How an Entrepreneur Should Approach a Pitch
Womena is a Dubai-based, women-only angel investor group serving the Middle East and North Africa, or the MENA region. Through professional networking, investment guidance and thorough research on startups in the region, Womena connects promising startups in the growing economy with high-net-worth women investors. Here, Womena shares insights on the importance of pitching when raising funds for a startup.
womena.co - Strong pitching skills are critical to a startup’s success. To receive investment at any stage of the funding life cycle, a startup will usually need to pitch many times, be it to WOMENA members or a venture capitalist. Entrepreneurs may find themselves pitching their company hundreds of times over the company’s lifetime. Hence, it’s important an entrepreneur hones these pitching skills early on for the best chance of success. While the pitching process may seem mystifying and intimidating at first, there are a few simple things an entrepreneur can do to boost their chances of success.
Check out successful pitches online
There are a plethora of websites out there with advice on what to include in a pitch and videos of startups pitching at demo days around the world. These give you a really good idea of what you need to do and you can pick and choose the best parts from each pitch you watch. Do this before you prepare your own pitch, particularly if it’s your first time.
Refine your pitch to the audience
Every pitch is different but most entrepreneurs give the same pitch to each investor. Entrepreneurs pitching to the WOMENA members might want to highlight how their company is targeting women, for example. The point is that each investor is different and each pitch should be too to reflect that difference.
Keep it short and snappy
An investor might hear dozens of pitches over the course of the week. If an entrepreneur doesn’t hack it right from the start, the rest of the pitch is going to be an unnecessary uphill battle. Immediately, tell them who you are, what the problem is and how your company will solve it. If your pitch is more than 10 minutes long, then you’re entering dangerous territory – the investor’s attention is probably waning (if it hasn’t already gone completely) and you need to wrap up quickly to keep that attention.
Back up what you’re saying with numbers
Numbers are an excellent and simple way to show the strength of your business and/or market. They’re easily digestible and can provide considerable insight. Make sure you know relevant statistics, you can back them up (i.e. you don’t make them up on the spot) and understand what these numbers mean. It’s very easy to state an incorrect stat but it’s so much harder to recover once you’ve been caught out.
Practice!
The idiom practice makes perfect really does hold true when it comes to pitching. The more you practice, the more comfortable you will be pitching to investors. Practice with friends, colleagues, advisors … anyone really. Get feedback too! The people you practice with could have some very useful advice.
Look the part
Startup founders’ dress is often associated with jeans, hoodies and T-shirts à la Mark Zuckerberg. While that might be the standard dress at work, it might come off poorly to a potential investor who doesn’t have a similar tech background. Notice too how Mark Zuckerberg has smartened up in recent years? There’s a reason behind that. You want to look respectable and show the investor you mean business. This doesn’t mean wear a suit and tie: that would probably look a little odd unless you’re pitching to a very formal investor or investment company.
Visit Womena.co to learn more about Womena's efforts, like the group on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
Trailblazing Women: Jenny Tooth OBE, CEO, UK British Angels Association
Anne Ravanona, founder and CEO of Global Invest Her, interviewed Jenny Tooth OBE as part of a series on Trailblazing Women role models from around the world. Read the introduction below and click through to Huffpost Business for a full interview, discussing who Tooth looks up to, her achievements and challenges, women's and men's leadership strengths as well as her own, the responsibilities of working for small businesses and more. huffingtonpost.com - Jenny Tooth OBE is CEO of the UK Business Angels Association, the trade body for angel and early stage investing, representing over 15,000 investors around the UK. Jenny has over 20 years’ experience of facilitating SMEs access to investment, both in the UK and internationally. She ran her own consultancy on Access to finance for SMEs, including spending nine years based in Brussels, working closely with the EC. She has developed a wide range of investment readiness programmes, including projects supported by national and EU funding. She has also participated in a number of expert groups on access to finance and chaired the EC Knowledge Intensive Services group under DG Enterprise. In 2006 she took on the role of Director of Business Development at Greater London Enterprise. In 2009, Jenny co-founded Angel Capital Group and which incorporates London Business Angels, one of the most established and active angel networks in the UK.
Read the full interview here. Visit the UKBAA Website and follow them on Twitter at @UKBAngels.
