When provided the option to invest in a company, Corevist COO Susan Wall didn’t think she could. Not only did she not have initial interest or expereince in investing, she also didn’t think of investing as something she could do as a woman.
“[For] women, it’s not part of our consciousness to think we can invest in anything,” Wall said. “If [that person] hadn’t asked me, I don’t think I would have gotten started down that road, but now that I am, I’ve started realizing that all throughout my career, I was one of few women in a room.”
And this sentiment can be felt by women—from founders to investors—throughout the Triangle ecosystem and all around the nation. According to a recent Pitchbook report, companies founded solely by women received only around 2.1% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the U.S. in 2023. In the same year, women made up 26% of investment professionals at VC firms and 17% were general partners.
Jenn Summe, a partner of GrepBeat’s sister investment firm Primordial Ventures, said she would often attend annual meetings or events and could pick out fewer than 10 other women to talk to in the venture capital (VC) community that she didn’t already know.
“We always like to joke that at venture or tech conferences, there is never a line in the women’s restroom, because there are so few there,” Summe said.
After “complaining” enough about this specific phenomenon, she and Melissa Crosby of Colopy Ventures (and of our beloved In The Soup podcast) decided to create a group to get more women into the investment community and to learn more about investing. That’s when they came up with Ladies Investing/Local Angels (LiLa), an informal and educational group that meets every other month to talk about technology angel investing in the Triangle and beyond.
“Largely, we want it to be educational, but we also want the content to be community driven,” Summe explained. “We want to encourage women who don’t have any experience investing to come join and create that on-ramp toward getting into this career path. That’s why we want to focus on education…to make sure that there’s plenty of empowerment in understanding your finances, looking at deals, etc.”
LiLa’s group organizers consist of four local women from the Triangle tech ecosystem: Jenn Summe, Susan Wall, Melissa Crosby and Windy Kohl, the former CEO of Asurion Hong Kong. The first LiLa mixer will take place at the GrepBeat HQ on Tuesday, July 18th from 4-6pm. You can register here.
One of the main reasons for the creation of this group is to create an environment where women can openly express their feelings and thoughts surrounding more “at-risk” topics like dealing with finances, according to the event organizers.
Taken from their own experiences, people tend to like or gravitate toward other people who look like them or share the same experiences. With this group, they want to uplift and empower women to learn how to invest/work with investors and open the door wider for more women founders to earn more capital—and for women investors to get more traction in their community.
“We have a ton of smart, badass women here who come in and participate in all of those areas and they just need support, community and the confidence to do so,” Summe said. “We’re getting more women into being decision makers of funds, just by being here in the area already. We just need to keep dropping more ladders behind us and making it easier for the women to come in and continue this cycle of including more women in our ecosystem.”
Wall added, “It’s the experience of being in these [spaces] that I think we really want to help people because you don’t know what to expect if you’ve never been in a board meeting, never pitched to a VC or an individual investor… We’re not going to solve some of the systemic issues, but we can do our own part to break down some of the other barriers against women.”
Though there is still much work to be done for gender pay equality—women who work full-time continue to earn 84 cents for every dollar a man makes—the LiLa organizers hope that their education and community-driven sessions will expose women to investing and bringing in more money on their own.
With Kohl retired and Wall retiring, they hope to spend more time imparting what they’ve learned in thier careers to other women and underrepresented funders nad founders in this community.
“I want [anyone who’s interested] to open up their minds to the fact that maybe they should check this out,” Wall explained. “Even if they’ve never thought of this before, never thought about investing…this is really about investing. Just learn about it and see if this might not be a door you want to open.”
