Good afternoon and welcome to the Women and Equalities Committee. This session is the second of the Committee’s inquiry into female entrepreneurship. It will be a fantastic opportunity to explore the experiences of entrepreneurship with the four female founders who are part of our panel today. We are very grateful to have you all. The aim of the session is to understand the experiences of female founders in starting, growing and sustaining their businesses, including raising capital and accessing support. Welcome to you all. Could you all introduce yourselves and describe the businesses that you have created? I will start with you, Dr Roni Savage.

I am CEO and founder of Jomas Associates. We are an engineering and environmental consultancy serving the construction industry. I started the business in December 2009, just over 15 years ago, having worked in industry for over a decade.

Hello, everyone. I am the founder of Foundervine, which is a business focused on helping small businesses grow. We work across the UK, running programmes and initiatives that help entrepreneurs at all stages of their growth get access to the training, networks and support they need to build sustainable businesses.

Hello, everybody. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called GoHenry, a money app that helps children learn to earn, save, spend and invest. It was founded 13 years ago. If I fast forward to today, we have helped 2.2 million kids in the UK, and hopefully a few outside of GoHenry, to be smarter with money.

I am the co-founder and CEO of Burnmark. We launched in 2016 and are a fintech company that provides research into financial institutions, challenger banks, private equity and investment houses. We work closely with all players in the ecosystem.

We have a real diversity of businesses and experiences here, which is fantastic. I am going to hand over to Catherine first.

It is great to meet you all; you have fantastic CVs. Can I start with Devie, please? What has been your experience of accessing, or trying to access, investment for your business?

In one sentence, it has not been great. If I were to explain the process of what we have tried with Burnmark: in the fintech world, typically, we start off with accelerator programmes. This may or may not come from an incubator ecosystem, which I have not been part of. We have been through a few accelerator programmes run by large names and corporates. I can speak in more detail about the experience, but to give you an overall idea, as a next step, we then tried to obtain more seed and angel funding, which was available. London has a fantastic fintech hub in terms of opportunities. We also tried to lead on to the venture capital system. In terms of the experience itself, it is vastly easier in the early stages of fundraising. It very much depends on the location, but London is great for fintech. We have a huge number of accelerator programmes available. However, the challenges we have faced going through the early-stage accelerators and the seed funding initiatives is that we sometimes end up being diversity metrics rather than seen as serious start-ups that deserve funding when looking at neutral metrics. I have seen several programmes that are extremely happy to have us, due to the nature of the business being in fintech and as a female founder but unfortunately the results have not been great in terms of us obtaining funding through any of these programmes.

Does anyone else want to add to any of that?

I would love to add to that. I would second some of what Devie has said. We have been successful and have raised over $125 million of funding prior to merging with an American fintech two years ago. We found reasonable access to pre-seed and seed funding and then crowdfunding, which was very successful for us, but we started to run into problems at what I will call a late-stage series A round, where we were looking for $40 million of investment. We pitched to 103—I remember the number distinctly—UK and European-based funds but did not find one that was prepared to lead. That was despite, in my opinion, compelling financials and evidence of traction. We went to the US, and four months later we had our lead and were able to get followers in the UK and, interestingly, a French female-founded fund—a lot of f’s in that sentence—who joined as the second follower in that round.

What do you think was the difference in the US? Why did they get it, but the UK did not?

Both from GoHenry’s experience and that of a lot of late-stage founders who I now know in my network, the appetite for risk and the opportunity that people see is very different in the US. That is something that has been cited and recorded in a lot of places, but there is no doubt that being female-led played into that as well.

To what extent is a lack of diversity among investors and investment panels a barrier to female entrepreneurs getting more investment, and why do you think that is the case?

Research shows over and over again that men invest more in men and women invest more in women. That is saying it very simply. There are lots of factors at play. I do not think that gender alone is what correlates there. The challenge we tend to see in the women-led businesses that raise funding and come through our programmes is that sometimes the sectors that women build in are seen as quite niche or not exciting or scalable enough. We are talking about wellness, femtech, beauty, climate. If they are not seen as exciting enough, or the investor does not have enough interest in that area, they will be less likely to invest.

It is so ironic, is it not? We are 51% of the population, so how can beauty or menopause products or health tech for women be niche? It is certainly not niche.

It is not niche at all. There has been amazing progress in these sectors, but we tend to see that where you have women-led investor firms or panels, they are four and a half times more likely to invest in other women. The data shows that consistently. When it comes to the warm introductions, for example, that founders often need to get into these firms, you are 13 times more likely to raise funding if you get a warm introduction into a fund. Men tend to do that more than women. There are lots of different stats like that, and so we find that we need more women who understand these sectors to sit on these panels to be able to find these kinds of businesses exciting. We also need more women to have that pipeline into funds from the very beginning, so starting right from the education system, I would say, in terms of seeing venture capital as a suitable career.

Do any of you think—Dr Savage, you might like to respond to this one—that there is merit in mandating a gender balance on investor panels or committees, or at least those that are supported by the British Business Bank? Do you think that might work?

Absolutely. It is important that we have gender-balanced decision makers, but I am also mindful that there is a potential lack of gender balance in the pipeline, so how do we make that work? An example that I must cite is one that was shared with me by another female entrepreneur who had applied for funding and was told that she would not be granted it because she was of childbearing age. But that was a panel of men, so their assumption was that because she is a woman and she is of a certain age, the longevity just was not there for her as a business owner and a founder. Certainly, when you have women around the room who have gone through a similar journey, they will have a different view. That is the important thing to understand. Unless we have people in the room who understand females and women as entrepreneurs, we will continue to have the same results. It is absolutely imperative that we have women around the decision-making table, otherwise we are just not going to move the dial forward.

My final question on the diversity of the actual investors is, to what extent do intersectional characteristics—ethnicity, age, disability and so on—make it more difficult to get funding? Izzy might be a good person to answer that.