Why There Are So Few Women CEOs—And What Can Be Done About It
We loved this account of women CEOs: their scarcity, the illusion that the problem is already solved, how more women leaders can be good for business (hint: it takes more than just one woman), and how to help prepare women for jobs at the top from the beginning of their careers. Read below, and click through to listen to an interview.
Because seeing women at top positions is wonderful, but we've still got work to do before we reach gender equality.
You know those lists that come out every year ranking the highest paid CEOs? Well, one from North Texas caught our eye: there was only one woman in the 100 top paid public company CEOs.
The data, from The Dallas Morning News and Longnecker & Associates, raised two big questions: first, is Texas an anomaly? And second, does it matter for investors if women make it to the C-suite?
Pam Patsley is used to being both a powerful and petite woman. When we meet in a 15th-floor conference room in Dallas, the first thing she does is adjust the height of her chair so her black ballet flats reach the ground.
Patsley became CEO of MoneyGram International – one of the world’s largest cash-transfer firms – in 2009, right after the financial crisis. Her job was to steer the behemoth to safety, all $1 billion-plus of revenue and 300,000 locations – and she did.
Start Me Up: Why Women Funding Women Entrepreneurs Works Best
taketheleadwomen.com - Show her the money. Please.
New research published in the Harvard Business Review reveals that female entrepreneurs are more successful when their start-ups are funded by female venture capitalists.
Sahil Raina, assistant professor of finance at the Alberta School of Business writes: ”With startups financed by all-male VCs, there is a whopping 25 percentage-point difference in the exits of female-led and male-led startups. Yet when startups are financed by VCs with female partners, that difference disappears. There is no meaningful difference in the success rates of female- and male-led startups when they’re financed by VCs with women partners.”
Raina continues, “These findings suggest that, somehow, VCs with female partners are better able to evaluate or advise female-led startups, or both, to the point that there’s no performance gap between startups led by women and those led by men. However, if female entrepreneurs get their funding from VCs solely led by men, their startups will be far less likely to be acquired or make it to an IPO.”
Gender matching can be one big factor in the improved performance of women entrepreneurs, he writes. It could also be that female VCs are better at advising women entrepreneurs or better at picking the winners. Still, “If the goal is to have more successful technology startups led by women, it may not be enough to simply encourage more women to start companies. A crucial step to helping more female entrepreneurs succeed may be to encourage more women to join venture capital firms.”
Huffington Post: Giving To Women And Girls And Why It Matters
When Sara Blakely—one of the world's youngest female billionaires—signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates encouraging rich people to promise half their wealth to philanthropic causes, her comments not only focused on investing in women as the right thing to do—but as the smart thing to do. When women philanthropists invest, they're more likely to support women's and girls causes—and that lifts up entire communities.
When women invest, they invest in women—and that helps the world. Now, the study Giving to Women and Girls: Who Gives and Why gives us hard numbers to back up that wisdom. Read on for more from the Huffington Post.
huffingtonpost.com - Sara Blakely, founder and CEO of Spanx, proclaimed in her Giving Pledge letter, “I am committed to the belief that we would all be in a much better place if half the human race (women) were empowered to prosper, invent, be educated, start their own businesses, run for office-essentially be given the chance to soar! I pledge to invest in women because I believe it offers one of the greatest returns on investment.”
With these powerful words, Blakley galvanized a top spot on the list of global leaders in philanthropy. Not only did she give us shapewear for every season, but she also declared as truth what so many women across the globe know intuitively but don’t have a megaphone to champion: When we donate to nonprofit organizations that lift up women, we can be assured that our philanthropic investments will generate dividends for entire communities.
And now, as a result of new research from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, we have empirical evidence to better understand why women invest in women. This research also offers inspiration for emerging and seasoned philanthropists alike with examples of compelling projects that are moving the meter for women and girls, both in the United States and around the world. The research, Giving to Women and Girls: Who Gives and Why, is the first empirical study to systematically analyze this trend among individual donors. The findings show that nearly 50 percent of female donors support causes for women and girls and — noteworthy — 40 percent of male donors also support these causes. Increasing age and income levels are the most likely determinants of giving to women’s and girls’ causes; other control variables do not affect giving to a similar extent.
