FEMALE FOUNDERS FASTER FORWARD
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Mission Statement
Female Founders Faster Forward (F4Capital) is fundamentally changing how startups secure capital. Our innovative Startup Investment Model Index (SiMi) effectively measures startup maturity, opportunity, and risk, while eliminating bias and prejudice in prevailing venture-funding processes. SiMi is like a FICO Score for Startups. Much like the impact of the FICO Score on consumer lending, SiMi assesses, informs, and empowers startup founders on venture investability--outside of gender, race, or other identities. By focusing purely on the state-of-the-startup, SiMi also facilitates smarter investing. Using sophisticated data and analytics driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, SiMi delivers entirely new levels of funding transparency and benchmarking, creating entirely new positions of funding for under-served founders. With broad, free-of-charge SiMi adoption, we intend to bring female founders, especially, out of the shadows and further into the pool of successfully funded enterprises. Our baseline data model already includes more than 750 funded startups, with input from both founders and funders. A data and model university peer-review is underway. We need funding to support further SiMi development on a non-profit basis. Why care? Consider the founders and the businesses that get left behind, those that never make it above the fold. They represent lost opportunity, unrealized positive financial impact, paradigm-changing solutions that died on the vine for lack of funding—only because they were founded by women. No more. Help us revolutionize venture-funding processes and level the playing field for startup founders by putting SiMi in their hands. We are a registered 501c3 non-profit organization. For more information, please see https://www.f4capital.org/.
About This Cause
In 2018, and for the last 10 years, with only small variation, approximately 2-3% of the tens of billions of dollars of US venture capital goes to female founders. From 2012-2018, the rate has been 3% annually. Even more concerning, less than 1% of venture capital goes to female founders in tech. Despite all the conversations, time, and resources dedicated to stronger support of women in STEM, in the US and globally, US female founders continue to be left behind. We can increase the numbers of women in STEM, which is economically valuable for academia and corporations, and of women in leadership, which is vital to establishing role models, but without access to capital, few female founders can succeed in high-growth business markets. To deliver a solution and gain traction at scale, one needs venture- or institutional-level funding. Most women founders are trailblazers. They hold patents. They run companies. They draw upon decades of successful business experience. They are respected. But, in the US, they cannot gain reliable access to startup venture funding. They can have conversations about it. They can schedule meetings. But they cannot close funding deals on an even-near equal basis as men. It’s maddening. And unfair. Why is this the case, that women are under-funded? Inherent bias, whether intentional or not, exists in the venture-funding process. Not every VC opposes funding diversity. The funding process is broken and outdated. No standard method exists. Decisions are based on gut, past patterns, the current hype, and an inner network. And each VC is aware only of those deals brought to the firm’s attention. SiMi changes everything. By removing identity-based bias in venture funding, by assessing a startup’s investment worthiness based purely on accepted, normalized, “state-of-the-startup” data, new levels of visibility and access can prevail. Proprietary methods will continue, yet the starting point changes. Many ask, perhaps not enough women are seeking venture capital? Women are seeking venture funding...they’re just not getting it. How do we know? Let’s look at the gender divide in a single sector: tech. Although 20% of tech executives are women, less than 1% of VC funding goes to tech startups with female founders. When funded, on average, female-founded tech startups receive 1/3 of the Series A funding of male-led tech startups. According to a Kauffman Foundation survey of nearly 350 female tech startup founders, 80% used personal savings as their top source of funding for launching their new startup. Women go broke, even bankrupt, trying to bring viable enterprises to market. It shouldn't and doesn't have to be this way. SiMi is the solution. Each VC has its own proprietary investing process. Increasingly, VCs are embracing sophisticated technologies to assist them in reviewing candidates and portfolios. SiMi offers the same distinct, standardized assessment process, at the top level, plus access to the comprehensive analytics and machine learning resulting from aggregated, national data input by founders and funders alike. Realizing the level of change we seek--and need--in the startup funding system demands quality collaboration and the broadest possible adoption. We're working with academic, policy, and technology partners to bring a peer-reviewed, highly sophisticated, entirely innovative solution to a market that represents many billions of dollars annually. We need foundation support. Our effort is not about personal profit. We created SiMi to literally disrupt and revolutionize startup funding, so that more qualified enterprises succeed, whether founded by women or not. We are a registered 501c3 non-profit. SiMi currently is in development. This funding campaign supports carrying the solution to the next-level deployment, while maintaining its use free-of-charge. Our goal is to see equal VC funding go to female founders. It's possible. In fact, it's beatable. We simply need to change the starting point. With a new investment model, the conversation stands on entirely new ground. Being a woman will be immaterial, yet absolutely undeniable in its success. That's the way we do it. Imagine. We can see it. Help fund SiMi. Help us bring our solution to the masses. By the way, SiMi will benefit all under-served founders. We already have advocacy support and adoption interest from a broad variety of additional geographic, socio-economic, racial, ethnic, gender, orientation, and age populations. Veterans may be a next addressable under-served group. The longer we wait to change the prevailing funding rate to female-founded startups, the longer we miss the opportunity to raise these entrepreneurs into the markets and the longer we miss the benefit of their offerings. This is a socio-economic issue that deserves attention today and, frankly, is long overdue. While other advocacy groups, organizations, and even VCs have increased the level of conversation around women (there even is a drive to increase the number of female VCs and female-targeted funds via impact and social investing), none of this activity has translated to any significant change in the prevailing funding rate of 3% or less annually (see, for example, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/portion-vc-backed-startups-founded-women-stays-stubbornly-stagnant/, and note the female-only-founder rate of 3% from 2012-2018). In order to change the rate with any true impact, we need to change the starting point--we need to change the investment model. Our mission is to increase access to venture capital for all under-served entrepreneurs. SiMi is how we meet our mission. This project is vital to our ability to further develop SiMi. Without further development and adoption of SiMi, the less impact we will have. We need funding to bring SiMi to the next level of development and to place it in as many hands of under-served founders as possible.