Just before I do, I will come in on that last point; my take is a bit different. I do not think it should be mandated that women sit on these panels. Every fund is complex in what it is investing in, what it does, the thesis and the investment areas it has, and each has different needs. So to mandate something that does not take into account those complexities could be clunky and invite criticism. Instead, we need to focus on building that pipeline, because if you are forming an investment committee, you are looking to do that from your existing network. If there is a mandate, you might try to find the women who fit the bill, and then it concentrates the roles on a select number of women who are already there. If work is done to improve that pipeline, and if British Business Bank-funded funds can be the standard bearer for that approach, with open calls for IC members that have application processes and clear selection criteria, then we will find more women applying for these roles.

I do not want to put words into anyone’s mouth, and I am not an entrepreneur, but it feels to me like there is no particular solution. I imagine that you need a mixture of everything—more women-led panels, more pipeline and lots of other things. Do we have time for Louise to answer?

Just a very quick one. I think the British Business Bank and the Government could be the standard bearers for this. With those organisations, we could perhaps mandate a quota on the investment committees and the panels that review the start-ups and people applying for funds. I agree with Izzy; I do not think it is right to mandate that across the whole of the industry because there are such specialisms there. But certainly the British Business Bank could be a standard bearer.

Funnily enough, we had a roundtable in Birmingham last week where we talked about mandating targets. In terms of the British Business Bank, because so much of its funding percentage has gone towards male-led businesses, we could say, “Right, we now need a target for women-led businesses.” The women entrepreneurs in Birmingham seemed to agree with that. I do not know if anyone on the panel also agrees. Yes, all are nodding their heads.

Thank you very much, Catherine. I want to go back a little. Devie, Louise explained that crowdfunding was successful. I wondered what was successful for you, because you said it was very difficult to get investment. What worked for you?

Interestingly, social media-based platforms work better for women. I want to quickly raise this point because it is very important: the way early-stage funding works today is through angel groups that are known to each other. There are very close-knit groups in London and other places, mostly from a school, university or club. It is very heavily club-based at this point, and it is very difficult to penetrate this group of people who have known each other for years. This is one of the reasons why online fundraising and platforms that help with fundraising work. If we look at the US angel list, for example, and we have seeders here in the UK, there are a lot of platforms where everyone is neutral. There is more scale in terms of having men and women play an equally important role, which does not work well in the online networking and fundraising world. If you look at the numbers: 12% of start-ups in the UK are run by women but 0.1% of PE investment and 0.5% of VC investment goes into them. It tapers off as we get into the late stages because they are heavily dependent on networking.

We have heard that women business owners find it more difficult to get investment and when they do it is less than men. We have heard all those statistics, but it is different for different groups of women as well. We need to highlight the intersectionality here. Only 10 black women in the entire history of raising funds have ever raised more than £1 million in the UK. What can we do to tackle the lack of support for intersectional characteristics to be addressed and recognised for their talents? I am going to ask you Dr Roni, because you are writing away furiously now.

That is a shocking number; I did not realise it was only 10. That speaks for itself. How do we change it? The first step is to find out why only 10 women have achieved that number. Personally, I am keen to understand that. I speak from my lived experience of somebody who has run her own business for 15 years and has recently bought a business, but also approached a bank for funds for another business—I have heard all the excuses possible. I feel that it is a lack of understanding of female entrepreneurs. Also, when you combine intersectionality, you are quite often sat in front of somebody with whom what you are saying does not resonate. They do not understand who you are as a business owner. Naturally, their automatic, knee-jerk reaction is rejection, irrespective of what we say. People sometimes make decisions based on that knee-jerk reaction rather than on the paperwork that is in front of them. How do you change that? It goes back to the point we made about who is around the decision-making table. Certainly, I understand the point about not putting a mandate out there, because there is no pipeline. How do we build that pipeline to ensure that people who are around that decision-making table represent those who apply for funding? Until we get that right, we will never have the balance that we are looking for, irrespective of what we do.

Does anyone else have anything to add on this particular point? If not, I will move on to angel investment.

Just very quickly, the stats are shocking. I remember them coming out in 2019 and all of us thinking, “Let’s pour as much work as we can into building the programmes and the initiatives to change that.” The stats have actually got worse in the last few years. We find there are challenges on the founder side in terms of awareness of the options available to them, and proximity to wealth in order to invest, and the importance of having both female-led and mixed networks that give founders the opportunity to meet people who they may not have had the social capital to know in the first place. How do we build that? On the investor front, there is a pattern recognition that takes place. You have seen founders from a particular background build and be successful, so naturally your brain tells you that is what leads to success. If you have someone who visibly does not fit that match, your brain does a lot of work to try to convince you otherwise. What can we do to address biases in investment processes? How can we support reversing some of that pattern matching and make female black and Asian-led businesses more visible, and buck some of the thinking that there is simply not enough evidence to show that these types of business owners are successful?

Louise, is this a reason why crowdfunding was more successful for you at the beginning? Did you ever explore the reasons why it was more successful than other routes of funding?

To be honest, when crowdfunding was suggested to me, I assumed we would give it a try but that we would need to go to VC funds as well. Then it was wildly successful; we raised £4 million the first time and £6.2 million the second time. Speaking to what both Dr Roni and Izzy have said, a lot of the people investing were ordinary members of the public; they did not have a preconceived idea of what a successful founder looks like. I also think we were helped a little by the fact there is an emotional pull in the business that I run; it is teaching kids to be smart with money. People can understand that very quickly and simply. I think that is really why. It was interesting to me that, when we moved on to seeking larger rounds of funding, it was very much more difficult.