New diversity report highlights progress in VC industry
It's been a year and a half since the NVCA launched its Diversity Task Force, making it an official priority to broaden the pool of investors -- typically white men -- who fund Silicon Valley's tech industry. During that time, former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Ellen Pao lost her high-profile gender discrimination trial against the storied Silicon Valley VC firm, and investors and tech companies have faced mounting pressure to diversify their teams.
File photo: Aspect Ventures Jennifer Fonstadt, left, speaks to Women 2.0 CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania, center, and National Venture Capital Association Diversity Task Force co-chair Kate Mitchell, right, after a panel discussion on diversity in the tech industry at Intel Corporation's Executive Briefing Center in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday, June 9, 2015. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group archives)
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Are Investors Still Squeamish About Putting Money Into Women's Health?
Nuelle is a device that is designed to encourage arousal for women who experience problems with their sex drive at various stages in their lives. Long says she started the company after conducting extensive user research, in which many women shared that they lacked alternatives to hormone therapies.
"This was where we saw one of the greatest unmet needs in health care," says Long, who saw an opportunity to create a device-based alternative. After assembling an all-female executive team that included obstetrician Leah Millheiser and former Art.com senior vice president of marketing Lesa Musatto, she set forth for Sand Hill Road to secure the company's first big check.
Long expected that it would take some time to find the right set of backers, but she didn't anticipate her all-female team being referred to by a male partner as "the Charlie's Angels." Nor did she expect that she'd face the kind of blatant dismissals that she did: She was regularly laughed at in pitch meetings, and was told by several venture capitalists that she must be exaggerating the data, as "it doesn't happen to my wife."
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Why aren't there more women fund managers?
But the inroads that women have made in money market funds show that there is a path to greater representation in the industry.
Morningstar Inc., the investment tracker, says only 8.69% of U.S. open-ended stock funds with named managers are run by women. The statistics in bonds are somewhat better: 9.37% of bond-fund managers are women. But that's still well below the percentage of women in the overall population.
The data aren't entirely bleak. If you define “fixed income” to include money market funds, the power of women portfolio managers increases vastly. Patricia Larkin, for example, runs more than $179 billion for Dreyfus. Federated Investors' Deborah Cunningham manages $260 billion in money market fund assets. And Charles Schwab's Linda Klingman handles about $619 billion in money funds.
In taxable money market funds, about 36% are run by women, according to data from Money Fund Intelligence. “Women have a long history in the money fund business and, anecdotally, it has always seemed one of the areas of the investment business that isn't dominated by men,” said Peter Crane, CEO of Crane Data, which publishes Money Fund Intelligence.
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Enabling female entrepreneurs and beyond
Michelle Obama echoed this point during the United States of Women Summit in June, saying, “We’ve seen time and again that when educated girls grow into successful women, they don’t just pat themselves on the back and enjoy the fruits of their successes—no, as they should, they reach back and they help other women and girls along after them.” She singled out Kenyan entrepreneur Ciiru Waithaka, the founder of FunKidz, a successful children’s furniture company that designs products inspired by African stories. Waithaka garnered the First Lady’s praise for founding a program that has taught 350 disadvantaged youth about technology and innovation to date.
Can a rise in female angel investors help close the funding gap?
The lack of female investors out there may also play a part. There are numerous routes to funding but angel investment is still mainly driven by men. Considering we often hear that investors invest in those with characteristics they see in themselves, it’s not surprising to note there can be a pattern to the ‘type’ of businesses that receive funding. A study of 220 UK start-ups by Startup DNA found male entrepreneurs are 59% more likely to secure angel investment.
The situation is improving, though. Women now represent one in seven angel investors in the UK, double the rate in 2008, according to the UK Business Angels Association and the Centre for Entrepreneurs. But that’s still a big disparity. Rich lists might still be populated primarily by men, but the gap is closing. CEBR research back in 2005 suggested women now own 48% of Britain’s assets.
Why women tend to outperform men when investing
Over the last few decades, women have made great gains in education and business. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics shows women now earn 60% of all undergraduate and graduate degrees, and 46% of all MBAs.
When it comes to investing, however, women remain vastly underrepresented. According to a 2015 study by Morningstar, women manage only 8.69% of open-ended stock funds.
On the other hand, female investors tend to consistently outperform. According to the University of California, Berkeley, study, “Boys will be boys: gender, overconfidence and common stock investment” by Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean published in 2001 — the first of its kind to look at gender and investing — women outperformed their male counterparts by 2.3% over a seven-year period.
