Meet the Women Behind A New Venture Capital Fund for Female Startup Founders
Forbes
By Katerina Ang @katerinareports
Experiential ‘venture community’ the Helm is supported by AirBnB’s Joe Gebbia; aims to fight sexism in the age of Harvey Weinstein while delivering returns
These women have taken the Helm.
Lindsey Taylor Wood has spent around a decade working with nonprofits, particularly in the women’s rights space, but wasn’t satisfied with the returns she was seeing. “I wanted to understand why philanthropy is, by and large, the only way we invest in gender equality,” says Wood. “It’s crucial but can’t be the only way.”
Now, Wood thinks she has a solution. She recently launched the Helm, a female-led “venture community” that she, uh, helms as chief executive. The Helm functions partly as a traditional venture capital fund: for a minimum of $50,000, investors get to buy into startups exclusively founded and led by women. It will also create programming that may include events about female entrepreneurship and meetings with thought leaders in the gender equality movement.Among the fund’s early backers is Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of AirBnB.
The Helm is entering a space that has traditionally been testosterone fueled. According to a 2014 Babson College report, only 6% of partners at VC firms are women. That inequality breeds other problems. First, it means the startups which are funded tend to be designed by men for a predominantly male audience. Second, it limits the opportunities women have to grow their wealth. “When men have money, they get asked to invest,” says Wood. “Women get asked to join the board of a non-profit or to write a check” for charity.
That discrepancy also makes an uneasy situation even more uncomfortable for the few women working in tech. According to Crunchbase, only 15.8% of startups globally have at least one woman founder; a number that can only look worse when you realize that women of color are backed at even lower rates. Industry observers note the presence of highly unequal power dynamics that occur when a rare female startup founder goes hat-in-hand to a VC who’s often a white or Asian male.
These echo the circumstances young actresses found themselves in when they wereallegedly prepositioned by disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Sexual harassment scandals have claimed the scalps of prominent VCs like 500 Startups chief exec Dave McClure, who famously apologized for being a “creep.”
“It’s really important to keep the focus on tangible solutions to the imbalances that allow these behaviors to continue,” says Erin Shipley, a co-founder and managing partner at the Helm who previously worked at the Weinstein Company. While she’s witnessed what she calls “toxic culture,” Shipley says that she’s never been sexually harassed. “It’s impossible not to be aware of the reality that underpins the statistics and we hope the Helm contributes” to improvement.