Starting with awareness of the options available, in our network at Foundervine we have had around 20,000 founders come through our programmes in the last few years. A lot of them come from places where they literally have no awareness of the options available to them, and so a lot end up self-funding or bootstrapping for a long time. The stats show us that women tend to ask for less and raise less at a much later stage of their business’s journey. The option of leveraging other people’s capital is not something that is initially considered in the same way. A huge part of addressing that comes from investing in the networks that allow women to be in spaces where they can understand the opportunity that comes from equity or debt. It is also about changing perceptions around debt, which is sometimes seen as a bit of a dirty word or something that you do not have. But it is so important in terms of being able to grow a scalable business, so changing perceptions around attitudes to money is a big issue. It is so important to put women into networks where they have the opportunity to meet other people who have raised, so they can understand and demystify that process. As I said before, in terms of proximity to wealth, if you are able to meet people who could be early investors in your company and provide the small amounts of funding that help validate the concept, build confidence and support fundraising, you then have a track record unlike where you are asking for a larger sum of money later. It is a much more straightforward thing to do. A lot of it is around the support we can provide and the organisations that exist. The start-up space is so fragmented that when you come in you have no idea where to go initially. We can work to create more centralised points of support for founders so they can build that awareness.

There are quite a lot of interesting avenues. I personally think it is fantastic that we as a country offer SEIS and EIS tax incentives for investors. I do not know if enough women know about the schemes. If you told more people who are relatively successful, potentially high net worths, that they could have a tax break if they invested in small businesses, a lot of them would say yes, but they do not know. Increasing awareness of SEIS and EIS would help. There is also something in investing in angel training programmes. There is the Angel Investing School. There are networks such as Alma Angels. Creating these communities of other women investing together is really powerful in terms of pooling funds, even though they might be smaller pools. As we have said, there is something in making sure that, where founders have brilliant ideas, they are able to put them in front of potential angel investors a lot more easily. It is so important to have these platforms that allow founders to pitch in rooms full of like-minded people to get support. We need increasing awareness of the opportunities, tax incentives and network building.

May I just add a quick point to that? In terms of thinking about this question, we are starting to do it for ourselves. You are absolutely right; there is Alma Angels, which is a female-led fund of angels investing in largely female-led companies. I also belong to a female network called WITSEND, which is women in technology. Two years ago, we started WITSangels because so many of the membership were interested in investing but did not know how to go about it. In our network, we found we had three or four high-net-worth individuals who were experienced, and they set up teaching for other women. We now bring forward female-led ventures and invest in them. As you said, they are smaller-ticket investments, but it is creating an environment where women who have perhaps never thought about investing before can align with another 10 women who are interested in this venture, learn about it and hear the questions that are asked, and do so in a safer space.

Thank you very much, Natalie. Izzy has already told us there is not a huge amount of knowledge about how to incentivise investment or about how women become investors as well. In terms of support for female entrepreneurs, is that the same, Devie?

Yes, I think so. There are a lot of schemes that help female entrepreneurs in the UK. We have CIS, which are very attractive; we also have a fintech special skills visa, which brings a lot of founders and employees into the country. I would say the UK is quite fantastic in terms of the support in the fintech ecosystem. We also have several Bank of England programmes that support start-ups, as well as the regulator. I would say the UK is doing the right things in terms of support for entrepreneurs. What we are lacking perhaps is only the scale. I agree that we need to build that pipeline, which probably comes much earlier, to make use of the support that is available. A lot of the grants available through the Government are set at a certain stage of growth and revenue, or with a certain backing of larger R&D departments of universities, for example. This is another avenue I have explored. There is a bit of a gap before we reach the level where we can access the grants and tax schemes.

Does everyone on the panel agree with that? Is there something else that you want to see from the Invest in Women Taskforce or the British Business Bank? Is there anything they could be doing differently that would make it easier to be a female entrepreneur?

At Foundervine we build accelerator programmes, which are typically three-month long and cohort-based. We get groups of diverse, women-led businesses and give them dedicated support over that period to improve their business and operating models and to raise capital. We have found programmes like that to be invaluable for founders who are often incredibly lonely and understaffed in their own head in order to build their businesses. Being able to back accelerators is a big part of that early journey. Two years ago, we were backed by UK Shared Prosperity Fund, so we built two programmes focused on helping London’s tech sector founders. It has been incredible for us to support more founders with investment readiness, including things like mentoring, office hours and access to the networks that they need to raise. More programmes like that are needed. UKSPF funding is scaling back now. It is not obvious what is replacing it. The Invest in Women Taskforce invests in funds that will back women-led businesses, which is brilliant, but they need to have done all the work to get there in order to be invested in. Support and greater funding are so important at the stage before, 18 months earlier. They have had a fantastic idea, but they are just trudging along, because a lot of ideas go into the graveyard, and the ones that manage to push through get access to the support that they need to grow.

Does everybody else feel there is a gap before getting to the point of the Invest in Women Taskforce and that there needs to be more support?

Absolutely. When you are at that incredibly early stage, if you have not come from an investment banking or VC background, I do not know how anyone is expected to know what is out there. I am going back a few years now, but I spent so much time googling, “How do I fund my business? Where do I go?” I had never heard of the term “angel investor”; I was asking friends who they knew who was rich. It sounds like a joke, and it was a bit of a joke, but that is where it started. Foundervine is a great organisation doing brilliant things. There are other accelerators out there that I am aware of now, so if somebody comes to me with an idea I can now point them in the right direction, but it is only because my head has somehow risen above the parapet that I am visible and people come and ask me.

I am sat in the room as a female founder who has run her business for 15 years, and I am finding out about various initiatives while I am here. In fact, I found out about the Invest in Women Hub when I read the notes from Jack, and I have been an entrepreneur for the past 15 years. The issue is that there is a vast amount of support and information out there, but people just do not know where to go for it. In order to elevate female founders and businesses overall, we need to have a hub that we can go to for information. When we look at female founders specifically, is that a role for an Invest in Women Taskforce? I do not think so. There is a role for somebody to signpost to female founders at different stages of their journey. We just do not have that at the moment, whether it is support for starting up or for scaling up. As a business owner, I have six different people who advise me on running my business. They are not technical; they are not earning me money; they are just there to make sure that I have the right level of information, because I cannot rely on Google. Where can we go to get the information that we need, not just at start-up but different stages of our journey? I do not know whose role that is, but certainly having lots of different organisations doing it on their own is not the solution in the long term.

