Women

If You Want to Better Understand Startup Communities, Read These Three Women

I’m working hard on The Startup Community Way this week with my co-author Brad Feld. As we’re polishing up the meaty part of the book—which draws on a wide range of theory, empirics, frameworks, and just some really brilliant thinking on the part of the many impressive shoulders this work stands upon—a few names keep coming up in the references we’ve assembled.

Three of these names I want to talk about today are intellectual giants in the areas of entrepreneurship, geography, and cooperative social systems. Their work collectively intersects in a way that explains a lot about why startup communities exist. If you want to understand startup communities, you should know their work. Two of them I consider friends, so not only do I get to benefit from their insightful work, I also know there’s a kindness and generosity behind their ideas. The third is not someone I knew, and sadly she’s already passed. But, I think a lot of her work and I’ve written about it already.

All three are women.

How venture capital mega-rounds obscure improving gender diversification of startup founders

Today, I’m going to publish headline numbers of venture capital investments ($) by founder-gender type. I’m doing this for two reasons. First, while my study provided some important new information, headline numbers of capital invested is what clicks in most people’s minds for “what’s going on” (I disagree). Second, I want to point out that looking at headline numbers of capital investments might obscure a truer picture of a diversifying founder base because giant funding rounds are dominating VC markets.

To test this idea, I pulled annual figures for venture capital deals and capital invested by round size (<$50M, $50M-$99M, $100M-499M, and $500M+) and gender dynamics of founders (women-only, mixed gender, and men-only). What my analysis shows is that mega-rounds ($100M+) are male-dominated and drowning out some promising gender diversification going on for companies in-line with historical venture capital activities.

Women-Only and Mixed-Gender Founding Teams are Driving New Venture-Backed Startup Activity

Two weeks ago, I published a new report for the Center for American Entrepreneurship, titled The Ascent of Women-Founded Venture-Backed Startups in the United States. I followed-up with a summary on this blog last week.

One criticism of the report is my definition of “women-founded”. For reasons I explain in detail in the report’s methodology, I chose “women-founded” to indicate a company that has at least one verified female founder. That means it includes startups with all-women founding teams and teams with both women and men (coincidentally, it also means that I assume that companies with missing founder information had no women founders—more on that in a second). A key reason for not separating these groups was needing a bigger pool of companies to draw from in order to credibly track outcomes over time—and there just weren’t enough of them in the mid-to-late 2000’s to do that. There were tradeoffs.

However, that does not prevent me from more narrowly segmenting these groups here and demonstrating first financing trends only across the four types of founding teams in the dataset—women only, men only, mixed gender, and missing gender. To begin, the first chart here displays the raw numbers of annual first financings for startups falling into each of those four founder-gender categories.

New Study on Women Founders

Last week, I published a new report for the Center for American Entrepreneurship, titled The Ascent of Women-Founded Venture-Backed Startups in the United States. The study is the culmination of months of research and collaboration with some amazing friends at the National Center for Women & Information Technology and beyond.