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Connecting Female Founders with Female Investors Through Fun
Next event in San Francisco during JPM
Who we are
Women are now controlling the majority of this worlds wealth and we are NOT a minority! Yet we are treated like that while we control 80% of the consumer spending and VC's invest only 3% of their capital in female entrepreneurs.
FE is a not for profit founded by Gitte Pedersen and Mette Dyhrberg, both Danish US based entrepreneurs and Iya Khalil, founder of GNS Healthcare.
We want to make the American Dream Real Again by enabling women to participate in value creation through entrepreneurship.
Equality and equal opportunity is in our DNA.
Mission: Provide Female Founders equal opportunity to funding by
- Uncover the unconscious bias that we encounter as female founders when we present for investors and effectively respond to this bias
- Enable female founders access to funding by creating, expanding and leveraging existing network of female angel investors
- To facilitate change by creating and backing more female run enterprises “There is no glass ceiling in a house you build yourselves”
Gitte Pedersen
Opinioned scientist with a mission to cure cancer
Gitte Pedersen is a scientist/CEO with a mission to cure cancer. Gitte started Genomic Expression together with her brother, Morten Pedersen, after her parents were diagnosed with cancer. The company got off the ground as the diagnostic partner of a $32M “Genome Denmark” project, and she then raised money to establish an independent lab in Boston. Gitte’s dream team to cure cancer has tons of start-up DNA from genomics to commercial launch of drugs. The unpleasant truth is that only one out of four cancer treatments prolongs life. To help rectify this, Genomic Expression finds the best drug for the patient and the best patient for the drug by sequencing RNA, which is like the software of the cell, instead of DNA, which is like the hard disk. RNA analysis can show if a tumor will respond to new immune therapies, which are the only kind of therapy that offer a potential cure. Gitte has a master in Chemical Engineering and worked for Novo Nordisk in a number of positions from R&D to Marketing before she founded Proximity Ventures, an advisory firm that assisted biotech companies in Scandinavia enter the US market was well as the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on attracting investments into the Danish Biotech industry.
Mette Dyrberg
Hacking chronic disease with data
Mette Dyhrberg is a health innovator who is changing the way we treat chronic disease and rethinking the delivery healthcare. She is the CEO and founder of Mymee, a digital therapeutics program that reverses the symptoms of chronic autoimmune disease through data analytics and health coaching. Her coaching methods restore quality of life to people who struggled with less than effective treatment plans by the modern medical system. As an authority on autoimmune issues, Mette is a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences such as Stanford Medicine X and Exponential Medicine. Mette holds MS in economics and is a certified health coach. An economist turned diagnostician, she’s the Sherlock Holmes of anamnestic data. She first entered the functional medicine arena in an attempt to tackle her own chronic health issues. In her early twenties, she became severely ill. For years, Mette battled an ever-expanding array of medical diagnoses ending up with six different autoimmune diseases simultaneously. Mette took matters into her own hands, hacked her own health and in doing so, she created a tool that solved her health problems and soon began helping others do the same.
Inspiration
Female Equity is a not-for-profit with the mission of providing female founders equal access to funding. The way we are doing this is by creating a network of female investors and founders that support each other. The kick off is a weekend retreat in the Hamptons where we will develop the first plan of action/manifesto while we also do fun activities such as paddle boarding. The goal is to create lasting relationships and this is a by invitation only event. This is a by-invitation-only event.
Why Female Equity
Equity means justice, equality, truth and integrity
FE = FEmale without MALE, FE symbolizes iron in the periodic table, and FE means “faith” in Spanish and “fairy” in Danish. Gitte and Mette grew up in Denmark, which strives for both financial and gender equality and supports this aim with a phenomenal framework that provides measures such as paid parental leave for both parents and free education and healthcare. In other words EQUALITY is in our DNA. We managed to take our companies to where we are now by ignoring the inequality. However, with the latest political developments and recent reports suggesting that women do not receive the same level of funding as men, that’s clearly a problem we need to correct. Female Equity aims to do just that by creating a strong network of women who will support each other.