I shall add the caveat that everything on the internet is not always true.

I have two small follow-ups. Roni, sorry if I missed it at the beginning, but how did you get the funding for your business 15 years ago?

I feel like an imposter here, because I actually bootstrapped my position to this stage. As I look at scaling the business, to Izzy’s point earlier, I know that debt is a good thing for growing the business. To date, I have bootstrapped, so I am very much an imposter.

My other question was, how do you get into accelerator funds? Do you have to apply? We heard in our roundtable that it took some people 80 hours to fill in the application form and then they got no feedback. That was for Innovate UK.

I have spent a lot of my time applying for accelerator programmes. There are about 200 of them in the UK for fintech start-ups, so there are quite a few that we apply to. Each one, like you said, takes hours. They include everything from a pitch to starting with one-liners, all the way to a detailed revenue and a business strategy plan, which is normally fine and something you would expect to have, but they ask for variations that you may have to create from scratch with every accelerator programme, and this takes effort and time. Generally, if you are applying to about 10 to 20 accelerator programmes, it becomes a full-time job, and then you have the process of being ready to be part of that as well.

I want to say on the public record that Foundervine’s applications are not as long—I promise—but they are extremely competitive. We have had 20,000 applications over the last seven years for our programmes; 9% are successful, so that is 19,000-odd who are struggling to find the support they need to grow. Although there are hundreds of different avenues, they are incredibly competitive and often very time and cohort-based. After that programme has ended, it is quite difficult to continue to help these businesses, even though they need support for a long time. I think a lot about the model of how we can support businesses for the long term in a sustainable way. It is something that Government can very much invest in as well.

We have explored quite a few reasons. I would say the fundamental one is lack of access to the early-stage networks. I started with bootstrapping as well. A lot of us go to ourselves and close family first before asking the outside world. It is a kind of imposter syndrome or lack of belief that you can ask others for your first funding. In general, women tend to feel that they are not equipped to ask for money from outsiders until they have put all their money in themselves. Once you start getting into the angel networks and accelerator programmes, again you are held back by the belief that you are different from the others. I had the extra challenge of not being born or growing up in the UK, so I was an adult coming into a new country and asking for funds, which made it even harder. All those are challenges in terms of accessing early-stage investment. Once you do not have that early-stage momentum, your valuation does not go up unless something significantly changes. The first two years determine how much funding you are able to get in the next 10 years, and that is where women genuinely struggle a lot. They do not get to that stage of scale where they can ask for the big money for the early-stage issues that we have discussed. I would admit that we hold ourselves back in terms of the inability to ask confidently as well.

Definitely more support is needed. All four of us agree that we have not heard of the Invest in Women Taskforce until today. It would make a huge difference to have access to a brand that is there to support you, to be aware of that and to be able to ask for help. Then it is just adding things to that brand in terms of saying, “Oh, we will provide you with a list of angel networks. We will provide you with other options. If you want to do crowdfunding, we have these platforms.” But we need a central point where we can go and ask for help.

I will make a quick point about women receiving less funding. I have a concern that it is becoming a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy—that there has been so much media attention on the fact that women get only 2% and diverse female founders get a fraction of that, and that is making women cautious about how much money they ask for. As you say, that stymies growth in their very early stage, which then stymies growth and scalability. I do not know how we change that other than changing the narrative around it by correcting the balance.

On that point, I go back to what I said earlier about why these percentages are so low and why they have been that way for so long. Generally, the response to that is because there is not diversity in the decision-making panel, and men loan money out to men, but I do not think that is the only issue. It is important that we take a step back and identify the real causes of the disparity in those numbers. There are a number of issues that I could cite as a business owner. To Devie’s point earlier, I have run my business for 15 years but actually I did not take on investment because I was scared; I did not take on business because I had young children. My focus in the early years of running my business was waiting for my kids to grow up. Now they are older, I have time to scale my business and take on investment, so I bought a business three weeks ago. There are different reasons that are hold women back, and it is really important that we understand what they are and that, when we talk about the diversity of women, it is about not just what we look like but there being different challenges. I certainly would not have been taking on £10 million when my kids were three and six months old, but certainly I can now. It is just understanding the different women who come to the table and what the real issues are, so we can fix them. We are going to be talking solutions later, so I do not want to jump into those, but if we identify the real problems, we can fix them rather than focusing on what is not the issue.

How long do we have? I work in a sector where 15% of the entire workforce is female and 2% are in leadership roles. Nobody else looks like me doing what I do in this country—nobody. What challenges have I faced? If you do not expect somebody who looks like you to walk into the room or to be the decision maker, that is a huge challenge. Imposter syndrome is a challenge. Irrespective of whether people acknowledge that, it is an issue. Ultimately, it is the perception that people have of you as a female founder that has an impact. I spent probably until 2017 hiding behind a name that sounds very much like a bloke, for instance, and I would send a man out instead of me for those really important meetings. My assumption at that point was that it would be a lot easier for them to be in the room because people who make decisions do not look anything like me. That is a challenge. We need to ensure that people who make decisions look like the people who make up our country. As you said before, if we make up 51% of the population, we should have women making up at least a significant proportion of the decision-making room. It was a huge challenge for me that decision makers look nothing like me and are naturally drawn to people who look like them.

Completely; we probably all want to have a say on this. I will give my personal experience. I was all but patted on the head and told I needed to start a charity or an educational platform, not a commercial business, which is bizarre because men are parents too. That happens all the time. We have named some sectors: it can be femtech, beauty or childcare. I know another couple of women working in the childcare space, and it is the same story.

