(Memphis Daily) As a female serial entrepreneur, I experienced firsthand both the challenges and the opportunities of building a technology startup as a woman.
I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2004 and in 2013 joined Start Co. as an entrepreneur-in-residence because of the community’s focus on inclusion and empowerment of women. With the support of LaunchTN, City of Memphis, Assisi Foundation, FedEx, Start Co. Angels, and local partners like Baker Donelson, archer-malmo, The Marston Group and others, as a community we can see the impact and success of our acceleration and inclusion programs for women.
We intuitively know that it will be nearly impossible to advance our community or our country by leaving half of our population on the sidelines in technology and entrepreneurship. And yet it’s no secret that these areas are primarily male-dominated. In fact, recent demographic reports show that women only make up 30 percent of the workforces at major tech companies such as Google and Apple. Further, less than 7 percent of all startup capital is invested in women founders.
In spite of these numbers, we know that gender diversity among company leadership teams, board members and employees creates better, more viable company structures and successes. In fact, a 2012 McKinsey study found that the organizations with the most diverse executive teams had 53 percent higher returns on equity and 14 percent higher earnings performance than those with the least diverse teams.
In Memphis, Start Co. and community members examined the landscape in 2012. It was clear that change was needed in Memphis since the technology startup scene did not reflect the gender make up of our community.
With this in mind, Start Co. (then LaunchYourCity Inc.) and its supporting partners embarked on a journey together to increase women participation in the Memphis startup ecosystem by incorporating and supporting more women’s-specific programming, including coffee meet-ups, Startup Weekends, workshops and 48-Hour Launches. This programming empowers women founders to bet on themselves and their ideas and choose Memphis as the place to launch.
Building on this deliberate action to be more inclusive of women founders, Start Co. and area funders went a step further and created the Upstart accelerator in 2013. Upstart is one of world’s first women-led accelerator programs. Not only has this changed the game in Memphis, it has gained international recognition, attracting talent from all across the globe – from New York City, Atlanta, Bermuda and even Hungary.
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