hello my name is Scott Kerry I'm the group editor here at IDG I am joined
today by Onion avid ski from the Valais capsule hello Anya thanks for joining us
today we're going to be talking about Anna's career in venture capital we're
going to be talking about the industry as a whole and we're going to be talking
about a hot-button topic of the year I think is the changing face of venture
capital and the need for greater diversity and inclusion in the industry
how does that sound sounds like a good plan I think the best place to start is
with your career you founded voulez capital last year well a year or two ago
what was the idea behind founding a fund of your own so I never really
anticipated running a venture capital firm and I certainly didn't consider VC
as a career option for many many years I guess it was a result of an
entrepreneurial choice like a lot of my choices of the last 10 15 years
I saw a gap in the market we know funny enough I was pregnant at the time I was
looking for a breast pump and I was trying to find something that wasn't
designed in the 1950s and I came across a story of niya in the US and is
basically like the iPhone of breast pumps its redesigned technology it looks
amazingly well but the founder had a horrific time raising money male V
season mostly he sees a male found it hard to connect with the products they
found it disgusting they didn't really understand the market and they couldn't
see the potential of it so I decided to do some research and figured out there
was this is a story I've heard many times before in the u.s. there were
funds focused on women entrepreneurs and they were doing really well in Europe at
the time when we launched there was nothing so I felt like there was a huge
opportunity so for me it was very much a kind of a startup II choice rather than
an investor choice and and I guess now I'm on this side of the table and now
I'm refresh is the form or intrapreneur but that makes that makes total sense
and when you talk about spotting a gap in the market it's obviously a fund
focus entirely on investing in female founders is that where the idea came
from very much so so our investment criteria is at least one of the founders
has to be a woman and the premise for this is very straightforward
if you a woman run business let's say the
founding team is all women it very quickly becomes diverse and data shows
that over and over again if you have an all-male fine to founding team it
typically stays or mail for a very long time as an investor I want to invest in
diverse businesses because they bring better results better returns founding
team has a better perspective on the business that they're trying to run on
their customer needs and all those things so it just makes business sense
yeah and nowadays you know since last year we actually now have some more
statistics we have some more information about the makeup of the industry we've
known for years that diverse businesses perform better than non diverse
businesses but now we're starting to see that companies with at least one female
founder or an entirely female founder team has always struggled to get funding
it is as low as 1% or one penny in the pound historically did you see that data
did that data surprise you or did that kind of reaffirm what you thought about
the industry as a whole so the industry has stayed very stable for about 30
years if you look at some of the numbers coming out of HP are over those 25 30
years there's been very little change so I'm not surprised by the numbers but I
think the numbers have come from both sides partly it's how the venture
capital industry functions as a whole its focus on valuations it focus on
trying to find one unicorn out of a hundred and if you found two out of a
hundred then you're a superstar in the VC world so that tends to repel female
founders they want to grow their businesses just as much as the men do in
effect some research shows they even more ambitious with regards to growth
but they want to have the right investor at their side they see it as a
partnership and and if an investor doesn't match the culture of their
business doesn't understand what they're trying to do with their business they
tend to just decide let's go and do it on our own we draw the grow more slowly
but do it on our own terms so that creates the imbalance if you look at
applications to VC kind of companies for funding you'll see that there are less
than 5% from female founders so the problem is on both ends of the equation
I actually personally think if the VC is doing their job right when
welcome to them and that's kind of the premise of Ola capital I don't have a
deal flow problem that's a lot of my colleagues in the industry will say
exists and I think that's partly because of the culture that would create it
resonates with the female founders they see us as a long-term partner to their
business and that seems to work yeah that's great and I think that that's a
you know I cover the technology business and and what we see over the last few
years is that some of these aggressive mail run companies that have been piled
with VC cash and they've gone grow very very fast it's kind of tumbled down on
them eventually it's finally in the last couple of years it's come back to bite
them and I think as steadier approaches is not only a good thing but also just
good for business and is that what you're seeing with the companies that
you're engaged with very much so it's going back to the fundamentals of
business you know growth at any cost is it may have worked or something like
Facebook but it doesn't necessarily work for every single business and and there
is that kind of balloon hot air element to the industry at the moment
and it does eventually explode and it's not great for investors it's not great
for customers it's not good for great for companies so I try and go back to
fundamentals of business there has to be real value that's being generated and
that also means actually people willing to pay for it at the end of the day if
customers are not willing to pay for the value that you create then clearly you'd
doing something wrong so going back to revenue going back to steady growth
going back to strong relationships with your kind of customers strong
relationship with your suppliers being a real player in the ecosystem and and for
me it's about finding those kinds of businesses and women historically quite
good at identifying those those areas and they focus on that steady consistent
growth over time and that's what I'd like to see in our companies great and
one thing that keeps coming up when we talk about these issues within the
industry and within you know for female entrepreneurs finding funding finding
the right fund finding right partners one thing that we keep coming across is
that they have historically had trouble getting into the right networks it's
that the data again showed that women have women female founders have more
trouble getting warm introductions then male founders is that an issue that you
definitely see in the industry and is there anything that you can kind of do
to get women into those networks that that kind of lead to the funding and
lead to the success that they've seen from their male counterparts in the
entrepreneurial business I think you've identified a very important question and
a lot of VC stand have a fairly narrow pipeline kind of source and that's
usually their business the kind of business school networks and other
similar kind of ecosystems one of the things that we're trying to do is have
as broad an ecosystem as possible in terms of a deal pipeline and I think
that's what really works for us and that takes real action on behalf of the
investor not just the intrapreneur because at the end of the day yes warm
