“You don’t want to let any smart woman or any good idea fall through the cracks simply because it doesn’t work for a particular fund manager.”
Female entrepreneurs have long known how hard it is to raise money from a roomful of men. “I would walk into these rooms of late-40s, early-50s dudes — potential investors — and they would just look at me blankly, like, ‘I do not get it,’” said Rachel Drori, the founder of Daily Harvest, a delivery service for produce-centric meals. “Sometimes, they’d say, ‘Can you send samples to my wife?’”
What if Ms. Drori, and others like her, could pitch to a roomful of women?
On a frigid evening in January, some 275 entrepreneurs filed into the SoHo outpost of The Wing, the women-only co-working club, for a women-only pitch night. They grabbed seats (pink folding chairs, mint settees, maroon couches) as well as sustenance (crudités, cheese, wine) ahead of the main event: Ten start-ups would present their business propositions to potential investors as well as those interested in learning from or working with them.
The gathering was called Wingable, named for the club and Able Partners, a New York venture capital firm that had already put money into each of the 10 companies. The fund, which was started three years ago by Lisa Blau and Amanda Eilian, has been an early-stage investor in a number of female-founded companies, including The Wing and Goop.
www.nytimes.com
0 comments:
Join the Conversation