Why is now the right time to invest in female entrepreneurs?
Why is now the right time to work together to truly create a gender-equal start-up community?
Why is it so critial to take a "risk" now on the next generation of female entrepreneurs?
A little bit on me; I am the cofounder and head of design for Packback. We are the first company to offer on-demand One-Day eTextbook Rentals to college students for $5 or less per day, to help save students money and fix the broken textbook industry for both the students and the publishers. Concurrently with my work at Packback, I spent the previous year working on the operational side of venture capital at Lightbank and Listen Ventures in design, branding and user experience. Through my background, I have been able to witness (and live) the experience of raising capital from both sides; from the perspective of a start-up cofounder and from the perspective of the VC's who invest in them.
What I've learned is that the most important moment in a young start-up's launch is when you get that first person to believe in you; to take a risk on you.
When we started Packback, we were four college students, three boys and one girl, all non-technical, trying to take on a broken multi-billion dollar textbook industry that many ed-tech companies before us have attempted to fix. In our Junior year of college when we first started skipping class and driving up to Chicago to work at 1871 every Thursday and Friday to try to meet advisors and get support, we only had an idea, initial wireframes of the product and early indications of interest from publishers. When we began approaching our first mentors, who later turned into our first investors, we were a risk, to say the least.
I'd like to highlight one of the first groups to take a risk on Packback, one of our first investors, Jumpstart Capital. Jumpstart is headed by Shradha Agarwal and Rishi Shah, the founders of ContextMedia. Shradha is one of Chicago's most preeminent female founders; she and Rishi bootstrapped their company and now are one of the most profitable and quickly growing start-ups in our city. Shradha has become a mentor and role model for many of the current and aspiring female founders here in Chicago, including myself. She actively donates her time, opens her network, shares her experience and invests in female founders, and her efforts are changing the start-up gender landcape here in Chicago.
ContextMedia's origin story is very similar to Packback's; Shradha and Rishi founded their company as undergraduates at Northwestern University with an idea to use monitors in doctor's offices to provide targeted educational health resources at the time-of-need plus focused advertising. Most patients only get to spend a few minutes face-to-face with their doctors each year, and do little to obtain information they need about their conditions outside of their doctors' visits. Shradha and Rishi saw a problem in a massive industry, and fearlessly decided to take it on before they graduated college.
ContextMedia didn't always intend to bootstrap their company. Early on-nearly eight years ago now-they attempted to pitch their idea to local investors. However, between their age, the difficult industry they were attempting to disrupt and the then less-developed investment network in Chicago, they were unable to get any investor to take a risk on them. Thankfully, through incredible determination, and despite incredible challenges, they were able to start and sustain ContextMedia early on and get to the next stage of their growth.
Today, Chicago's investment and start-up community is thriving, and it is through the deliberate choices of people like Shradha and Rishi who are actively working to take that crucial risk on the next generation of entrepreneurs, regardless of age or gender. Changing the cultural landscape of an industry is not a passive process; people like Shradha are actively choosing to use their resources and experience to create a thriving, gender-equal start-up community here in Chicago. In the case of Jumpstart Ventures, they aren't waiting until they have IPO'd or exited to start re-investing in the next generation of Chicago entrepreneurs. That deliberate choice to take a risk on new, high-potential entrepreneurs has given many of Chicago's newest start-ups that "advocate" that is so critical to making it to the next stage of growth.
Through investors like Shradha and Rishi taking a risk on us, Packback has since been able to appear on Shark Tank, secure Mark Cuban as an investor, close out of $1.5M in seed funding, expand our digital catalog to include nearly 3,500 titles and grow our student user base to over 80,000. In starting a business- as in changing the culture of an industry- timing and location are critical. I look back at the early stages of building Packback and I am so thankful that we had access to Chicago and decided to build our business here. I don't know if we would be where we are today if we weren't building our business in this city, in this day and age, without the amazing mentors and supporters we've been able to meet here.
Currently in the broader start-up ecosystem there is a lot of talk about lack of female entrepreneurs, on both sides of the issue. Much of that conversation is about risk. There are fewer female entrepreneurs, and therefore, a smaller pool of data around the performance of female-founded companies. A smaller slice of venture funding is backing female-founded start-ups. There are still fewer investors willing to take a risk on female founders, despite many firms that are making an effort to change that statistic. These are all facts.
However, if we look at female-founded companies as an investment opportunity, and look for the leading indicators of the success of future female entrepreneurs, we need only look to Shradha, or to Nicole Yeary of Ms.Tech, or to Daniela Bolzmann of WeDeliver, or to any of the other dozens of female startup founders and executives here in Chicago. All of these women took an enormous risk charging headfirst fearlessly into the relatively uncharted waters of being a female tech start-up founder and are now reaping the incredible rewards.
In both the creation of start-ups and investment within start-ups, entrepreneurs seek out markets or opportunities with untapped potential. If something were an easy challenge to take on, someone would have already solved the problem. But what I know is that female entrepreneurs, and Chicago in general, represent a largely untapped opportunity that is on the brink of explosion…and I couldn't be more excited to be a part of it.
In starting a business or investing in one, we must seek out the emerging, untapped opportunities to realize the greatest reward.
And here in Chicago, that time is now.
--
By the way, if you’re a software engineer looking for an opportunity with a startup, we’re hiring at Packback. Check out our job listings or just email us directly: [email protected]
This entry was originally prepared as a speech for the Women in Venture Capital event hosted by Ms.Tech and Nicole Yeary, to kickoff the Chicago Ventures Venture Summit this week.
