For over a year I have been video interviewing venture capitalists, angel investors and women founders trying to investigate the apparent shortfall in funding for women led technology startups. My goal has been to listen to as many people as I could from both sides of the table, in order to get a diversity of opinions on this controversial subject. Whilst I have been doing these interviews, many people have said to me that no problem exists and that women can be as easily funded as men if they have a great idea, team, plan and advisors. However the statistics show another story. The percentages of women in technology, female entrepreneurs and female venture capitalists are extremely low compared to men. But the reasons are multifold and complex and cannot be resolved quickly or easily. With this post I hope to shed some light on the intricacies of this issue. Everyone that I interviewed was inspiring and added a different voice and view to the puzzle.
Atlas Venture
Herve Lebret: Difference in European and US Venture Capitalists
Video interview with Hervé Lebret. Hervé manages the Innogrants @ EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), a program supporting startup creation. The program includes grants to entrepreneurs and conferences where role models share their entrepreneurial experience with students and researchers. From 1997 to 2004, he was with Index Ventures, the pan-European venture capital firm which invested in Skype, mysql, Virata, Addex, Genmab. He began his career in academia in electrical engineering and applied mathematics at ENSTA and ONERA (Paris). He is also the author of the book “Start-Up, what we may still learn from Silicon Valley” . Hervé Lebret is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Université de Rennes. You can find Herve @ his blog & on Twitter @hlebret
Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures: Advice to European Entrepreneurs
Video interview with Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures. Fred joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies AdSafe, Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, and Zoopla. He also served on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). You can find Fred @ his blog Fred Destin and Twitter