I’m slightly neurotic about digital clutter. Despite having something like 10TB of cloud storage, every few months I convince myself I need to clean it out, as if Google is about to knock on my door and politely ask me to make room.
During one of these purges, I rediscovered a study I saved almost a decade ago. It found that women-founded startups raised less than half as much capital as those founded by men, yet generated more cumulative revenue over five years and more than twice the revenue per dollar invested.
Which is kinda crazy. Any sane, returns-driven investor with a fiduciary responsibility to their LPs should be trying to arbitrage the hell out of that.
So naturally, while half-watching Ruprecht stalk his latest squirrel prey, I started noodling on what, if anything, women founders and leaders might be doing differently. Trying to answer that in a few hundred words would be absurd. Intellectually, I’d basically be entering a sword fight with a spork. But a few women I’ve crossed paths with over my career immediately came to mind.
I’ve really only had two managers. Both women, both incredibly effective, and almost complete opposites. One was hands-on and gave a wide-eyed 22-year-old on Wall Street the structure I desperately needed. My current manager gives me enormous autonomy as long as I produce. One taught me how to operate. The other trusts me to figure out where I’m going. Different styles for different versions of me.
Then there’s Mahadia, co-founder of Tanzania’s dLab. She’s soft-spoken, deeply thoughtful, and the kind of person who can ask one quiet question while seemingly calculating what your answer means two, three, or five years from now. I first met her over coffee at Stanford in 2019 when I was having serious cold feet about leaving tech and LA for what I assumed would be a one-year detour into government. That conversation helped convince me to take the leap.
Years after the original donor funding ended, Mahadia is still there and dLab is still growing, even after her three male co-founders moved on.
Nadine, who leads DigiFemmes in Côte d’Ivoire, is almost her opposite. High energy, roll-up-your-sleeves, push-back-on-the-donor, figure-it-out-as-we-go founder energy. She wanted to understand every part of the operation and had opinions about all of it, including plenty we probably didn’t want to hear. Exactly what a program bringing together two U.S. government agencies, a Fortune 5 company, and a VC partner probably needed.
When funding abruptly ended, DigiFemmes could easily have ended with it. It didn’t. The program is still training women in software development and entrepreneurship, and Nadine is still there.
So after all that noodling, I still have absolutely no idea what the secret sauce is. Ruprecht, meanwhile, is still circling the tree. He has never caught a squirrel, but I give him props for commitment.
These four women couldn’t be more different. What they do seem to share is an ability to build things that keep working, sometimes long after the circumstances around them change.
Maybe that’s resilience. Maybe women get unusually good at navigating systems that weren’t exactly designed with them in mind. Maybe dudes are just slackers.
I don’t know, and I’m pretty comfortable never knowing - but grateful I got to have been in their orbit.
Roll credits.