Go ahead — dismiss me but you can’t dismiss my company’s growth.
The frenzy over the state of female funded startups seems to have hit a fever pitch. Everything from the dismal % of female led VC backed startups to the # of female VCs to the % of accelerator classes that have female CEOs. Same goes with its mirror issue — the overabundance of “bro-led” startups (summarized neatly in this NYT piece).
Fantastic. These are important issues that need to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind.
Except for us female founders. Our job is to grow our change making ventures. To focus on our customers and our product and to show everyone what we’re about — by doing.
2 startups, 5 accelerator applications and hundreds of investor meetings later, I can tell you one thing:
You can ignore me, but you can’t ignore my company’s growth.
How can I be so certain? Because I have lived the difference in approaches and outcomes over the course of my two start-ups.
The first was borne of my passion, a subscription e-commerce company that I was convinced was the perfect product that people just needed to know about. I spent more time talking to advisors and investors than I did potential customers and users. I devoted weeks of time on applying to both Y Combinator and Techstars and was convinced it was bias to blame when we didn’t get an interview for either.
Not surprisingly, this startup didn’t survive. Two years later I can say objectively (but still with sadness) that it shouldn’t have. I was playing startup with a beautiful product but no market. Going through all of the motions but none of the substantive things that actually get start-ups off the ground.
Wounded, embarrassed and humbled, I approached my second start-up in exactly the opposite way. I told no one. I structured it as a series of tests and experiments because it was a space that I knew nothing about. I only talked to users, not friends, not advisors and certainly not investors.
In only 3 weeks I already knew I had something here. Something tangible something real. I applied to Y Combinator again, even though I only had those early results and no team, convinced I’d again be the victim of bias and dismissal.
Guess what? I got an interview. They recognized the promise of what was here and wanted to learn more. Ultimately I didn’t get funded — but I got something even more valuable — direction to keep on going and come back with more data and a team.
Should I have been funded then? Absolutely not. I had nothing worth funding. But I did have potential so I went back and pretended as if I had gotten in. I pushed myself to show 10–20% growth each week and in the process learned what was working and what wasn’t. How to really listen to user feedback. How to tweak my product and evolve. Eventually this dogged determination caught the interest of my now co-founder and CTO and he signed up to build the technology side of our vision. It really is true — at the earliest stages, growth solves most problems.
By now I had months of consistent growth. Users that were raving about Poppy. I had something tangible to take to investors. Even then it wasn’t easy. I got dismissed for my idea, was questioned about my ability to be an effective founder with two kids under 4 and experienced about every other injustice that even stellar growth can’t solve as a female founder.
But I caught the attention of the people that mattered to me. Investors that I’m beyond proud to have on our cap table and are building this company with me.
And the accelerators? Well the applications wrote themselves. They weren’t about whether I was a woman or an MBA or a “non-technical” founder. They were about the growth we had proven and the promise we were showing. They were about why we were the exact team that could persist and solve this problem.
This time when I applied to Y Combinator I still had doubts. After all this was the place that some of the best engineers went to to build their software startups. Where I was warned was ideal for the 22 year old white programmer which I was undoubtedly not. My start-up wasn’t in robotics or AI or enterprise software. I didn’t have any of the “tech pedigree” .
But I had growth and raving users and a proven ability to test and learn quickly — which is what YC repeatedly said they valued.
I was about to prove whether they walked the talk.
We reapplied to YC and encouragingly got another interview. We pushed even harder during those weeks to have even more results and user insights to talk about.
On the day of our interview we were nervous but confident. Until I saw a competitive company that had started around the time we had. They had a male CEO and a founding team with an enviable tech pedigree. They had the perfectly designed app that I had dreamed of. My confidence immediately plummeted and I knew our road ended here. Too used to being passed over by investors in favor of “pattern recognition” I bristled at the injustice that would cause us to be passed over here as well.
With nothing to lose we walked into that interview and fought for our startup lives. We fought on the basis that while we didn’t have any of the classic pedigree, we had the results and the will and grit to build the rest.
We were the ones to get funded.
Y Combinator restored my faith in the start-up ecosystem by being some of the only people to value objective results over the subjective optics. (To be fair, the TechStars Seattle team also took a chance on me based on our early results and I’m eternally grateful to that team as well.)
We have since raised over $2M in seed funding from some of the best in Silicon Valley and Seattle. We continue to grow consistently.
So do I think it’s all a happy story? Absolutely not. I’ll be the first to tell you bias exists and that the bar I have to meet as a female, parent founder building a “childcare” platform is infuriatingly higher than my single white male peers building a similar product. That every day I have to read about startups with a fraction of our impact and growth getting more funding and attention.
But do I think all is lost? Certainly not. In the best way, my destiny is in my own hands. I now know that if I show the results, I can find the supporters that will help. It’s about the long game and with investors getting increasingly selective, it’s our time to shine with substance.
It is too easy these days to get caught up in the downward spiral of the abysmal numbers. Too easy to feel victimized. Early on, when I was mired in pity with my first startup, it was easier for me blame all the external factors and none of the internal.
If I’m wrong — if you’re the female founder of a company consistently growing 10% each week and you’re not getting the attention of investors or accelerators, I want to know. I will personally go to bat for you.
Yes there is much work to be done. Work to make underrepresented groups not only feel welcome, but productively integrated. Work to improve representation around the table — in the boardroom or at VC firms or on the stage at demo days. But as founders our role in the change is clear — build the companies worth funding, worth accelerating. To yet again do the hard work that proves the point in spades. The path may be irrationally harder than a peer for the same results but don’t let the frustration deter you from the real goal — to build a company that endures and is successful.
If you’re a founder that has been rejected by anyone, I urge you to turn that into resolve — to double down and prove them wrong. I have learned that I might be easy to dismiss but the growth and impact of my company certainly isn’t.
If you are really, truly onto an idea that has to exist in the world, you’ll find yourself willing to go to the ends of the earth to keep it alive.
And that gets attention — trust me.