Less than 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. When Laurie McGraw started Inspiring Women five years ago, the number was 2.4%. A few years later it had dropped to 1.8%. Absolute dollars going to women have grown, but the share of total capital has gone the other way, and the gap is now one of the largest unsolved problems in capital allocation.
Laurie sits down with three women working to change that from inside the system.
The guests:
Ita Ekpoudom is a Partner at Gingerbread Capital, a family office fund started by a former co-chair of tech banking at Goldman Sachs who realized after retiring that she had never made a private investment in her entire career. Gingerbread now invests directly into female-founded and co-founded companies, and as an LP into majority women-led funds.
Jenny Abramson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rethink Impact, the largest fund in the country backing female CEOs across health, education, environment, and economic empowerment. Jenny was a tech CEO herself before founding Rethink in 2015. Her mother had run one of the earliest institutional funds backing women roughly twenty years before that, and the share of VC going to women was higher in her mother's era than in Jenny's.
Erin Harkless Moore leads the investment platform at Pivotal Ventures, the organization founded by Melinda French Gates to advance women's power and influence. Pivotal pulls on three levers: philanthropy, policy and advocacy, and investing. Erin deploys capital both into next-generation fund managers as an LP and directly into early-stage companies across the care economy, women's health, and financial access.
Topics covered:
01. The $648B care economy, larger than the pharmaceutical industry, and why Pivotal partnered with The Holding Company to size it
02. Maternal mental health, childcare infrastructure, elder care, and women's health as one connected market
03. The companies these funds are backing: Midi (the first unicorn in menopause), 7 Starling, Winnie, Wellthy, Bold, Spring Health, and Maven
04. How to spot category-creating founders before the rest of the market catches on
05. April Koh, Spring Health, and what it meant to see her on the cover of Time
06. Why "emerging manager" is the wrong label for funds like Rethink, Magnify Ventures, and Cherry Rock Capital
07. Stacy Brown-Philpot's path from early Google to Task Rabbit CEO to founding Cherry Rock Capital
08. The pattern-matching problem at the heart of venture capital
09. Why nine firms captured 50% of all venture capital raised last year
10. Gender-diverse teams, capital efficiency, and the data on returns
11. Who actually sits on investment committees at endowments, foundations, and pensions, and why many pension funds are already run by women
12. The great wealth transfer heading largely to women and what it means for financial services
13. Why most women change financial advisors after inheriting wealth
14. The Casa Dragones story, Berta Gonzalez, and the speed gap between male and female capital decisions
15. Donna Khan's research on prevention versus promotion questions and how investors interview female founders differently
16. The $5 to $6 trillion gender parity opportunity in entrepreneurship
17. Why women are twice as likely to invest in other women, and why that still is not enough
18. Practical advice for women ready to invest, lead, or fund the next wave
Full episode on Inspiring Women. Subscribe for more conversations with the women shaping business, capital, and leadership.
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