From a societal perspective, we know that women are more likely to build socially responsible companies with socially responsible policies in them. They are likely to recruit more women and more people from under-represented backgrounds, and so there is a huge societal advantage from having women start these businesses and backing them. We find over and over again—zooming out a bit—that failure is just as good as success because even if you figured out that it is not right for you and you go back into the workforce, you are going to be more entrepreneurial in the workplace to change it and make it more productive. Overall, having more women starting businesses benefits the entire workforce regardless of whether their business is successful. We need to fund women’s ability to fail just as much as we fund them to be successful and to allow them to fail safely. It is okay; lots of businesses fail. Have a go at it, fail safely, and use that skillset, knowledge and confidence to go into the world and make it better as well.

Thank you, Natalie. Izzy, what you just said there about failing and failing safely is quite an un-British view, even in business. Whereas in America, whether you are male or female, it is actually quite a badge of honour to fail as a businessperson. As you say, it is failing but you are still learning, you are still trying and you are still going out there, or you have learned a lesson and you have taken it somewhere else. Is there something that we need to fundamentally change and address in our business culture when it comes to those attitudes? Is there anything that we need to change around money? Is it something to do with our country and our views about how we talk about money and who gets to talk about money? I still feel very sheepish: we all have to fundraise to print our leaflets, and the bit that I hate most is asking for money. Why? My ideas are worth backing, your ideas are worth backing, the ideas of everyone here are worth backing, as much as anybody else’s. What do we need to do break the culture of us being shy around money? How do we lessen the imposter syndrome—I hate it—that fantastic women have and should not have? It does not belong with them. How do we break that culture?

I have to put my hand up for that one. For me, it is all about financial literacy—teaching kids about money. I do not know if everybody here knows, but we have been lobbying the Government for probably three years now to try to make financial education mandatory in every school in the UK, and the purpose of that is multifold. It is to create, or start, a generational shift of kids who emerge as young adults empowered, confident and smart with money. But part of what we try to do is trigger open conversations in the home about money, and getting people to discuss it more openly. A lot of our research shows that people who are confident with money—people who have received a financial education as young people—are 46% more likely to start a business. That is part of the answer to the problem we are talking about today. That creates more jobs in the economy and more wealth in society, so getting those conversations going from very early on in a child’s life and in that household is hugely important.

How early on do you reckon, Louise?

Well, as a mother, I would say from right from the get-go: as soon as a child is understanding the buy/sell concept, which is very early— four or five. In terms of what the Government can do, we are looking for it to be made mandatory in primary schools.

Children are already very good at negotiation, so the money side of it should follow through.

I just wanted to say that it is not just a UK problem. We did a very interesting study in mainland Europe—Netherlands, Belgium, Germany—and we saw the same issue: people are not willing to discuss money. One of the projects our client did was very interesting; they opened up the numbers for everyone to see how much their peers were saving and how much their peers were investing. That completely changed the nature of savings and investing. If we can have open visible platforms or communities where we are able to share, “Oh by the way, I am investing in start-ups and this is how much I have put into start-ups versus real estate”—the UK’s favourite investment is property—“And this is how much I am saving towards a house versus putting into high growth investments or social investments,” then just having access to those numbers will absolutely change the way we think. I have seen it happen with this project and it completely changed the numbers, with savings going up from £100 a month to close to £1,000 a month. So there was a significant impact from just seeing what your peers were doing.

We have covered some of the ground that I was going to touch on, but I want to take you back to this issue around failure. Something that we looked at when we spoke to female entrepreneurs in Birmingham was that, on the statistics, far more of the businesses that fail are male run than female run. Which leads me on to my question: do you think that a lot of the support for female-led businesses is too focused on the start-up stages and not enough on growth and sustainability—that next level up? I know, Louise, you have touched on this already, but do you want to go first?

That is absolutely the case, yes. We have said there is a gap in how female-led businesses find those very early-stage support networks, but they are there. Where it starts to dissipate is at growth stage. When you are scaling and wanting to expand at a high speed, those networks pretty much disappear and if you have not had access to venture capital funds that can either follow with more funding or introduce you to their network, then there is a big gap, yes.

Roni, a lot of your initial growth was bootstrapping and the debt route, which is the traditional route, particularly for those of us who are involved in property. But did you find scaling up was the more difficult part?

I am at scale-up stage, so it is actually quite interesting. There is a significant amount of support out there, but it is just knowing where to find it. That goes back to the point I made earlier: I am having lots of conversations—for instance, I am speaking to BGF at the moment and I know it is really intentional about supporting female founders—but I am not sure how many other female founders are aware of BGF. I know what BBB is doing for female founders. I have spoken to the bank about this, but the stats that are being released are around start-ups. We know that 40% of start-up funding goes to female founders but actually we are not quite sure how much of that goes to scale-up. There is so much focus on, “Let’s get them off the ground,” but actually how do we get the women who have passed that stage to go above that? There is some support, but I would say it is not visible enough.

This touches very much on Louise’s realm, but I would like to ask the other witnesses about it. What financial education, Izzy, did you have prior to starting your business and do you think that this adequately equipped you to get off the ground?

Background is an interesting question when it comes to being able to successfully lead a business. Before starting a business I spent some time in the University of London helping students to start up. What I found is that younger people who are able to work in industry for a period of time before they start are able to build foundational knowledge in a number of areas. Whether that is finance, human resources, leadership strategy—all those things—that can be very beneficial. That is not to say that you should not start from school, but having work experience is so important. So it is not necessarily about financial knowledge—quite frankly, you can use accountancy systems and pay people to do that kind of stuff for you—but being able to have a holistic view of what it takes to be a leader, to be a strategist, to manage people, to delegate and to build the operational infrastructure of a business is so important. We are not taught that. To extend Louise’s point, I would say that financial education in schools and enterprise skills in schools are important. How are we teaching young people to be project managers, to collaborate in teams and to manage money effectively? To create products from a very early age is important so that when they get to a place and they are thinking, “Gosh, how do I do this?”, girls in particular have the confidence to know that they can be the person at the top managing other people doing the things. That is a key thing: “Am I a leader? Am I someone who can lead people and build something that is complex?” That is more important, I would say, than having financial knowledge, particularly in the age we are in with technology and how it can support people in building.

Thank you. Devie, do you have anything to add?