There is a special place in hell for women that don't help each other
Madeleine Albright, 1st female US secretary of state
Madeleine Albright is an American politician and diplomat. She is the first woman to have become the US Secretary of State. She served from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Because she was an immigrant, she was not eligible to be a U.S. presidential successor, and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. Albright supported Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign. While introducing Clinton at a campaign event in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary, Albright said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Invest in other women
Pipeline Angels by Natalia Oberti Noguera
Natalia Oberti Noguera is an amazing women who single handedly took upon her to change the fact that most women do not angel invest. Her thesis was that if she could teach women to invest in other women then we could change the landscape. Pipeline Angels now has 50 portfolio companies and 400 female angel investors. That is powerful. There are now several networks and incubators as well as VC funds that focus on female entrepreneurs and its our goal to establish and build out those network.
Coaching other female entrepreneurs
Springboard by Kay Koplovitz
Springboard has been around for more than a decade and have supported many women in STEM through coaching to effectively present for VC’s with astonishing results. Female VC’s are now hosting open office hours for female founders in New York, San Francisco and Boston. New angel groups focused on women run business are emerging. The train have left the station. Kay Koplovitz founded the USA Network, Chairman & CEO from 1977 until 1998 when it sold for $4.5 billion. Kay is the first woman ever to head a television network as the founder and former CEO of USA Networks. In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed Koplovitz to chair the bipartisan National Women's Business Council. This helped create a platform for her to Co-Found Springboard Enterprises in 2000.
Work and Play is the same
Bill Tai - ACTAI - Female Equity Ambassador
Bill Tai is the founder of the XTC competition which identifies new ground breaking technology companies and invites the winners to visit Necker and present for Richard Branson. The network of investors and entrepreneurs is called ACTAI and meets all over the globe to kitesurf and start new companies. Bill invested in CANVA, pitched by Melanie Perkins, and it’s now a multi-billion-dollar business. Some men do recognize talent and are willing to bet their money on it regardless of location and gender. We need more men like Bill, but we also need more women who are willing to invest their hard-earned dollar in other women—as angel investors.
Why
"There is no glass ceiling in a house you build yourselves”
51%
Of the Worlds Population is Female
60%
Of all Wealth is the USA is owned by Women
2%
Of VC $ goes to Female Founders up 0.3% in 20 years
5%
Female CEO's of Fortune 500 companies
11%
Of all funding to female founded companies
15%
Of all board seats are occupied by women
20 Years
The typical lifespan of a corporation
80 cents
Earned of every dollar men earn
The $4.4 Trillion Dollar Blind Spot
Investors are missing opportunities, society growth and people jobs
According to Morgan Stanley
- What we do
Pull the wool off your eyes and connect the dots
Whether you’re a man or a woman, we tend to judge women by a different scale and that can, in certain situations, be detrimental to their success. Our goal is to uncover the unconscious bias female entrepreneurs have to navigate in order to raise their funding and develop the next generation of successful companies.
We aim to create strong personal networks that we can leverage to enable introductions to female-friendly capital sources and other networks that support female entrepreneurs, such as Pipeline Angels and Springboard. By sharing our stories in a safe environment, we aim to develop tools and strategies as well as new organizations and networks that can support our mission, and while we do all this we will have fun and enjoy getting to know more amazing women.
The pitch is the same - the questions are not
We’ve all experienced it. We present at a pitch event and then we get the Q&A session, and after that—we wonder what happened. Well, I’m not the only one asking myself these questions, and Dana Kanze has done an amazing job at QUANTIFYING the detrimental effects of the unconscious bias against female entrepreneurs Male lead teams get asked promotion questions; female lead teams get asked prevention questions.
Male lead teams get's asked promotion questions female lead teams get asked prevention questions
In the News
It is impossible to understand whether your experience is unique unless you share it with your peers. The #MeToo movement has shed light on a lot of inappropriate behavior by certain males who hold a position of power over women’s lives. I shared some of my experiences—as published in this article in STAT, during the 2018 J.P. Morgan Conference in San Francisco—the largest investor conference in healthcare. The response was troublesome. While I must stress that this concerns a minority of “bad apples,” a significant number of female entrepreneurs experience unwanted advances or comments related to their gender. Obviously this needs to stop. Share your stories.
Sharing our #MeToo stories
Gitte Pedersen and Iya Khalil was interviewed in STAT "JPMing while female: Women share their experiences at biopharma’s big gathering" click on picture to read their story
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© 2018