Why are Women Funded Less than Men? a crowdsourced conversation

I spent 5 years in London trying to raise funding for my online matchmaking business & in the end had to admit failure.  Very early on in that journey I had committed to help women source venture when I was successful.  As it turned out I have been doing just that for the last almost year, not because I was successful but because I failed.  I have been video interviewing venture capitalists, angel investors & women founders on the shortfall in funding for women.  My goal has been to listen to as many people as I could from both sides of the table, so I could hopefully determine where all these conversations intersected.

Read more

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

Read more

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

Read more