The percentage of venture capital dollars going to startups led by only female founders hasn’t surpassed 3% over the past decade, despite a bevy of initiatives and efforts helping women launch and invest in new tech companies.
Paige Hendrix Buckner wants that to change.
The Portland, Ore.-based tech leader in April became CEO of All Raise, the San Francisco-based nonprofit founded in 2017 to help boost women and non-binary founders and funders.
Some research shows that female founders outperform their male counterparts. Last year, female founders exited faster and maintained a lower burn rate than the broader market, according to Female Founders Fund.
Hendrix Buckner wants to spotlight this type of data and shift the perception that women are riskier bets than their male counterparts.
“We want to change the way that culture looks at women founders and investors,” she told GeekWire.
A recent report from Cake Ventures describes the “trillion-dollar female economy” and the opportunity to build companies selling products for women.
“Women founders can have a unique vantage point into how the economy works,” said Hendrix Buckner.
Investing in female founders and venture capitalists shouldn’t be treated as a “charity case,” she said.
“It’s just good business sense,” said Hendrix Buckner, who served as interim CEO earlier this year and first joined All Raise in May 2022.
Hendrix Buckner was a founder herself, having started a platform for business gifting in 2015. She knows the struggles faced by underrepresented founders and what it’s like not having access to the right networks, particularly at the earliest stages of company building.
Part of the mission at All Raise is to get more women representation on the investment side. Evidence suggests that the lack of female partners at venture capital firms makes them less likely to invest in startups led by women.
Data from All Raise shows that less than 15% of venture check-writers are female — a number that has increased from less than 10% in 2018.
There’s still more work to do, said Hendrix Buckner. She said it’s important for female investors to have male allies, and to have pathways to promotion within firms.
Harvard Business Review found that VC firms with more female partners had better returns and more profitable exits.
But even if startups raise early-stage capital from women VCs, they can face hurdles raising subsequent rounds of financing due to “attribution bias,” according to a separate study by Harvard Business Review.
Big picture, getting more support for women founders and investors will benefit society at large, given the outsized influence of the tech industry, said Hendrix Buckner.
“Women investors are funding the future and women founders are building the future,” she said. “And if they both don’t get the support that they need, we’re not going to see the change in culture that we need to support not just a healthy, diverse, inclusive, equitable tech ecosystem — but also a healthy, diverse, inclusive and equitable society.”
