"It's so Cute You're Doing a Startup!"
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Is it hard being a woman entrepreneur? Is it hard getting funding? Is your venture really a ‘business’ or is it ‘just’ a lifestyle business? Given the stories finally coming out from the VC and tech worlds on what women have had to put up with, we know the answers to these questions. So, when asked to moderate a panel of women entrepreneurs, I thought it was time to change the conversation.
The panel ranged from age 27 to 55, manufacturing to services, for and not-for-profit, and diverse backgrounds. The discussion was lively, as one would expect from us women, with 3 main insights (yes, they’re based on a small self-selecting sample and are generalizations, but…):
1. Women are agile entrepreneurs.
Putting issues of funding & access aside, do women approach entrepreneurship differently than men? Yes! We are more willing to ask questions, which accelerates learning, which accelerates experimentation, testing, prototyping, which gets to answers faster, which results in faster adjustments and pivots based on customer needs. Our egos are tied to the business’s success, not to being ‘right’, so we let go of assumptions when the data shows otherwise. And, we marveled at how we get so much more ‘free advice’ (from men) then do our male peers.
2. Balance is a variety of excesses.
A member of the audience shared this insight – what a great summation! We had a wide range in views on this topic. Sarah Carson feels, “Striving for balance is striving for mediocrity.” Both she and Sadie Kurzban try to do a handful of things very well, forget the rest and manage the guilt (does that ring true!). Vibha Pinglé encourages integrating work and life to reduce the frequency of choosing. On one occasion she had to take her young son with her to a meeting in South Africa and found him in a tree with the village children showing them his video game. Not many kids get that kind of experience! Morra Aarons-Mele feels that the definition of balance is up to us, not to society. It’s our decision on how/when/why to scale our business and how to support and raise our family.
3. It’s not the degree; it’s learning to learn.
The world tells us the degree matters. None of us have an MBA and yes, amazingly, we are all successful! Our undergraduate degrees ranged from STEM to STEAM and while many of us didn’t or hadn’t directly used our area of concentration a lot since college, the process of architecting our own education and learning how to ask great questions, which was key to our undergraduate success, led to our success after college.
Morra closed out the Q&A with a great piece of advice ~ live with a spirit of abundance. We women, in general, tend to worry about not having enough – time, money, energy, etc. But hey, it’s not about re-slicing an existing pie – it’s about making new and bigger pies and being proud of it!
Many thanks to the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and the Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship for sponsoring this panel and a personal special thank you to Danny Warshay for such an incredible introduction!
