Only about 10 percent of venture funds ever make it to a fourth vintage. Of those, just 5 to 10 percent are led by women. I’m one of them.
When I started Female Founders Fund in 2014, I believed that solid returns and conviction would speak for themselves. Strong performance would unlock capital and the industry would reward the achievement, especially from those breaking new ground—or so I thought. What I’ve come to learn is that venture capital isn’t a pure meritocracy. It’s a network-driven ecosystem where who you know often matters just as much as what you build.
Cultural and political changes, and a tight market environment, are making it especially difficult for fund managers to maintain momentum. Now is the time for the industry to reflect on how to ensure that these funds, especially those led by diverse managers, can weather these forces and continue to support diverse founders with brilliant ideas.
Investing in women isn’t charity. By yielding powerful, durable returns, it has proven to be smart business. As risk tolerance declines, it could be tempting for institutions to retreat to the familiar. Instead, they should pay attention to the data.
A shorter runway for women
Over the years, a few lessons have become clear. They aren’t the ones you find in your LPA, but they’re the realities that quietly shape who gets funded, who gets backed again, and who quietly fades away.
Returns are just one part of the picture. While performance is important, other forces—institutional change, personal networks, and internal politics—often drive how capital gets distributed. Once an institution commits to a fund, that relationship can extend across multiple vintages. The incentive to change managers is low.
Check writers want proximity to the next generation of Tier 1 talent striking out on their own. That bias works in favor of spinouts—former Sequoia, a16z, or Benchmark investors taking the entrepreneurial leap. But for managers without that institutional pedigree, the path looks very different. And for women, who remain significantly underrepresented in those firms’ partnership ranks, the path is even narrower.
Your first fund is often cobbled together from founders, friends, and family offices willing to take an early bet. By Fund II or III, however, the bar shifts. Institutions want scale, systems, and years of realized returns, all of which take time to build. For emerging managers, that’s the hardest leap: breaking through a system designed to reward familiarity over conviction.
Venture is a relationship business. It prides itself on data and rigor, but in practice it runs on trust. The capital that fuels our industry still moves through networks built over decades. Who you know, how long you’ve known them, and what you have to offer, determines access.
This is why new or diverse fund managers often find it easier to raise their first fund on promise than their second on proof. Convincing someone to take the initial bet on someone new can be easier than asking them to break a pattern with subsequent funds—because the pattern is still overwhelmingly male.
We must also look at money. Wealth isn’t optional—it’s the price of entry. For example, all new fund managers are expected to invest a “GP commit,” which equates to roughly 1 percent of their total fund size. On a $50 million fund, that’s $500,000 in cash, upfront.
Imagine asking an entrepreneur to invest half a million dollars in their own Series B to show commitment. For many, especially women and first-time fund managers, that barrier is insurmountable without preexisting, generational, or spousal wealth. It is one of the quietest but most enduring structural filters in venture, and it uniquely disadvantages women, who, on average, hold less personal and intergenerational wealth.
Having a financial cushion is also vital to play the long game that venture requires. To stay in the business, particularly through downturns, you need a financial cushion. Big payouts don’t happen often. Selling some of the investment early can help a little, but small fund managers can’t always afford to take a lower price without making it harder to raise money later.
It’s not just about resilience and grit; it’s about runway. And because women more frequently enter the industry later, without the safety nets that have historically supported male peers, their runway is often meaningfully shorter. Staying in the game long enough to see your conviction validated is, in itself, a form of privilege.
Another challenge that has played out over the years is that while several well-intentioned institutions and corporations have stepped in to support and capitalize diverse managers, the purpose behind many of these checks has been to provide “start-up” capital designed to help new funds get off the ground, with the expectation that larger institutional investors would take over from there.
That handoff, however, has proven difficult. Even as the tide has turned culturally and politically, there’s a real opportunity to rethink how we sustain diverse managers beyond the first fund, widening the base of long-term support so they can weather market cycles and build lasting franchises. The current system still assumes women will somehow “graduate” into institutional support structures that were never designed with them in mind.
Shaping the next frontier
I started Female Founders Fund as an entrepreneur who spotted alpha in the market—a clear gap between the caliber of women building companies and the capital available to back them. Twelve years later, that thesis has proven right again and again.
At Female Founders Fund, we’ve seen it firsthand. Maven Clinic became the first unicorn in women’s health, defining an entirely new category of care. Billie reimagined modern personal care before its acquisition by Edgewell. BentoBox transformed hospitality tech, leading to a successful exit. Tala, now valued at nearly $1 billion, continues to scale globally, expanding access to financial services in emerging markets. Wagmo created a new category of employee benefits around pet care, while Violette_FR built the first artist-led French beauty brand in decades.
These companies touch millions of end customers and have built products, tools, and services that have scaled across industries proving that female-led innovation drives real enterprise and consumer value. These founders are category creators—pairing big visions with world-class execution.
These outcomes aren’t outliers. They’re evidence that backing female founders is a wise investment strategy that generates meaningful returns. We cannot let this moment in time with its tighter markets and shifting market and social priorities create negative momentum.
Women are now leading in industries once thought impossible to break into: Space DOTS, founded by a NASA-trained astronautical engineer; Beyond Aero, reimagining flight through hydrogen-electric propulsion; Amini AI, building Africa’s environmental data backbone; Waabi, redefining autonomous trucking; and Dacora, making history as the first female-founded automotive company.
From aerospace to AI, from climate to transportation, women are shaping the next frontier and the best is yet to come.
In order to keep seeing new role models of success especially for those living outside the traditional Silicon Valley ecosystem, we need to keep capital flowing. That’s how the next generation of women and underrepresented founders will see themselves in the leaders building today.
In a moment when the world feels increasingly divided, doubling down on progress isn’t just good business—it’s good stewardship. Because the hardest part isn’t raising a fund, it’s building one that endures. And the longer I stay in this business, the clearer it becomes: investing in women isn’t a risk, it’s a return.