Entrepreneurs and Investors

For a second year in a row, only 2.2% of investor funding went to women-led startups. #NotAcceptable. Despite all of the media coverage and all of the commitments by investors to diversify their portfolios, many continue to miss or ignore opportunities to invest in the next billion dollar startups that happen to be led by women.

hedge funds owned or managed by women have an 8.95% return rate, handily beating the 2.69% return rate generated by an index of typical funds. Also, Google’s attrition rate decreased by 50% after it extended its paid maternity leave for women to five months

Five years ago, I started a conference with my co-founder, Nancy Hechinger, called the Womens Entrepreneur Festival at the ITP division of New York University. We celebrate and showcase women entrepreneurs. Women network differently. They run their companies differently and they think differently than men.

“Business school is general,” says Anna Urman, director of the Small Business Development Center at the Community Business Partnership, a resource center for entrepreneurs in Springfield, Va. “Often people go to understand how to manage a large enterprise, which is an entirely different undertaking than starting a micro-business from the ground-up.”