women who start hard-tech companies, they
are in the minority: Last year, 30% of the VC
investments in retail and consumer compa-
nies went to startups with at least one female
founder, according to data from PitchBook
and All Raise. Among tech startups, that
share drops to 19%.
The retail/consumer space is a crowded
one, so embracing the idea of founder as
star and adopting a marketing message that
preaches feminist uplift has been one way for
women-led startups to cut through the noise.
But it also publicly ties female founders to
their companies’ failings, especially around
promises of creating better spaces for under-
represented customers and employees. “It’s a
very, very difficult territory to walk, to build a
unicorn-scale business based on feminism. To
be seen as inauthentic around that is danger-
ous,” says Catherine Connors, a serial entre-
preneur.
Several entrepreneurs told me that this sort
of founder-centric, by-women-for-women mar-
keting is often a mandate from the VCs who
invest in startups—forcing founders to choose
between pitching their startups as another girly
lifestyle business or not getting funding at all.
“We’re the pink portfolio,” Connors says. “The
assumption is that we’ll use femininity and
access to the female customer for the bottom
line—and to get to the $1 billion exit.”
Mauskopf says that while she and her fe-
male cofounder were raising money for their
software platform, one potential investor
asked why they “weren’t out there in the press
more” and asked if they could try “to build
a brand like TheSkimm”—a media company
with little in common with Winnie, aside
from its being founded by two women. “We
just need people to use Winnie,” Mauskopf
LearnVest, to Northwestern Mutual and who now runs her own
early stage venture capital firm, Inspired Capital. Naysayers dis-
pute the idea that, as Mauskopf put it, such falls from grace “hap-
pen only to women,” pointing to the high-profile exits of WeWork
cofounder Adam Neumann and Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick,
and the more recent departure of Nikola founder Trevor Milton.
Meanwhile, employees have complained this year in the press, on
social media, and in a couple of lawsuits about the leadership of
and workplace cultures created by the male founder-CEOs of com-
panies including Pinterest, Everlane, and Carta (all of whom have,
at least thus far, retained their jobs).
“Culture is top of mind for anybody interviewing now,” says Jen-
nifer Fitzgerald, the cofounder and CEO of Policygenius, whose in-
surance company has raised more than $162 million from private
investors. She argues that when workers criticize CEOs on social
media or in the press, it’s “less of a gender thing and more that
there’s just a shorter fuse and a bigger public platform, and a lower
tolerance for it among employees.”
T
HE REALITY OF THE SITUATION may—not
surprisingly—be a little more nuanced. In many of
these cases, it’s worth asking whether the female
founder in question helped set the very traps
she walked into. Outdoor Voices founder Tyler
Haney, for example, started her Instagram-friendly
activewear company in 2014 and within five years raised more
than $60 million. She seems to have been reading from the same
playbook as Gelman, sitting for multiple magazine covers, par-
ticipating in a long 2019 New Yorker profile that anointed her the
“brand’s best model,” and announcing her pregnancy that July on
Good Morning America with her own message of feminist empow-
erment: “As a young female founder and CEO, it’s so cool to show
that you don’t have to choose career or family.”
But in February, while still on maternity leave, Haney revealed
she was leaving the company. Soon after came the reports that under
her watch, Outdoor Voices had been burning through cash, delaying
store openings, and losing seasoned executives. Employees com-
plained, anonymously, to BuzzFeed News that having come to work
for a young female founder one called “so inspiring,” they instead
found Haney presiding over a dysfunctional culture of favoritism.
Haney, who returned to a diminished role at Outdoor Voices,
has acknowledged in an interview with Inc. that the brand “defi-
nitely pulled that [female founder] narrative out when it suited
us ... We really leaned into that story to grow this thing, and we
became press darlings. But that’s all great until it’s not, because we
also made ourselves targets.”
Like Haney and Gelman, many of the female entrepreneurs
who have resigned or come under criticism recently founded
consumer-oriented brands and became the very public faces of
their companies in a way that’s more common if you’re selling
leggings than, say, cloud-based enterprise software. These busi-
nesses often “get more press, because they’re more relatable to the
general reader,” says Theresia Gouw, founding partner of Acrew
Capital. “That can cut both ways.” And while there are certainly
30
SHARE OF VC INVESTMENT IN RETAIL
AND CONSUMER STARTUPS
WITH A FEMALE FOUNDER
For tech companies, that percentage drops to 19 %.
INVESTOR’S GUIDE • FEMALE FOUNDERS
%
