Pipeline Angels held an angel investing boot camp to Puerto Rico in 2018 to to enlist new investors and support the island's economy.
Twenty years ago, I tried to raise venture capital for a Silicon Valley startup venture I’d launched with a female partner. We had Fortune 100 sponsors and a huge bank ready to invest a million dollars. They had just one requirement: we needed a venture capitalist (VC) to also invest. We thought we had it made. After all, it was the height of the dot com era, and investors were handing out money to internet startups like fun-size Twix bars on Halloween.
When we made our pitch to VCs – and they were always only men at the VC firms –they’d ask whether we had a man on our team (we did not). I doubt these same VCs ever asked whether an all-male team had any women on it.
We didn’t get our funding – and we weren’t alone.
In 1997, only 1.7 percent of the billions of dollars in venture capital invested in startups went to women-led businesses, according to Springboard Enterprises. But that was then, right?
Nope. Now, 21 years later, that percentage has basically stayed flat, at around a dismal 2 percent in 2017, according to financial data and software company Pitchbook.
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