Written by Lisa Frusztajer, Investor in Residence at The Capital Network

At TCN, we recently looked back at all that our most recent Female Founders Fellowship (FFF) cohort has accomplished over the past few months. And what an impressive list it is: finding CTOs, ramping up production, getting funding, combatting imposter syndrome – all while some juggled home-schooling during a pandemic!

It wasn’t until the group got together that they had a chance to take a step back to celebrate all they’d gotten done.

Starting a company as a female founder remains an uphill battle. We know the statistics on the negligible capital going to female founders, with even less to female founders of color. Over six months, TCN’s Female Founders Fellowship gives a dozen female founders the opportunity to defy those odds, linking them to resources – investors, mentors, business-building skills – and, more importantly, creating a peer group where fellows share expertise to drive their businesses and celebrate wins, like:

• An entrepreneur previously stymied by the prospect of pitching to investors who now says “I feel confident I can pitch. I can talk to anyone about my company”;
• A retail startup completing its first week of sales in a major national chain, whose long list of creative merchandising ideas that came in large part from brainstorming with other fellows;
• A founder who, by interacting with fellows outside of her industry, learned that she needed to entirely change how she was communicating to talk in laymen’s terms — and in doing so realized how much she knows.

The ideas and energy were flying. And so was fellows’ confidence in their next steps, from leadership coaching, to defining goals for the next round of fundraising, to launching the beta version of a marketplace platform.

Collectively the group has already raised $5.1 million in the months they were in the fellowship – all during a global pandemic. Impressive, indeed.

Fixing a Broken Early Stage Funding System

The TCN Female Founders Fellowship’s success is measured in much more than money raised. A centerpiece of TCN’s mission is to open entrepreneur education to all, not just companies deemed ‘fundable’ according to the prevailing startup paradigm. For some accelerators and fellowships, that approach might create tension between choosing cohort members and achieving future metrics of success.

As this most recent cohort shows, we can do both: provide access to startup resources to all, and get impressive funding.

TCN’s democratization of access to resources for female founders — and for all under-represented founders — paves a path for repairing our broken early-stage funding ecosystem. Diverse businesses, backgrounds and experiences that fellows bring to the cohort make the FFF experience valuable, with peers sharing divergent points of view to gain collective expertise and confidence.

The Power of Peer Support

Peer support is critical in any undertaking. It’s hard to imagine a place where it matters more than for female startup leaders who travel an exceptionally lonely journey. The FFF cohort gives those leaders a place where they can let their guard down and tap into the power of the group.

Female Founders Fellowship participants’ comments say it best: