WHEN SELF-FUNDING AFFECTS YOUR SELF-WORTH

Today’s venture capital process continues to fail female founders, forcing many to risk their own savings to start a business. But that can come at a cost to their personal well-being

- BY TANYA BENEDICTO-KLICH

Growing up in rural Indiana, Christina Stembel never pictured herself as an entrepreneur. But in 2008, after moving to the Bay Area, she had a business idea. Stembel was working as the director of alumni events at Stanford Law, where a big part of her job was ordering décor. "I saw how much we were spending on flowers and went down the rabbit hole from there," she says. She learned that the e-commerce flower industry was shrinking in popularity among younger consumers. And that when people did order online, they were often unhappy because their arrangements looked nothing like the photos.

Stembel was inspired to build a better direct-to-consumer floral shop. It would be sustainable, with flowers sourced from a network of ethical farms. The bouquets would come wrapped in upcycled burlap to help combat the industry's plastic waste issue. She even had a name for her venture: Farmgirl Flowers.

To Stembel, it seemed like a much-needed concept in an industry that was "ready for a little disruption," but investors rejected her business proposal over a hundred times. That's when she decided to fund her idea with her own money. "I used the entirety of my life savings," she says. A total of $49,000.