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Some financial firms tackle diversity gap head-on, say they can't afford not to Natasha Granholm was a student at Robert Morris College when she got an unlikely foot in the door at PricewaterhouseCoopers. The accounting giant, which didn't typically recruit at..
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Women in Banking: Bro Talk Must Go; Wells Fargo's Tolstedt to Retire
Bro's Club? What Bro's Club?: Bank of America has responded to a gender-bias suit filed by managing director Megan Messina, who claims her male supervisor made it clear she wasn't welcome in his bro's club and consistently excluded her from e-mails and meetings with the 10 men he oversaw. B of A said that no bro's club exists and that this inflammatory term was never used by Messina's supervisor or other managers.
Come Back: Barclays is offering a paid internship for once-high-performing midcareer bankers who left the industry for whatever reason, but want to return. The program helps participants brush up on their skills and re-establish their networks. Barbara Byrne, vice chairman of investment banking, says the program helps solve one of the industry's biggest problems: how to recruit the best bankers — particularly women — for an executive career track. "If you come here and you join with us after taking some time off, you're going to stay," says Byrne, who is in our "Most Powerful Women" ranking. "We want people who you can invest in and stay with us, who form relationships."
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Five Reasons Women Need To Talk More Openly About What They Earn
I sat there saying very little.
Growing up, money—especially for the adult women in my life—was never considered an appropriate topic of discussion. Ideally, you had it; you never admitted that you wanted more of it or acknowledged a lack of it. That was just good manners.
But this recent evening made me realize just how deeply I'd internalized that reticence around money matters—and how personally and professionally detrimental that might be. This is one difficult conversation it literally pays for women to master, both among ourselves and in the workplace at large.
The gender pay gap is more complex than the 77¢-on-the-dollar figure we've grown used to hearing women earn relative to men. Many different factors contribute to many different forms of earning disparity, and while important research is constantly bringing them to light, it can be hard for ordinary professional women to see the full range of ways those imbalances impact our lives.
Women take more risks than you think — which makes them a better investment
And yet, investors hand men, not women, the money. A lot more money. Researchers at Babson College found that over a two-year period, companies with a female CEO received $1.5 billion in venture capital dollars, while companies led by men received $49.3 billion. That means for every $1 invested in companies led by women, about $34 went to companies led by men.
What’s going on here? It’s not that there are 34 times more male entrepreneurs. Women own 31% of all privately held firms in the United States. Nor can we shrug and say men simply have a lock on superior business ideas. According to a 2014 research study led by Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, when men and women pitched the same idea, investors were 60% more likely to invest when a man proposed it.
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Why More Women Should Think Like Athletes
The MPW Insiders Network is an online community where the biggest names in business and beyond answer timely career and leadership questions. Today’s answer for: “How do you excel in a male-dominated industry?” is written by Karen Peetz, president of The Bank of New York Mellon.
fortune.com - A recent Ernst & Young/ESPN W survey showed that 94% of C-suite women played a sport—52% at a university level.
This was no surprise to me. I consider my experience as a field hockey and lacrosse athlete at Penn State University foundational to my professional success. It taught me about equality, competition, and grit. It helped me get to where I am today: president of one of the largest financial companies.
Women can borrow lessons from athletics to help them succeed in industries traditionally controlled by men. Here are some I’ve found to be incredibly valuable in my 34-year career:
Be assertive
Diversity in talent starts pretty equally when women enter the workforce, but drops off at mid-management and continues to decrease the higher you look in an organization. To change that, high-potential women need to speak up. Articulate myths or prejudices you want to dispel.
Earlier in my career, I knew one way to advance was through international experience. At the time, most of the management team assumed my husband, young twins, and I would never relocate. In reality, my family was supportive and up for the adventure. I lobbied hard for a move, and eventually earned a position leading a business in London. If I hadn’t spoken up, I might still be waiting for my chance. Just as in sports, visualizing your goal and desired outcome is key to career success.
Brands Pledge to Give Women Equal Pay: Is Your Favorite on the List?
stylenews.people.com - Though women have made great strides in the workplace lately (um, hello, first female Democratic presidential nominee), we still have far to go — particularly in the realm of wage equality. But now, thanks to a new initiative put forth by the White House that calls for private sector companies to take the “Equal Pay Pledge,” the pay gap could soon become a thing of the past.
