Susanne Althoff - Launching While Female

FOR THIS BOOK I interviewed a hundred women entrepreneurs, as well as nonbinary entrepreneurs, between July 2017 and January 2020, with follow-ups in early 2020. Start-ups are fast moving, so details on the companies and founders here may have changed in the meantime.

Most of the available research and data on entrepreneurship examine only women and men. For this reason, this book primarily focuses on people who identify as women (cisgender and transgender), but its important to note that the hurdles faced by women tend to be shared by gender-expansive people, too.

Finally, while gender is the focus, my aim in these pages is to show how other identitiessuch as race, class, and sexual orientationalso play a significant role in someones entrepreneurial experience.

CHRISTINA HARBRIDGE thinks women entrepreneurs are a lot like women political candidates. She should know; she works with both. They often discount their own qualifications, especially when theyre just starting out. People tend to define them in terms of their family relationsshes a momrather than their professional life. And they have to be better than men, probably way better, just to have a chance to compete.

Harbridges San Franciscobased company, Allegory, coaches entrepreneurs, executives, and others to be better leaders and communicators. She also volunteers for Emerge, a nationwide organization that recruits Democratic women to run for political office and trains them how to win.

She remembers one particular woman vying for a statewide position of Democratic Party chair. She got super-passionate about something, and she was told to calm down, Harbridge tells me. And the guy she was running against pounded his fist on the table in anger, and no one said anything.

There was plenty of evidence of a double standard on the campaign trail leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Questions about US senator Elizabeth Warrens likability, or lack thereof, repeatedly popped up.

Women entrepreneurs going after funding get similar treatment. Different setting, different stakes, but the assumptions are the same. These funders use language with women that they would never say to a guy, says Harbridge. Ive sat in the rooms and heard it. It doesnt sound like youre ready, and this is like a thirty-five-year-old woman whos done all this stuff. Then they look at a twenty-year-old guy with an idea in the garage and say, Oh, my God, youre so ahead of your time! Its really fascinating.

Early in her career, Harbridge showed how a womans insight can fundamentally change the way a business operates. In the late 1980s, while a college student in Northern California, she needed to get a full-time job that would help pay her fathers medical expenses (his Parkinsons disease was worsening) and still allow her to take classes at night. She answered an ad for a collector, not even knowing what it was. She thought maybe it had to do with antiques.

She got hired as a file clerk at what turned out to be a debt collection agency. On her first day, the people she encountered in the break room were some of the nicest shed ever met. But she was shocked when she walked out onto the floor for the first time. My hands shook listening to people on the phone being just so cruel to people, she tells me. I thought, Why are they doing it this way? There should be a collections unit that collects debts by being nice.

Once she had the idea, she couldnt let go of it. In her early twenties, she launched a firm with the idea of making it the worlds first nice debt collection agency. The industry ran on the belief that you should intimidate people. Harbridge intuitively understood that this was wrong, and it would make people resent the companies that were owed money. I believed the purpose of a collection call wasnt to collect money, she says. It was to establish enough relationship so the person explained their situation so we could help them. Often the person didnt owe the money, didnt understand they owed it, or couldnt afford it. Once it was clear what was going on, we could help themfind jobs, dispute it, make a payment plan, file for bankruptcy.

Other agency owners made fun of me, called me Little Red Riding Hood about to get eaten by a wolf, Harbridge says. This whole nice thing, I got a lot of ridicule, but I was super-stubborn.

Even Harbridge assumed her approach would result in a lower rate of repayments, but she had a background in computer programming and thought that what her company lacked in collections, she could make up in efficiency. Imagine everybodys surprise, then, when her business ended up raking in collections at triple the industry rate. The industry average is 9.9 percent. We did 32.2, she says. It turned out people liked it when the collection agency was nice to them.

People often criticize the genius right out of the woman, says Harbridge, who sold her debt collection business in 2006 and soon after launched her second company. I have sat in rooms and watched a woman [whos pitching her business] nail it, just do something so profound, and then somebody will raise their hand and correct her. Women get a lot of negative messaging: Wow, you dont have any experience in that. It doesnt sound like you have a competitive advantage. I think youre too late to the game. Wow, its kind of a dog-eat-dog industryare you tough enough?

You might say, okay, just shrug it off and move on. Or offer a rebuttal. But a woman has to be careful about how she responds.

Harbridge says, One of the challenges is, if the female founder or CEO challenges that investor, makes him feel small or corrected, their discomfort and fragility may cause them not to fund her. Shes got to be strategic around keeping them open. This sucks, and it makes me vomit a little in my mouth when I have to coach women this way. The same is true with a candidate running for office. If the voter gets fragile and shuts down, a qualified, incredible female candidate will be less likely to win the race. This is especially true for women of color.

Harbridge often gets asked why shes only training women in politics. I dont think women are better than men, she tells me. Instead, shes motivated by the numbers. Women make up 51 percent of our population, but, for example, only 24 percent of the seats in the US Congress were filled by women as of early 2020. If it was men, Id be training men. The perspective is off in our country because we dont have enough women in positions of leadership.

Women are likewise missing from the entrepreneurial space. They own fewer companies than men, and those businesses have access to significantly less start-up capital, make significantly less revenue, and employ far fewer people. An entrepreneurial gender gap exists, and it leaves us with fewer jobs, a weaker economy, and less innovation. Building a start-up world thats open and inclusive would benefit us all.

Ive been studying and interviewing women entrepreneurs for years, and Ive seen versions of Harbridges story play out in a hundred different ways. I came to the topic not as an entrepreneur but as a journalist. I worked for a dozen years as an editor at the Boston Globes Sunday magazine, the last six of those as the magazines editor-in-chief. The newspaper industry has become entrepreneurial by default because its original business model has collapsed. To replace revenue no longer coming from advertisers and subscribers, we experimented at the