Women receive just 2.5 percent of venture capital (VC) funding— and of those, about 0.2 percent are women of color. Women simply don’t have access to the capital that men do.
 
I recently spoke on a panel of women investors to a packed room of both women and men eager to talk about how to get to gender parity in business. As we talked about market trends we’d been seeing, I mentioned one that seems at odds with the stats just mentioned: Black women and Latinx are starting companies at a faster rate than anyone else in this country. In fact, 78 percent of new women-owned firms are started by women of color. When we got to the Q& A period, a wise woman in the front row di­rected a question to one of my co‑panelists, a woman who runs a fund that invests in early-stage, women-led businesses, largely in tech.
 
“You said today that you’ve invested in more than sixty compa­nies,” she said. “Nathalie was talking about how women of color are starting companies more than anyone else in this country. How many of your sixty- plus companies are led by women of color?”
 
If you identify with what I’ve written so far, I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear the answer: Big. Fat. Zero.
 
Big fat zero is a big fat problem. Women—and women of color in particular—are starting businesses like crazy, but they rarely grow beyond supporting their owner, too small to court invest­ment. In the case of my co‑panelist who funds women- owned startups, the problem is more complex than simply turning down women of color. She has a pipeline problem that goes beyond race. The entrepreneurs making it into VC conference rooms represent a tiny, privileged sliver of women. They are mostly white and well-off, with institutions like HBS, Goldman, or Google on their ré­sumés.
 
They’re still kickass founders, and funds like my co‑panelist’s are doing important work. But if you’re like most women, you have no idea how you’re going to get into any investor’s office. You probably haven’t grown beyond solopreneurship or the side hustle because you’ve got one or all of these problems:
 
· You don’t have personal capital—tens of thousands of dollars in a rainy-day fund —or the spare time to spot opportunities, strategize, and think big.
· You don’t have friends or family who can invest their money or contribute key resources, like time with the family lawyer or a rent-free place to live.
· You didn’t go to fancy schools, so you don’t have ready-made networks and cultural capital to create the client and market­ing relationships that would help you jump to the next level.
 
Without these assets, many bright, entrepreneurial women get stuck in what I have started to call the Valley of Death—that long stretch between a one-woman show and a scalable business that becomes a household name. Many women never make the shift to entrepreneur at all. We’re too busy paying rent or putting food on the table.
 
This opportunity gap is why I founded BRAVA Investments. We invest in companies not based on whether they have women founders but on whether they can prove that they will economi­cally benefit as many women as possible. My goal isn’t to find a woman and make her into the next Zuckerbergian billionaire so much as it’s to find companies that can level the playing field for a billion women. I want companies that can change systems,...