When I was 24, I raised a $4 million round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital. I was arrogant and self-involved, so I felt like I fit in pretty well with all those men over on Sand Hill Road. Until, one day I disagreed with one of the partners over the firing of one of my employees.
"You little bitch." He screamed at me over the phone.
"Consider your company bankrupt."
The rest of the drama was only healthy for the lawyers.
Pretty quickly I got out of the business I had co-founded and ran off to the polite, considerably more well-mannered enclave of business school. And, after that, to stay-at-home motherhood.
And now as I dip my toe back into the entrepreneurial world I see a very different landscape, a landscape that helps me keep my faith in the global economy.
Here's what I see: Women can save the day.
The latest evidence:
A 29 year-old entrepreneur Demet Mutlu, founder and CEO of Trendyol.com -- a private Turkish shopping site, just raised a record breaking $26 million from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Tiger Global.
This is the first time a woman has raised this much money in Turkey. It is KPCB's first investment in Turkey. And it was done by two female partners from KPCB, Mary Meeker and Aileen Lee.
Can you hear the glass shattering?
This was despite the fact that studies show only 3-5 percent of women who run businesses get funded, and less than 10 percent of those working in the VC field globally are women.
But recent deals like Mutlu's show a very different environment in Silicon Valley, where women VCs level the playing field for women entrepreneurs one deal at a time.
Mutlu's Istanbul-based shopping site Trendyol.com has exploded to 4 million members in just 16 months. This customer-service driven company has employed many unique business strategies: no offices, rotating desks, private label products and allowing customers to vote on what new fashions it will stock.
"We are a customer obsessed team. Every area of the company, even finance, thinks about customer service," Demet told me in a phone call from Istanbul.
And they are not selling burquas. "Conservative doesn't sell on Trendyol," Demet says when I ask about selling clothes in an Islamic country. "Right now shorts and high heels are our top sellers."
Taking advantage of women's global purchasing power, Turkey's growing economy and its high level of Internet usage, Mutlu, Aileen Lee and Mary Meeker are creating new statistics. And it is happening here in the U.S., too.
Media outlets are taking notice of this trend. The Mercury News reported on a similar investment:
"The deal hinged on the long-term relationship between the founder, a serial entrepreneur, and a venture capitalist who has become a leading figure in e-commerce startups... In other words, it's the kind of thing that happens every day in Silicon Valley -- except for one crucial detail: They're both women. And that makes the story of Joyus founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and Accel Partners' Theresia Gouw Ranzetta worth highlighting."
Although women are leaving the VC field at a much higher rate than men, the power of those few women VCs remaining and their growing network of women CEOs is having an enormous impact on women who run startups and, as a result, on our global economy.
"Firms with women investment partners are 70 percent more likely to lead an investment in a woman entrepreneur than those with only male partners," said a recent report from Illuminate Ventures.
This presents a gigantic disruption of one of the last bastions of old boy networks. And hopefully a change from the testosterone driven, cut-throat world I entered 14 years ago
It's about time, not just for social and cultural reasons, but because of hard economic fact.
"Between 1997 and 2006, businesses fully women-owned, or majority-owned by women, grew at nearly twice the rate of all U.S. firms (42.3 percent vs. 23.3 percent)."
And it is not just about our business savvy, but it is also about our purchasing power.
"Women oversee over 80 percent of consumer spending, or about $5 trillion dollars annually." KP venture capitalist and Tryndyol investor, Aileen Lee, wrote on Techcrunch. "Women control the purse strings when it comes to disposable income. That's long been the case."
"But what's different now is that there is an exciting new crop of e-commerce companies building real revenue and real community, really fast, by purposefully harnessing the power of female consumers. One Kings Lane, Plum District, Stella & Dot, Rent the Runway, Modcloth, BirchBox, Shoedazzle, Zazzle, Callaway Digital Arts, and Shopkick are just a few examples of companies leveraging 'girl power.' The majority of these companies were also founded by women, which is also an exciting trend."
How encouragingly far away that is from "little bitch."
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I also think that you would be intrigued to see what Cheryl Heller (hellercd.com) says about the power of women as integrating forces, they are the yang in a world that has been dominated by ying. This movement toward women run businesses is also linked to a rise in socially oriented and minded businesses that give back to the communities in which they are involved.
As Cheryl helps define and build out our new MFA in Design for Social Innovation, we will be looking for those entrepreneurial-minded "ying" or integrative women to join our program and "leverage their girl-power" to make changes in the way business is run.
There appears to a thriving, growing industry today of women telling each other what they want to hear and patting each other on the back.
But where are the real issues?
CRAZY
Women can take over all of retail, all of wholesale, all of distribution, all of manufacture, all of design
and the world will be no better off
WHAT PLANET YOU ON ?
The borrow to expand model as opposed to the growth as profits allow model not only cedes profits and control to investors, it feeds the beast of the mentality that brought our economy crashing down.
Women keeping control of the companies they found should be one goal. The banking middlemen are not helpful to that goal.
That said, I'm really heartened by this article... though, as a consumer of estrogen, I feel somewhat bait-and-switched by it. ^_^
http://www.gfpatisserie.com/
95% of my customers are women.
Women VCs, CEOs, employees making equal pay; ladies, either go around the ceiling or find the right hammer to make a crack in it. Exciting times, and it is sad how few men get it.
The men who make these adds convey their fantasy of a world as they would like it to be, and this world view is offensive to many women. Some women making adds for women would be better. As would women making fashion for women. Who wants to see men deciding what women will wear and then judging them.