Left to Right: Laura Good, Karen Horiuchi, Aye Moah, Priya Jhingan
There was a packed house at last night’s Startup Grind Female Founders event at The Urban Hive as Laura Good stepped in to moderate a panel of female founders. The female panel consisted of:
- Karen Horiuchi, CEO, Glambot
- Aye Moah, Cofounder & Chief of Product, Boomerang
- Priya Jhingan, Founder & CEO, Evrystep
There were a lot of great stories and advice from the panel, some specifically related to female founders and gender diversity, but plenty of general good information for anybody in the startup world. I think it’s noteworthy that all three of the women on the panel had strong STEM backgrounds – science, technology, or engineering degrees from MIT, Stanford, and UC Davis – perhaps underscoring the benefit of strong STEM education.
Female Founder Specific
On gender balance and setting a balanced culture:
Start out with a balanced team to set the precedent. Having a female founder sets the company culture. Work to keep the team balanced from the very beginning. When sourcing, look for talent on LinkedIn to reach out to that matches the need and maintains the balance you’re looking for.
On meetings:
In our culture, people will tend to look at and defer to tall white men vs women on the team. Aye Moah established ground rules with her 6’2″ head of marketing when they go into meetings. They have an agreement that he will redirect technical questions asked of him to her, as Chief of Product. She also instructs him to look at her in meetings when others are talking (and usually looking at him), which serves as a cue that others should be looking at her too.
Karen Horiuchi advised, on meeting with potential investors, not take meetings at night so that it can’t be construed as a date.
General
There was also plenty of general advice not necessarily aimed at female founders.
Aye Moah emphasized the importance of recurring revenue – after procuring users, keep them coming back. She also related advice from a mentor/advisor – when figuring out your pricing model, charge more than you’re comfortable with.
Everyone on the panel addressed the highs and lows of being a startup founder – there will be vey high highs, and very low lows. When you have others on the team with you, it helps you to get through the lows. Mental energy of the founders is critical.
As a founder, you’ll do the wrong thing at some point. You just will. – Priya Jhingan
They each related their experience working with the 500 Startups accelerator and all agreed that most of the learning came from talking to other batchmates/founders. The network they developed in their accelerator cohort was the best takeaway. The connections are the greatest benefits.
A couple of other observations:
To me (and I could be wrong on this), the ratio of women to men in attendance last night seemed higher than typical. I hope that is just an indication that it attracted more women than usual and not that men opted out of attending out of disinterest.
My wife pointed out to me that in the announcement of upcoming guests at future Startup Grind Sacramento events, all are male.
Once again, a great event organized by the Startup Grind Sacramento team. If you’ve never been to Startup Grind Sacramento event, these events are the perfect opportunity to get involved in the Sacramento startup community and learn from the experience of some very smart and talented people. Check out the upcoming lineup and register today. You can also check out video of past events by clicking on one of the past event thumbnails. So if you missed last night, check back in and watch the video.
Update: Here’s the video from the event.
