Empowering Women in Web3!

With the upcoming launch of Web3 Disruptors, my new podcast, spotlighting the women blazing a trail in the industry it felt only right to dedicate this edition of ‘The Talent Edit’ to explore some of the issues surrounding Women-led projects and more specifically their access to funding.

In February 2023, Harvard Business Review (HBR) reported that women-led startups receive less than 3% of all venture capital (VC) investments. This disparity is partly due to the pandemic's lingering impact on women's careers, which has affected both their access to investments and job roles. Risk-averse investors have also contributed to the issue, preferring to focus on their networks of "boys clubs," making it harder for women to break in.

Web3 offers new opportunities for women and other marginalized groups to create more level playing fields by eliminating traditional hierarchies and power dynamics present in the investor-startup relationship. This environment fosters inclusivity and innovation, allowing individuals from all backgrounds to participate.

However, achieving gender diversity in Web3 requires more than just hiring women or meeting diversity quotas. It involves addressing the systemic challenges that have created these disparities in the first place. One significant challenge is the underrepresentation of women in decision-making roles within VC firms. With only 12% of decision-makers being women and 2.4% being female founding partners, there's a substantial gap in representation that hinders funding for female-led projects.

The solution, as HBR suggests, is not for VCs to support startups simply because they are founded by women. Instead, VCs should eliminate institutional patterns and thinking that prevent them from recognizing the potential in ideas presented by female entrepreneurs.

Another challenge is the imbalance of roles that women hold in Web3.

Fast company also highlighted another interesting reason as to why there are challenges around female-led projects being funded - there aren’t a ton of females who are in leadership seats - even if they are in the Web3 space: “Much of the current effort to bring women onto futuristic internet platforms is as content creators, rather than engineers of the underlying technology.” - https://rplg.co/9f57d200

This statement highlights that even though Web3 does provide a more level playing field - the women in the space are the creators not the engineers which results in a further imbalance.

While the odds are undoubtably stacked we did want to highlight and celebrate 3 female-led projects/organizations to watch…

Myraa Technologies / Shilpa Karkeraa

Among the products is a blockchain awareness program where the company works with financial institutions, factories, and communities to bring awareness to why we need decentralized finance, shared ledgers for transparency, and smart contracts that enable fair trade. Myraa Superstar is a product designed to drive inclusion and diversity through an unbiased AI-driven tool to clone superstars in your organization. It clones the characteristics of your star employees and helps improve discovery of talent. It also aids in eliminating human biases that occur during filtering resumes and enabling similarity as a measuring metric.??

Source: https://yourstory.com/herstory/2022/08/5-women-leading-innovation-in-web3-world

Lightning Engineering / Elizabeth Stark

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Lightning Labs is a technology startup that developed a level two open protocol layer that leverages blockchain and smart contracts to make transactions cheaper and faster.

Not only does this help with blockchain scalability, but it also opens up Bitcoin transactions to new markets that need low-cost transactions. The startup developed the Lightning Network Daemon and implemented the developer-friendly Lightning Network protocol. With the goal of bringing a system based on cryptography to market, Lightning Labs connects the world of open-source software with Bitcoin and next-generation fintech ideas.

Source: Hackermoon/Techcrunch

Headquarters (HQ.xyz) / Sharon Paul

Introducing a unified finance management platform specifically designed for Web3 teams. This platform consolidates data from both crypto-wallets and traditional banking accounts, providing Web3 teams with a comprehensive overview of their financial status.

On a related topic, with regard to the funding of female-led businesses, HQ.xyz announced a robust $5 million pre-seed funding round in the third quarter of 2022.

What's up next?

One of our goals remains to shed light on some of the obstacles that women in tech face, and in pursuit of this, I'm excited to announce that our inaugural episode of "Web3 Disruptors" will host Bridget Greenwood .

She is the visionary founder of The Bigger Pie and co-founder of the 200Bn Club. Bridget will share actionable insights for women aiming to secure funding for their ventures and looking to progress in the space. The impact of the 200Bn Club underlines Bridget's credibility on this subject. The Club has overseen the graduation of 8 startups, with 75% successfully securing term sheets and an average raise of $1.7 million. The program boasts relationships with over 200 VC partners.

The episode is released on June 7th - you won't want to miss it!