Yes, we had almost no financial education growing up and I think it is absolutely essential in schools. Looking at my son, it is still lacking in schools today and it is absolutely essential to learn how to manage your own personal expenses before you try to manage bigger money. The lessons that you learn are relevant, whether you are running a start-up or running your own budget for the week, and it does start at a young age. If you try to offer this education and the skills that Izzy mentioned post university, I find that it is less helpful compared with when it is given at primary or secondary levels. So definitely the message should be to do it as early as possible, which I believe we have not had in my generation.

Louise, we spent yesterday afternoon at a roundtable discussing financial education in schools and we had an interesting group of young people who were very supportive of that. What specific skills and information do you think people need and how easily available is it? Does it differ between what women need and what men need when setting up a business?

I do not think there is any difference in terms of the skills needed between women and men setting up a business, no. In terms of skills specifically related to financial education at school, it is about understanding the absolute basics of how to set a budget, how to live to a budget, and how to distinguish between wants and needs. That sounds incredibly simplistic but today’s society is so focused on instant gratification: think about how we expect everything on our phone instantly, and if it is taking five seconds to load we are banging on a button. There is a need to instil the sense of perhaps you need to save up for something before you buy it, or you need to set a budget when your student loan comes in. Then if you want to rent a property or buy a house, you need to think about what revenue you have coming in: how you are going to manage that, where you can cut your costs, what you might choose to spend your money on and how you can save in order to run your own life. As Devie said, it really does not matter whether it is looking after your own budget. When you then extrapolate that to running a business, Izzy is quite right: there is software to help you but if you do not have the basic skills of being able to balance those books, to use an accounting term, you are already in a disadvantaged situation.

Does anybody think there is sometimes a risk of that kind of education holding people back, particularly women, as opposed to men who are more likely to take risks? We as women are often less likely to take risks, particularly if we have had that sort of education: money does not grow on trees, save up the pennies and it will help the pounds.

I disagree; maybe I support Louise in this.

Yes, I am just trying to be devil’s advocate a bit there.

Financial education should not be about just savings or managing your money; investing and taking risks should be a big part of that lesson and we should probably teach everyone, including girls, how to take more and better risks. And why not? If you can prove to them that investing in, let us very selfishly say start-ups, will bring in a huge amount of returns—“This is the kind of returns you are seeing, which will be significantly higher than the savings you are going to get”—and demonstrate the need for diversifying your portfolio while doing that, that is a message we need to send out. It should not be about only savings, is what I believe.

That is what I was getting at; thank you, Devie.

While I do agree that the fundamental education should be the same for boys and girls, I have run hundreds of events and programmes that focus on supporting women and have coached hundreds of founders building businesses. I can tell you that a young man will come to me and say, “Hey, I have this product, how do I build it? Help me.” A woman will come to me and I will spend four sessions just helping her build her confidence that she is the right person to start building that product before we get there. So when we are talking about the education we provide, it is less about providing different education than about having nuanced and relevant education. It has to include more confidence and resilience skills building, and treating that like a hard skill like finance. Confidence is so important. Just going back to your point about the differences in US and UK culture and our feelings as British people: young girls are taught to be good, so “You have to be modest and you have to be quiet and you have to present nicely and be good.” We need to have more girls growing up being told, “You need to shake things up. You need to speak up if you don’t agree with something. You need to talk back if someone’s treating you badly.” If we are teaching that at school, it builds into a risk appetite and a speaking confidence. It builds into the understanding that, “If this person has raised £100-odd million, I can do that too and I just need to figure it out for myself.” That is so important and I do not see it enough in the schools that I go to. I do not see it enough in our university system either, having worked there for several years as well.

Can I just make a quick point? I will bring my engineering mindset to this conversation. I do not disagree with what you said entirely—just to caveat that—but actually, if you take a few steps back and look at why the boy has a different attitude to the girl: why is that happening? It is because of how the boy and the girl have been conditioned, very differently, from the grassroots. My concern is that we need to get to the point where we do not treat boys and girls differently, and we do not need to pull girls into a room and tell them that they need to be more confident because they are all being treated the same from the get-go. So the boys and girls are being exposed to the same things: boys can do netball as much as girls can play football. It is as simple as, how do we get that right at the grassroots stage—at the education stage in primary school, or as early as nursery where boys have been put in a different set from girls? How do we fix that from really early doors so that we are creating a generation of boys and girls, where girls are actually thinking, “I can do just as well as that boy can,” and vice versa? We speak about girls not having confidence, and actually I have done a lot of research around confidence; I worry that it is terminology that has been bandied around as women not having it and actually, I am not sure that is correct. We have been conditioned from when we were children and we are still being conditioned: as a parent I found that my job took a back seat over my husband’s while I was raising my kids, so we are still being conditioned as we grow older. How do we fix that? It is not confidence but it is courage, in my opinion. How do we instil courage in women and in girls when we talk about imposter syndrome and all the other things that we talk about? I would like to get to a point where we do not say that women lack confidence, but we actually say that women are not as courageous as maybe their counterpart men, and maybe we may actually start to move the dial if we look at courage rather than confidence. Slightly contentious, but that is my opinion.

That is really interesting. Financial education is a subject that I am very keen on. One of the things we talked about yesterday was how we make that financial education exciting to young people and get them to take it on board, as opposed to listening to, potentially, social media influencers who are not always—sometimes but not always—on the right page. How do we help people to navigate that difficult environment there?

One thing that came out of some young people who were there yesterday was the power of a special day in school. We talked about financial education and where it should sit in the school curriculum: was it in PSHE or was it in maths? What came out strongly from the young people was when the school created a special day. They felt it should be a regular occurrence—not once a year, but every couple of months or every month—where the focus was on the direct application of financial literacy. So not the theory, but building a business or thinking about what you had to do if you developed a product, or whatever the case might be. They felt that that would be exciting and they talked about bringing in specialist groups to run that day so that it was not putting an additional burden on teachers. But, yes, that was a really interesting outcome from yesterday actually.

