On May 8, Project W held its 10th Women Entrepreneurs Boot Camp (WEB) – the first in the Bay Area. With 18 investors and a host of experts and supporters, the eleven founders in our cohort spent a full day focusing on scaling their companies to get Series A ready.
Throughout the day, the founders and our faculty of experts and investors interrogated the challenges women founders face in this difficult fundraising environment. What kind of revenue traction do you need to raise an institutional round, and how do you build that traction? How do you extend your cash runway as long as possible? When do you start raising, and how do you close in this challenging climate? And, when you're fundraising, how do you disrupt the bias that results in less than 2% of venture capital being invested in female-founded companies?
While the founders in the 10th WEB cohort operate in different industries – future of work, healthcare, sustainability, financial services, regulatory compliance, media, and agriculture – the takeaways from the day can be applied across all their companies. Here are some of the key learnings:
Persevere during the tough times by relying on champions and your own network and jump into action when opportunities present themselves. Laura Spiekerman, co-founder and President of Alloy, shared her journey from a three-person startup to a multinational company with approximately 275 employees. Laura and her co-founders stuck with their mission during several difficult years and, during the pandemic, seized the opportunity to sell their pandemic relief fraud protection solution to financial institutions and fintech companies, spurring rapid and sustained growth.
- Delight your customers. Sales expert Patty Watkins shared her 25+ years of sales experience, returning repeatedly to the importance of delighting your customers. Existing customers buy 67% more and referrals from existing customers account for as much as 65% of new business. Patty shared how to keep your existing customers happy by understanding their business challenges and by engaging in a constant feedback and improvement loop with your customers.
- Traction and ability to scale is key to investors, but what that looks like depends on the company. Series A investors Talia Goldberg of Bessemer Ventures Partners and Emmalyn Shaw of Flourish Ventures shared their insights about what they look for in potential investments. Traction and scalability are key. Investors want to see customer contracts, sales, and other evidence that the market wants what a founder is building. And they want to see growing demand that indicates a sizeable market for the solution. What traction and scalability look like will depend on the product and the company. There is no check-the-box answer.
- You can improve your chances of raising more capital by learning how to disrupt bias in the pitch process. In a master class that applied principles developed by Dr. Dana Kanze from her seminal research, the founders learned how to reframe answers to questions around risk and challenges ("prevention") into responses that emphasized opportunities and growth ("promotion"). This strategy makes a difference. Dr. Kanze found that answering a prevention question with a promotion answer can increase the amount of capital raised by approximately 14 times.
Thanks to all the founders, investors, and allies who made WEB San Francisco a success. The Bay Area is blessed with investors and allies who understand the value of diverse founding teams and are committed to a redistribution of opportunities and resources to women founders. They make our work possible.
We'll be back, San Francisco!
