few weeks later I came across another statistic, that somewhere
between 1% and 5% of venture capital funding goes to women entrepreneurs.
Said another way,
it is more likely to get into Stanford Business School
than it is to be a woman entrepreneur who secures venture capital funding.
I found this to be shocking.
And as someone who came from a background in investing and
fundraising, I thought, this is a great business idea.
It must be.
There must be a market deficiency that I could solve through a company.
It's even the case with the popular show, Shark Tank.
Women who pitch themselves for Shark Tank are less likely to receive capital.
And when they do receive capital,
they're more likely to be priced down by the Sharks than their male counterparts.
So back to my business.
If there's anything I've learned as an investor,
it's that being right on the wrong time frame is the same thing as being wrong.
And turns out, I was a little bit late to the game.
There's actually plenty of companies out there that are doing this today.
Serving women entrepreneurs through are alternative capital markets,
through accelerators, through networks of professional women, but
you don't hear about this in the narrative today.
And so I'm asking myself why, when there are so many opportunities for women
entrepreneurs, is the only thing that you hear about, is how difficult it is?
I'd like to propose that we need to reframe the discussion.
Because actually there's never been a better time to be a woman entrepreneur.
Some venture capital firms do recognize this opportunity.
First Round Capital, in a study it's ten years of operating history,
found that women lead ventures outperform their male only firms by 63%.
But whether you'e a man or woman, as an entrepreneur,
it's important to recognize that venture capital isn't one size fits all.
It's not the right solution for every business.
Questions that you should ask yourself are,
how important is it to me to retain control of my company?
How quickly do I want to grow this business?
If you decide that venture capital is right for
you, it's also important to note that not all venture firms are created equally.
Some specialize by industry, others focus on later stage versus early stage.
GSB alumna, Jessica Herron, who's the founder of stella and
dot, recognized the importance of finding the right capital for her business.
She shopped around her idea for a direct to consumer jewelry business
to many different investors before finding the right one who believed,
not only in her business model, but also the vision that she had for
how quickly she was going to get there.
It was important to her to prioritize, not only her business, but also her family.
And arguably, her wildly successful business is well positioned today because
of the time that she took to find the right capital provider.
Outside of venture capital there are so
many resources today, in the form of crowdfunding and equity funding.
And the great news is that women are disproportionately successful in
these channels.
Kickstarter reports that women lead tech businesses are more than twice as
likely to be successful in raising campaigns than men.
Another GSB Alumna, Neja Woodward, is using Kickstarter to prove
early stage product market fit and gain customer traction.
She's designing a line of dolls and
stories that are inspiring the next generation of girls,
that they can be women entrepreneurs, or coders, journalists, or politicians.
And, she's doing so through Kickstarter.
So, the way that Kickstarter and crowd funding works,
is that early contributors give capital in exchange for goods or services.
Outside of traditional crowd funding, there is equity crowd funding,
in which entrepreneurs can actually raise real equity.
And women are also really kicking ass in this channel as well.
CircleUp, which is one of the leading firms in this space,
reports that women are more than five times as successful raising capital
online than they are through VC.
And more than nine times more likely to raise capital
online than they are through traditional banks.
One woman entrepreneur who raised capital through CircleUp
suggests that raising capital online takes gender completely out of the equation,
because most of the communication is written.
I'm optimistic about the future for women entrepreneurs,
particularly because some suggest that alternative capital markets,
like CircleUp, are going to outstrip venture capital within the next ten years.
But as optimistic as I am about the future,
it's important to reflect back on where we've been.
I was born in January 1988, into a world in which women
couldn't secure a business loan without a male co-signer.
Within my lifetime women gained access to this
fundamental source of business financing.
That's pretty staggering to me.
And yet women have been creating businesses for generations, and
successfully doing it.
One example that's close to my heart is my great grandmother, Myrtle.
She started a successful fine fashion business in Muncie, Indiana,
of all places, in 1956, when most women were simply housewives.
And she did so while raising two kids.
She and the other women who've come before me are my inspiration.
I hope that this is just the beginning of the conversation, and
that by sharing stories of success, we can start
to change the pattern, because venture capital is all about pattern recognition.
The more successful women entrepreneurs that do well with institutional capital,
the more likely investors will be to follow the herd.
As an aspiring woman entrepreneur myself, I'm throwing my hat in the ring.
Will you join me?
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]