As a female founder, I have encountered the following challenges in capital raising: 1. Lack of access to the right networks to create the necessary relationships, 2. Traditional, underrepresented and female investors reinforcing the status quo approach instead of creating investment approaches that meet the needs of underrepresented and women, and 3. An unsupported bias that non-technical female founders will fail at a rate higher than technical founders. I would summarize this as being at a disadvantage alongside all women and underrepresented, on the basic lack of long-term data to show the results associated with investing in female founders.

I liken this to 15 years ago when it was believed that only 1% of women had Spondyloarthritis (SpA) an inflammatory arthritis of the large joints, Today, we now know that women make up almost 1/2 of the patient population. Why was it believed that it was a “man’s disease”? Because, until recently only white males were included in initial clinical trials and there was no data on women (or POC), so they weren’t diagnosed. White males were included in early trials, and they were diagnosed. Today, women are included in research, diagnosed faster, and they are having excellent outcomes and thriving with proper treatment as the research has become translational to the clinical setting. This is much like the investment landscape – we don’t have the evidence-based research to translate.

Building on the SpA example. most Rheumatologists and General practitioners held hard and fast until about 2006 that women didn’t get this disease and over time as it was researched, there has been a paradigm shift and growing numbers of clinical research studies showing women had the disease, but it manifested differently. I see this parallelled in the VC world where women manifest their dreams differently because we do have different lived experiences. While growing numbers of VCs are more aware of needs to invest in underrepresented founders and/or have underrepresented Partners, in my conversations with them, there is often an air of these 3 themes: 

1. Status Quo: You must do startups the same way that those who have been successful are doing. 
2. Tough Love: You are held to a higher standard and because I had to fight to get where I am. 
3. Reinforcing Status Quo over New Thinking: You need to do the things I did to be successful, an argument counterintuitive to Equity (as in giving people what they need to succeed) and reinforces the status quo approach to investing.

There is a documented increase in the number of non-technical Female tech founders – it is thought that one of the primary reasons is illumination of opportunities in general for women, STEM Pipeline & that women are now seeing problems they can solve, have been “given permission” that they can build & it is requiring data and tech expertise have that have been predominantly male. In a recent conversation with Maria Kratsch, CEO of the Partnership Fund, an economic development fund for NYC and named the most powerful woman in NYC by Crain’s- she reinforced all three of these problems and is an excellent example of a woman who has the power to hospice the old system and build a new one that is equitable and considerate of the possibilities that exist in women and underrepresented people achieving more than .0001% success at reaching the $100M mark that exists today for startups/     While I have faced barriers in my life, I have overcome each one in my own unique way  -by being tenacious and failing until I got right -until now. will continue to do so to make my dream of measurably closing racial wealth gap using data plus the size and scale of public companies a reality and adding Lunum to a new, more human dataset that shows how women can manifest better returns, solve societal problems and be one of the first to open the door for the rest.