The conversation around confidence and courage brings me perfectly on to the next bit. Izzy and Roni, I see both your points of view here, but just to reflect back on what you said, at the end of the day, we are where we are. I agree with Izzy: at this point we need to build courage or confidence in our women when they come to you and that, for me, is really important. We have not yet got to the point where children are treated the same in primary school, and I could give you lots of examples of that. But something that has helped me a lot over the years is having a mentor. I have had different mentors at different stages and I could not have got into politics without a massive network of women helping me, supporting me and giving me the courage. So out of you, who has a mentor right now? You do not have to tell me who.

I have hundreds.

Quite a few actually.

So, everybody?

Well, I have an advisory board.

I was going to say, there is not somebody who is my coach or my mentor, but I have a network that I tap into for advice and support—yes, absolutely.

You are obviously a bit further on in your journey than a lot of the women you might be helping; you are amazing women and I am sure you are reaching down to help other women come up the ladder. Is there enough networking and mentorship out there for women?

We have a lot, but is that enough? Probably not, because we are trying to scale the number of women entrepreneurs in the first place. We need to have lots more examples of women founders who have done well, who have raised funding and who have been through the challenges we have talked about; the more examples we have, the better the mentorship will be. I also agree with the others that we need that network, or a group of mentors rather than one person. We do have mentors associated with all the accelerator programmes and all the angel investment clubs that we have, so there are mentorships available but we have the exact same challenge that we have with raising funding in the early stages—maybe it is not helping us to scale enough.

Just to move on a bit: if you are going to a networking event, is it better to be a male and female networking event or a woman-only networking event? This is something that was said in a previous roundtable and there were different views, which is quite interesting. I would love your opinions on that.

You need both. What I find interesting is if you are in a female-only network—I mentioned earlier I belong to one with a humorous name, WITSEND, which is senior level women in tech—the power in the room is insane. I do not mean power in terms of the traditional sense of the word, but the energy level, the openness, the honesty, the sharing and the lack of ego in the room is incredible. I always walk away from any event I go to with that particular network, or other female networks, hugely excited and energised and empowered. But I do not think you should limit yourself to that because that is not the world we live in. If we are not also engaged in networks that are all genders, we are really missing a trick. That is really important. We of course also need to bring men along with us because they are the other half of the population.

I totally agree with Louise on that. I also join lots of female networking groups and you come away and just buzz for weeks afterwards. However, if I look at my industry for instance, where a significant proportion of decision makers are men, I am never going to make change happen if I spend time in the room with the small 15% of women. So it is important that you have the decision makers in the room, and actually there is a really important place for diverse spaces where men are involved. We are constantly trying to get male allies in the room when we are having those important conversations. So I think there is a place for both; I totally agree with Louise.

Just to say, from a policy approach we should invest more in these networks. They are often very individually-led and under-resourced—sometimes you are in a pub and everyone covers their own tab. What does it look like for us to back them? Just going back to the female founders building businesses, the kind of mentorship networks where they are expert-led and driven, where they are structured, where you can find them online and register rather than knowing people, and where you can really access them without having an existing network, they exist, but they are very gated. I would have to dig through a lot to find WITSEND. Likewise with the networks we belong to, we are not accessible people. What does it look like to have networks where you can literally just google “Foundervine”—we run lots of mentoring programmes but there are others available—and you can just sign up regardless of who you know? That is a really key thing that we can find more funding towards.

Looking at diversity inclusion schemes, when big businesses want to see a pipeline of female talent come up through their ranks, they quite often say, “Oh, we will do mentoring for the women.” But actually they are not the problem; the problem is the middle management who are not seeing the leadership skills within the women already. Is there any merit in perhaps women mentoring men within this—any female investors potentially mentoring male investors? Apart from the courage and confidence issue, it is about the skills not being seen. We already know the statistics that women-owned businesses will give better returns on investment, they will grow and they will be more successful, so why are we not seeing that investment? Perhaps the problem is not the women and the mentorship needed, but the mentorship of the men who hold the money. Do you know any male investors who have changed their views or have been influenced in any way by what they have seen from female entrepreneurs?

I am not going to name names.

You do not have to.

I am working with one angel investor group at the moment, having been introduced to it a year and a half ago: I pointed out that it does not have a single woman on its board or in its leadership team and, having looked at the last year and a bit of deals that have come into my inbox, there have been only three female-led companies. So I robustly challenged it about why its pipeline looks like that when I am receiving so many other opportunities for investment from other sources that I wish I had enough money to put into. But, no, I do not know of any that are actively doing it. I go back to the fact that those of us who can need to be part of making that change.

Just from a perspective of institutional capital: I sit on the investment committee for a fund called the Growth Impact Fund and just this morning I had an IC meeting. It is a fund that was intentional from the beginning about being founder-first and focused on supporting diversity and entrepreneurship. Because of that, it accidentally ended up with an all-female investment committee. There is a man now, but in the beginning it was just an accident because they reached out to people who were in their network. As well as funding, you initially become allocated to the business as a deal mentor and then as a mentor afterwards. So what ends up happening is that you have a founder-focused fund that has 49% of applications from women compared with, I think, 13% industry average, and it has dedicated support and negotiates flexible finance with that founder. A great example is that we have raised three rounds of social investment and we wanted a repayment holiday for nine to 12 months when we first raised. The fund we raised from gave us that; we just did not want to pay interest for a period. We wanted to restructure our arrangement because we had a working capital need and it was very open. It is a female-led team and that has just been so important to me. In that sense, although we are talking about mentoring in a general context in social networks, when it comes to the funds that are there, institutional funders need to build mentoring networks into their model. They should allow the experts in their network—the talent in their network—to be allocated to their portfolio in order to give these founders the opportunity to get that kind of advice as well.

We have talked a little already about caring and family responsibilities, particularly with you, Roni. But for everyone, to what extent have caring and family responsibilities impacted the running of your business or the businesses of those that you know? Obviously it does not have to be just childcare, but caring for older people or whoever in your family.

