We Found $2 Billion For Women Founders. It's A Start

When Linnea Roberts retired in 2016 from Goldman Sachs, where she’d been a managing director, she didn’t intend to become a startup investor.

- KIMBERLY WEISUL

At a dinner the next summer, she met Bertha González Nieves, co-founder of tequila company Casa Dragones, and was surprised to learn González Nieves had no female backers. Roberts promised to find her 10 great female investors. “I started reaching out, and the level of consternation and doubt on the part of the women I spoke to was incredible,” says Roberts. “The next day, my husband had dinner with a bunch of his buddies, and in a night raised five times what I was trying to raise.”

Some of her husband’s success may have had to do with the fact he is George Roberts, the R in private equity firm KKR. But Linnea was incensed, nonetheless, and determined to start focusing on investing in women. By the end of the year, she had set up a $50 million venture fund, named GingerBread Capital, from her family offce. She wants to see her founders making investments in other women, and the earlier the better. “I tell my founders, ‘My goal for you is simple,’ ” Linnea says. “ ‘I want you to get rich, and I want you to put it back into the system.’ ”

That system is severely broken. Of the more than $100 billion invested by venture capitalists each year, all-male teams get about 83 percent. All-female teams get 2 to 3 percent. Gender-diverse teams—which might include just one woman on a founding team of five or six—get the rest. These numbers haven’t appreciably budged in years. This is despite the fact that women-led companies that do get funding tend to be more capitaleffcient and have higher revenue than comparable companies led by men. And, according to First Round Capital, gender-diverse leadership teams show valuation growth 63 percent higher than all-male teams.