By Sabrina Fitzgerald and Jenni Chance
Co-founded by Kate Dwyer and Penelope Gazin, Witchsy is an online marketplace startup for artwork. Whilst testing to secure venture capital funding in Silicon Valley in 2016, they struggled to obtain meetings with Venture Capitalists (VCs) and their enquiries often went unanswered. When they did secure meetings, many of the male investors they met with wouldn’t take them seriously.
In a bid to overcome this, the two women created a third fictional male co-founder called Keith Mann. When they launched utilizing Keith’s signature on emails to developers and potential investors, Keith obtained quicker responses and more meetings than his women co-founders ever did. Our research suggests that this story is just as relevant today as when this sequence of events unfolded.
Today, Witchsy is a thriving and profitable online business selling “art, pins, shirts, patches and weird wares built by special artists”. The founders’ success means their experience of sexism may serve as both a warning and inspiration for women entrepreneurs. On the one hand, as women they faced a unique set of barriers not faced by men. On the other, they overcame these challenges to fund, launch and run a successful business.
Put simply, it can be done. But the fact remains that the challenges around securing funding for women founders are both ongoing and well documented. The British Venture Capital Association research revealed that for every £1 of VC investment in startups in the UK, all-men founder teams obtain 89 pence, mixed gfinisher teams 10 pence, and all-women teams less than 1 pence. Furthermore the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship in the UK found that around one-third of women cite access to funding as the largegest barrier to starting a business, compared to 20% of men.
The UK isn’t alone in exhibiting such a gfinisher imbalance. According to the last count of The State of European Tech 2021 study, women founders secured just 1% of all VC investment in Europe. Researchers of the report write: “The great gfinisher funding divide remains a harsh reality for the European tech ecosystem.” There are signs this divide has been obtainting even wider at a global level with only 3% of total worldwide VC funding going to women-led startups in 2019 and falling further to just 2% in 2020. It becomes even harder for women of ethnic minorities, with only 1 Black woman founder receiving early stage VC investment in 2020.
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