 Why female founders outperform - yet are dramatically underfunded, and is it possible the solution is a behavioral change? by Na'ama Moran and Sephi Shapira Na’ama Moran is a Founder with 3 exits, scaled to $150M Rev, and raised $130M. As the Co-Founder of Waya – the operating system for mission-driven founders – she helps Founders scale. Sephi Shapira's The Fundable Founder is a blunt field guide for startup CEOs who want to raise capital on their terms. Every week you’ll get founder-first tactics on mindset, method, and investor dynamics, drawn from decades of hard lessons in the fundraising trenches. No theory. Just sharp insight to make you fundable. Read the entire post here. --- The URL for this post. This is the second article in a series on female founders and the funding gap, born out of a conversation I had with my friend Sephi Shapira - a successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and fundraising advisor who, over the past decade, has worked with female founders who have collectively raised north of $800 million. Sephi is also the father of two young girls and cares deeply about empowering women. We started this series because the numbers are absurd: women make up 15% of tech founders globally, yet all-female founding teams receive only about 2% of venture capital funding - and that’s been the average for 30 years. If you have a male co-founder, your chances of getting funded go up by a staggering 1,054% (from an average of 2.4% to 27.7%). These numbers become even more confounding when you learn that businesses founded by women ultimately deliver more than twice as much per dollar invested. The gap between how women perform and how they get funded is one of the most persistent anomalies in the entire venture ecosystem, and unfortunately an area where little to no progress has been made.  In the first article, Sephi and I talked about agreeableness - the behavioral pattern that makes women better operators and worse fundraisers. This time, we are going to talk about something different: vision. And, more importantly, how to build it. Because unlike the funding statistics, this is a gap a founder can close herself. Sephi warned me at the start of our conversation that he might say uncomfortable, even controversial things. He was right.
What follows is a summary of our conversation about the vision gap. I split them into discrete topics and provide guidance on what you can do about it. Men are better at imagining an unrealistic self and that’s what investors are looking for A few days ago I listened to Scott Galloway on The Diary of a CEO. I love to listen to Scott’s talking; he has a grounded, thoughtful, and data-driven way of explaining what he sees in the world. While talking about Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO and the colossal vision behind it, Scott said - with the kind of candor that makes you wince and then, when you think about it, slowly nod: “But quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self and women are more measured. And I think that’s one of the things that has held back women as entrepreneurs - and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them.” He then paired it with an observation by the late legendary investor - and Warren Buffett’s partner - Charlie Munger: when you meet someone with a crazy vision of their own potential - someone who seems slightly delusional, maybe even obnoxious about it - Munger’s rule was never bet against that person. Because occasionally they’re right. What Galloway and Munger are essentially saying is that vision at the fundraising stage is the ability to inhabit a future state so completely - and so convincingly - that the people across the table start to believe in it not because you’ve proven it, but because you seem incapable of imagining a world where it isn’t true. When you believe in your crazy vision so deeply, you step into a parallel timeline, and your very ability to access it so thoroughly is what empowers you to communicate your vision with conviction. That, and you’re not suffering from impostor syndrome. More on that later. Read the rest of this post here.
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