According to a post on the White House’s blog (yes, we said White House blog), “in 2014, the typical woman working full-time all year in the United States earned only 79 percent of what the typical man earned working full-time all year. The pay gap is even greater for African American and Latina women, with African American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man.” So on Wednesday, at the United State of Women Summit, the White House announced they would be challenging companies to join them in their commitment to ending the gap once and for all.
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Warren Buffett says he is looking to invest more in women
independent.co.uk - One of the most famous investors in the world has said he is looking to invest in more women-run companies and bring more women onto his board.
Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, told the audience at the first ever United State of Women summit in Washington DC that he currently invests in six companies with female CEOs and is "looking for more”.
He also has three women on the board of Berkshire Hathaway and wants to up that number too.
“What makes me even more enthusiastic about the future, is that 90% of that time [in the past] we were only using half of our talent. Think about what would happen if we used all the talent for 100% of the time,” he said. “It’s like having one hand behind your back.“
The first woman to join his board in 2003 was Charlotte Guyman. Her name was suggested to him at first by his wife.
“I said ‘bingo’, but I didn’t think of it myself, and that demonstrates one of the problems we men have to get over,” he confided.
Since then, Susan Decker and Meryl Witmer have joined the 12-strong board, which includes Bill Gates and Mr Buffett's son, Howard Graham Buffett.
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A Female Syrian Entrepreneur Builds in Exile - Newsweek
newsweek.com - Sitting behind a large wooden desk in her white hijab, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Lara Shaheen looks every bit the modern Arab businesswoman. The only problem is that her business is illegal.
Shaheen, 34, is a refugee from Syria—she fled four years ago after President Bashar al-Assad’s regime arrested her brothers. They were released after three months, but the experience was enough to prompt Shaheen and her family to flee Damascus. Shaheen came to Amman, Jordan, with her mother, father and younger sister, while her brothers escaped to Germany. After that ordeal, her parents developed health problems. With her sister only 17 and her brothers far away, supporting the family was left to Shaheen. “I’m the lonely girl who must work to make money for my family,” she says.
When she first got to Jordan, she volunteered with Hemma, a local organization providing support to Syrian refugees living outside of camps. But after nine months, Shaheen realized she wanted to do more, explaining, “We are staying here for a long time, so you can’t keep giving people handouts.”
With the Syrian conflict now in its sixth year, exile is becoming increasingly permanent for refugees like Shaheen. However, the vast majority are unable to work legally in Jordan. Although they can apply for work permits, obtaining them is a complex and often prohibitively expensive process.
As a result, Jordan’s Ministry of Labor estimates that fewer than 1 percent of refugees there have access to legal work permits, while some 160,000 to 200,000 Syrians are working illegally, without any of the legal protections Jordan’s labor laws offer. This could soon change. In March, Jordanian authorities announcedthat, as part of a new deal with the EU, they would allow up to 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally.
In April, the government implemented measures to make it easier for Syrians to work, including a temporary waiver of application fees and a 90-day grace period for employers in the informal sector to obtain permits for Syrian refugees. According to the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, “this could see up to 78,000 Syrians able to work legally in Jordan in the short term, and thousands more in the coming years.”
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In India, successful female entrepreneurs are invited to speak only about women
qz.com - In December, a friend who is also a public relations executive asked me if I could suggest the names of a few women entrepreneurs to speak at an event on India’s technology startups. “The client wants to include a discussion about women and entrepreneurship,” he said.
Since the event was only a few days away, I asked him to invite other women speakers at the event for this panel. But that wasn’t an option.
“We don’t have any women speakers so far,” he said. “That’s why we want to include a women-only panel.”
I should have guessed. The all-female panel was, as they often are, an afterthought.
Women are a rare sight at technology events in India. Unless there is a discussion on “managing family with work” or “how the industry accepts women.”
Questions on innovation and business are usually reserved for their male counterparts.
For instance, in January, the Indian government hosted its first-ever “Startup India” event and invited five women entrepreneurs for a 30-minute panel called “Celebrating women: Stories of innovative women entrepreneurs.” The discussion during this session revolved around the advantages women bring to the startup industry, and how women should deal with questions about marriage.
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