My son had a pretty serious medical condition while I was in the early stages of starting up my business, which meant I had to take a substantial amount of time off to be in hospital with him. Research has proven that women carry more emotional load and mental load—we do not have to argue on that. But in terms of caring, if you have a regular job in a corporate, you are able to take time off and get paid for caring responsibilities, so you have a buffer in terms of knowing that you can go back to doing that job. What happens to entrepreneurs, and this is what happened to me, is that you do not get paid and you do not have new projects during the time you are taking that break for caring. So there is no system or buffer to support you while you are going through an emergency or a caring situation, which adds that extra risk to becoming a founder in the first place, and which always comes with that extra mental load for women who have children. It always stays with me, even now; although I have gone back to working full time, it is a worry that if I need to take time off now I am not sure if the company will survive. So it is a genuine problem for the vast majority of us: without an emergency issue it is fine, but what do you do when you have an emergency situation and you need time off?

Yes, it is a real challenge. As an employer, when you talk about funding for women who are of childbearing age, you have to consider what the potential constraints are—I say that quite openly. I started my business with children who were six and three, and then three years into running the business had another child. To Devie’s point, I did not take any time off; I could not take any time off as there was just nothing there. There was no support; there was nothing there for me. But actually, what enables you to carry on as an entrepreneur is potentially friends and family support—in my case, a mother support who was there—but without that support it would have been totally impossible for my business to carry on. So actually you go from being an entrepreneur, to having no business at all if you are going to be having a child and you do not have employees. It is a real issue and I am not quite sure what the solution is for women who are starting up. Obviously when you get to scale-up stage and you have a team around you, it is much easier to step away from it, but if you are the sole runner of your business, what do you do when you are having children? I do not know. I do not have the solution yet, unless you have family support.

Just from an investor perspective: I have been an angel investor for a while but also scoping out what it would take to be an institutional investor. One thing I found really interesting, although it has changed now, is that in LP agreements that GPs have to sign when they raise their funds, there is something called the key person event. It is a period of time, I think about three weeks, where a clause is triggered if you are out of the business and the investor can, basically, screw you over in different ways. Can I say screw over? I have said it twice. So if you had a baby, basically, any time off would trigger a key person event. Was that built into the thinking when it was built? How do we ensure that when someone decides, “I want to set up a fund to invest in anyone,” there are not clauses that limit their ability to actually raise a family while they are building a fund? There are also other things like the GP commit, where you put in thousands of pounds of your own money to signal your commitment when you are building a fund. If you have been out of the workplace for a period of time, or you simply do not have the same amount of savings, you are simply not in a position to put that commit forward to raise your first fund. So I went in all bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking, “I’m going to raise all this money,” and then immediately it was like, “Whoa, okay, there’s all these things that I’d need to think about.” Some are just general things everyone has to put up with, but there are some things you need to really take into consideration as a woman. If your business fails, you fail, but you can pick yourself up. If you fail raising a fund and you have lots of LPs who have committed tens of millions of pounds, that is a completely different picture. So how do we de-risk that for emerging fund managers?

Does anyone have any ideas on what support you would like to see for female founders with family or caring responsibilities?

I know this has come up in recent conversations around all sorts of caring for family, but I wonder whether there should be some consideration for ringfencing some support for female entrepreneurs and whether that fund goes to them directly. Generally I find there is a lot of family support who potentially then have to step away from work with no compensation whatsoever. So some consideration needs to be taken in terms of how we financially compensate and incentivise female entrepreneurs to carry on while still procreating and building the population of our country, which is extremely important. How do we do both? We do not want women to step away from entrepreneurship just for the purposes of building a family. If you are employed you can go off on maternity leave and there is some support in that regard; if you are an entrepreneur there is not and there really should be.

I want to push back a bit—just say exactly what you want. Do not think of the constraints of what we have politically at the moment; tell me what would make it better if you have childcare responsibilities or caregiving responsibilities. Dr Roni, you said earlier about not starting the business when your children were three and six months. There is never a good or perfect time to have a baby; I imagine there is no good or perfect time to start a business.

No.

So what would have made it easier, or possible, for you to have done it when you wanted to?

Having some sort of financial backing would certainly help. The point I am making here is I have given an example of my mother who had to step in and help, but there was no compensation for her doing that. So what I am saying is that if there was an avenue for some sort of support for carers so that I could carry on running my business—I did carry on running my business; it was just her who lost out—how could we weave that in so that it was about giving not just support and funding through nurseries, but actually funding for family who have to care for those female entrepreneurs who have children?

Financial support for entrepreneurs should mirror what financial support is available for employees in a large corporate—for example, child tax credit, being able to send them to nursery earlier perhaps, and having paid carers if needed. So it is not a huge difference from what we have in the corporate world already, but if there is a product that can support women going through entrepreneurship in the same way with the exact same features, that would be great.

Does anybody else have anything to add to those?

I am just going to second what Devie said there; it makes a massive difference. My daughter is currently off on maternity leave and she has worked for a company since she was 18, nine years now, so she has the luxury of enhanced maternity leave. I was able to take three and a half weeks off work when I had her and I have guilt tripped myself every which way because of that. I had my son three years later and had probably a little more time off work but not much, and that was tough. That was because I had to keep the business going or give up.

Thank you, and thank you so much for your expertise today and for your input and insight. Louise, you talked about having that nice feeling when you leave a female entrepreneur event; I feel quite energised. It is lovely to be surrounded by amazing women and I hope that you go away never feeling that imposter syndrome, because I have been in utter awe of all four of you today. I am really grateful for your input. We have not heard from investors yet. We would love to hear from ones that are doing this well and that advocate for women and female entrepreneurs. We would also love to hear from people who do not do it well, because I want to know why they do not; I want to know why they are not willing to change or why they are not willing to see the brilliance that they are missing out on. You do not have to say publicly, but if after this you could email us about some investors that you think we should hear from, that would be great.