As a female entrepreneur how do you pitch a room full of male VCs effectively?
I have heard this question often and again from aspiring female entrepreneurs. Now if you think this question is irrelevant because you are personally not prejudiced and treat all entrepreneurs the same, you are either kidding yourself or in a very small minority. When a woman pitches a roomful of VCs, it tends to be an almost exclusively male partnership. They wonder if she can hire good men, whether/when she will have a baby and if she is going to be able to be as aggressive as required to survive and succeed. They might address questions on finance and technology to her co-founders and employees rather than to her. If the team has a product/service idea largely catering to women, they might ask their secretaries and wives for product feedback rather than taking a look themselves.
These are some significant hurdles to overcome and tend to intimidate many young women. So how do you get funded? Apart from having a good idea and team to begin with, here are five things you should do as a female founder to pitch successfully:
- Be authentic to your idea in every way – You should be a reflection of your product and your business. The way you dress, the way you speak and the way you behave should all reflectyour startup’s culture. Don’t do anything that distracts or takes away from that core focus –your business. So what does that mean? Dress like your customers if you are running a fashion portal, don’t dress like a man or over accessorize to the point people need to shield their eyes while addressing you.
- Demonstrate leadership – If you are the CEO, answer important questions whether they are addressed at you or not. Know your facts, know your numbers and know your technology. Don’t pitch VCs alone. Take male colleagues/employees alongwith you and ask them to defer to you on key questions. This allows you to establish your leadership and demonstrate an ability to hire good people who are happy to follow you
- Don’t undersell your self-worth – Most female entrepreneurs and professionals undervalue themselves as compared to their male peers. We have a tendency to need to prove ourselves before asking for a better offer. Know this about yourself and remember that you owe it to your team to get that awesome deal done at a great valuation
- Check your body language – Women tend to occupy the least space possible in a room. Centuries of manners and breeding encourage us to be delicate and reign ourselves in. Don’t make yourself small in a board meeting. Stretch out and use all the space you have. Don’t hunch, don’t giggle, don’t speak in a very high pitch – these have a significant negative impact on how people perceive your confidence and maturity
- Find analogies for common ground – If you have a product that targets women, help male VCs understand how to analyze it. Learn some sport /automobile metaphors. Offer some analogies that will help them position and place this in their own mental map. If you want to plant a flag in foreign lands, betterlearn the native language!
Now these ideas are just good tactics, not strategy. What we should all be doing – both women and men – is to be mentoring talented young women and aspiring entrepreneurs. Seek them out and coach them. Power and influence comes from what you can do for others not what they can do for you.We can learn more, stay young and grow our own influence by helping others succeed. So which young lady are you mentoring this month?
About the author:
Sandhya is an engineer at heart and investor by accident. She is currently a Partner at the Khosla Impact Fund. The sum of her life experiences – deep rural roots in Honnavar (India), designing supercomputing chips and robots at IIT Bombay, driving projects for public health, rural banking and telecom for McKinsey & Co, building iOS apps and product managing at HealthTap, being inspired to demand
more from the world at Stanford GSB and working with leading global venture capitalists at Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures – have left her with a very active imagination for what the future could be. Above all, she loves to help entrepreneurs working on hard-to-solve problems and can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets often and proudly from the handle @sandhya