With a gaping hole in the entrepreneurial playing field for women, a Durham-based team is working toward win ning the game and leveling the field once and for all.
Adam Klein, American Un derground chief strategist, is working alongside Lauren Whitehurst, founder of the consulting firm Side*, John Austin, director of Ground works Labs and Kimberly Jenkins, a former employee of Microsoft, in an effort to combat this entrepreneurial gender gap.
“The goal here is to pro vide an important mentor ing opportunity with access to capital networks that may not have been open to these [female-led] teams before,” Klein said. “We’re trying to level the playing field and have these quality teams have great opportunity and access. We don’t want them to have a barrier to become a great company.”
The American Under ground is a campus located in Durham for entrepreneurs all over the Triangle. According to Klein, in October of 2013, the American Underground was designated a Google-tech hub for entrepreneurs: one of just seven in North America.
“That partnership has giv en us the opportunity to work very closely with Google on some key initiatives to bolster Durham and the Triangle as a technology hub,” Klein said. “In January of this year we submitted an application to Google for an initiative called ‘SOAR’ to boost the number of quality female-led teams in the Triangle.”
Klein said research across the country shows that fe male-led companies, tradi tionally, have a more difficult time accessing capital than male-led companies. Klein said it’s their goal to find some of the most promising female-led teams in the Tri angle, connect them to expert mentors and then, be able to open up capital networks that were previously untapped.
“If you look nationally at the number of female en trepreneurs, speaking in just the technology business space, it is not reflective of the overall demographic of soci ety,” Klein said. “The num bers tend to be somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of technology companies that are female-led. At the same time, we know from research that female-led teams which receive venture funding ac tually outperform male-led teams.”
According to Klein, it’s re search such as this that sparks the interest of the SOAR pio neers. Klein said he thinks SOAR is one of the solutions to this conundrum and that if female-led teams were given better access to capital, there would be an opportunity for the region to grow more com panies and have the Triangle become a destination for female-led companies.
“One of the things that we’re excited about regard ing our launch of this whole initiative is learning more about the issue,” Klein said. “Some of what we’ve read has pointed to the fact that many female-led teams are usually in business industries that tend not to be as highly scal able. They’re companies like retail or brick-and-mortar businesses that are entrepre neurial nonetheless but do not have scalability as tech nology companies.”
If a female entrepreneur is interested in starting a com pany, Klein said one of the first things she should do is connect with a number of resources and networks as quickly as possible.
“I think one of the mistakes we see entrepreneurs making is working in isolation on an idea rather than sharing that idea with other people,” Klein said. “You want to get input, get help and have access to those resources that can real ly help your company grow.”
As for whether the battle for gender equality in the entre preneurial space will be won quickly, Klein said it’s too early to tell.
“I think it’s certainly do able but how quickly it will happen is hard to say,” Klein said. “There are plenty of very talented female leaders that graduate from universities every year in the Triangle. The question is: How do we take and create an ecosystem that helps female leaders that want to start a company con nect to the right resources and build and grow a com pany from there?”
SOAR’s first event is launch ing May 1 at the Full Frame Theater at the American To bacco Campus in Durham. The event starts at 10 a.m. and will bring together ven ture capitalists from around the region to talk about the issue of lacking capital for female entrepreneurs as well as the gender gap within the field.
“I just had a daughter,” Klein said. “Just thinking about her future and what kind of community the Tri angle is becoming is exciting. I think it’s going to be really important that the people who are involved in the entre preneurial system continue to try to pay attention to the initiative and think about the structural issues that might be in place. Then we can take a run at fixing or at least bet ter understanding them.”