introductions are important but fundamentally I get 50% of my deal flow
for as direct approaches to Blair capital through our website we make it
very easy for someone to send us adapt we make sure to go through every single
one of them and if people ask for feedback we always give that so again
they can learn and figure out where they need to fit within the ecosystem and and
that's really really important yes women need to network more but I think it's
it's the end of a day homework that you do on the investors are you approaching
quite often people just try and approach hundreds of investors and hope something
will stick or they take the first cash available or put on the table and I
really encourage entrepreneurs to find the right fit because at the end of the
day do if you do due diligence on the investor as much as they do on you it
becomes a kind of a solid relationship going forwards a long term relationship
with your investor and that's very important for the success of their
businesses so I definitely encourage people to do the right networking and do
as much homework as possible on the investors talk to their portfolio
company CEOs they're usually very happy to do so what is it like working with
that investor and find the right fit for you so it yes it's about networking but
it's a very strategic targeted networking with the right people
that you want on board yeah and when those companies approach you now that
you've got this active pipeline in place and you know you're a year or so in what
do you look for in a company when they approach you for funding what do you
look for in a founder what do you look for in a business idea I think the first
thing we look at is a business that really has
you that changes an industry or creates a step change in the industry so that's
really important to me because yes it is about scale and it's about growth and
it's about potential but fundamental value they were created for customers in
that industry and sometimes it means that we look at things are a bit harder
to generate initial sales and because if here the first one isn't in the market
it takes a while to be put to get used to the idea but a longer term I think
those kinds of things will bring a lot more results the other side is again is
the founding team they need to really understand their industry know it inside
out have that drive have that determination and actually be willing to
listen and learn from people around them so I see our relationship with the
founders a two-way street I don't know everything
they're the experts in the industry I can ask them the right questions I can
help them build a business because that's my expertise is building
businesses across different industries but the end of it a they need to be able
to listen and relate and that chemistry with the founding team for me is really
important because that we invested seeds here is a level and that involves a lot
of time working with our companies so that personal relationship needs to work
as well and the last element is because we're still relatively small we can't do
hundreds of investments so it needs to be things that really fire up my
imagination that genuinely make me get up in the morning and feel excited about
working with those businesses so we have said no to some amazing companies that
will have great business kind of potential but they're just not that
interesting so at the end of the day sometimes with an investor it's just not
the right fit from that point of view and I think looking at your background
when you are at JPMorgan and your entrepreneurial career before you
founded this fund I think energy looks like an area that you're interested in
is that something that continues on with your work now in terms of looking at
certain companies I think renewable energy and sustainability will always be
a key driver of things that we look at it's it's definitely a big segment of
the market that we look at also things that improve the lives of families and
women and children also is very close to my heart and then you know have a young
daughter myself so it's very much something it's an area that I know a lot
about and I want to see a lot of change in that area and that there is scope for
change it's things like residential care it's
things like education things like health care all of those areas have huge
potential and that's you know in some ways there's an impact element to it
we're certainly not an impact fund we're a traditional commercial fund but I I
like it when our companies creates some kind of good in the world as well as
just the pure commercial benefit I think yeah I think so I'd love to have a loved
to have it both ways but naturally I hate gravity to it's businesses that do
create some kind of positive good in the world and actually think a business
should be a driver of change in those areas to some of the companies that
we've been speaking to you for this series they are all looking at different
ways to kind of improve their diversity and inclusion we've seen people
releasing their policies in public and we've seen people providing data its
diversity VC in the British business bank to give that transparency there are
other companies who are now only looking at X without the names and the genders
of the people involved to taking off them how do you feel about these kind of
policies do you think that they're kind of band-aids over the issue or do you
think that they're all kind of helping towards getting the industry into a more
diverse place I think every little helps yes I am a big believer in disclosure
and I think once you understand what you're looking at the the extent of the
problem it's a lot easier to focus on the solution I also think that a lot of
established VCS will take time to change their culture because I you know I I
talk to a lot of associates within the market space they mentor quite a few of
them and there is a great desire to create venture capital firms of future
that are diverse and focused on women and minorities and pretty much treat
everyone as an individual in their own right but I think investment committees
and that's where the biggest bottleneck is they will take time to change because
typically they are 40 50 year-old males there are very few women and investment
committees and I see a lot of juniors take amazing opportunities to the
investment committees but not being able to get them through they don't yet have
the gravitas to push that particular button and I think this is where people
like ourselves have a chance to do it over the right way from the very
beginning and hopefully over the next 5-10 years
things will genuinely shift within the rest of the industry if I don't have to
invest in female founders in five to ten years time great I will invest in
whatever makes sense at the time but my goal is to really not help normalize the
industry and I think it will take a while yet but all of those steps are
steps in the right direction and I think becoming aware of the problem already
helps you change some of the elements of how you work day to day so we
collaborated extensively with the British business bank with Everest TVC
we work collaboratively with about 30 other investors as part of our female
founders pitch clinics that we run at the Google campus you know for me that's
all helping create an ecosystem that supports the right intrapreneurs because
at the end of the day I want to get the right companies the right founders
funded so that they can grow those businesses and create that value and we
do that in partnership with other investors we can't do it on our own
there's brilliant work and thank you so much for joining us today on you it's
been a pleasure thank you for having me yes
you