Millennial Black by Sophie Williams

Author:Sophie Williams [Williams, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

What’s causing the funding gap?

Black women are, as a group, deeply involved in their communities, and often start businesses with those community interests at heart, or make businesses that fill the gaps for services that they want or need – from lifestyle brands to hair or skin care, or training and educational services that have been overlooked up to that point. These propositions, with the expert knowledge of a founder who is a part of that community, and knows how to talk to and access potential buyers, should be no-brainer investment opportunities. However, that’s not how things usually pan out for these Black female entrepreneurs. Businesses like these, which speak to the personal or community needs of traditionally overlooked groups, by their very nature, require some insight, knowledge or imagination on the side of those holding the purse strings – or at least a willingness to really listen to the lived experience of the founder and understand the market need that their new product or service is filling. I say imagination because, as an industry, venture capitalists tend to be a largely homogeneous group (white and male), who have historically invested in products designed to help people like themselves, and businesses founded by people similar to themselves.

Black women may have to spend more precious time in investment meetings proving their credentials and the need for their business and product, than people pitching products and businesses that investors are more inherently familiar with, and with the need for.

Female entrepreneurs have long lamented their difficulty of accessing funding through traditional paths. There are more stories than I can count of women in pitch meetings being asked if they were on the pill33 (we don’t want to invest if you’re going to go off and have babies – you know what female founders can be like, type of vibes). Similarly, trying to pitch businesses that they knew would make a difference to women’s lives, that typically white, male investors just weren’t interested in or didn’t see the need for – such as products for children or women’s health.

This is something that June Angelides MBE, founder of Mums in Tech, heard over and over again from the women in her programme who were looking to raise investment. Speaking of one of the experiences of one of the cohort who had founded an app to help parents to find baby classes, she told me, ‘She was saying that when she was raising investment, she really struggled to get the male investors to understand why parents needed an app for that. They just did not get it. She’s one of the many women who came to me and said that an investor asked them if they wanted to have more babies or if they were going to lose focus on their business if they wanted to grow their families, and I thought, “That’s just such a ridiculous question to ask, and you wouldn’t ask a man in a funding meeting whether he was going to have a family.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.