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Don’t even bother coming up to angel investor Jonathan Sposato if you don’t have a woman on your founding team. Sposato, according to CNN Money, will not support your company if your start up crew is all male.
“It’s just as easy to find a female co-founder as it is a male one,” Sposato, best known for selling start-ups Phatbits and Picnik to Google, told CNN Money.
For a female tech entrepreneur, standing out in a so-called “dude-heavy” industry isn’t easy. According to Inc., venture capitalist networks in tech are exclusively male and they are more inclined to pursue male entrepreneurs. And to put salt on the wound, raising money in Silicon Valley throws women into a dangerous lair of “blatant sexism and sexual harassment.”
According to Sposato, female entrepeneurs in Silicon Valley grumble about going to meetings with investors only to be asked to go on a date. On top of this, statistical figures on investments in female tech enterprises are bleak.
Between 2011 and 2013, just 2.7 percent of venture capital investments went to companies founded women, Inc. said, quoting The Diana Project.
Sposato believes it is up to male entrepreneurs to step up and open doors for women.
“Someone in the audience asked my views on how the investment community was faring these days,” he said at a Q&A session at the Seattle Angel Conference this week. “[But] this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s been bubbling up, gestating.”
“There is a marked difference in the traction companies get depending on the gender of its founders,” Sposato added.
According to Sposato, male venture capitalists have a habit of “pattern-matching,” which means investors have an affinity for choosing founders that look like the founders of other successful start-ups.
“I think sometimes it can be very hard for entrepreneurs to get funded if they don’t fit the canonical image of that sort of Silicon Valley or Seattle area tech guy,” he said, GeekWire reports.
He added that, in his experience, three young male entrepeneurs can request $1.4 million from an angel investor and the deal would likely be made in 60 days — “easy peasy,” he said. “When it is a couple of three women doing that, it takes longer…we need to examine why that is.”
“I am no longer going to invest unless you have at least one female founder,” Sposato declared at the Seattle Angel Conference. “I won’t say yes.” His goal is to incentivize more men to bring female founders on their team.
Sposato is the co-founder of GeekWire and heads photo-editing start-up PicMonkey.
