In the current age of entrepreneurial spirit, we’re seeing increasingly larger numbers of women leading major corporations as well as some of the most exciting innovative startups today.
We’ve seen women executives take prominent leadership roles at large companies like GM, Facebook, Yahoo, and Hewlett Packard. In the startup world there are increasing numbers of women entrepreneurs starting and leading some of the highest profile and innovative companies that are likely to be leading companies in our future.
This is just the beginning of increasing number of women leading companies into the future.
There’s a proliferation of incubators and accelerators occurring around the world supporting entrepreneurs and their vision and passion to build successful companies.
In the US, two leading incubators have focused exclusively on women – ASTIA and Springboard Enterprises. They each have helped fund over 100 women-led startups and supported funding of over $1 billion for women-led companies.
In Europe there’s a platform call The Next Women. It’s a community of investors, advisors, and entrepreneurs supporting female entrepreneurs and building a powerful networking community. They are providing access to capital, resources and networks, offering support infrastructure critical for success.
The US government caught on to both this need and opportunity to support women entrepreneurs and created a group called Startup Women last year, which is a partnership between Startup Weekend and Startup America. This is a new initiative supporting female entrepreneurs around the world with a bold target of supporting 1,500 women led startups by the end of this year. They have received significant support and backing from Google for Entrepreneurs #40Forward Campaign, and the Blackstown Charitable Foundation. It’s extremely encouraging to see the government take an active and leading role supporting female entrepreneurs.
There’s also group in San Francisco called Women 2.0. It’s a new platform and community focused on supporting women entrepreneurs that creates content, community and events for aspiring and current innovators in technology.
We believe more women-centric incubators will be starting around the globe to support the vision and success of women entrepreneurs.
The key to inspiring women entrepreneurs starts at an early age.
This is a key time to offer the early stage woman entrepreneur support with funding, mentorship, advisory and partnership opportunities to enhance and accelerate their success.
As we know, education is the key and foundation for future success and more women around the globe are being given the opportunity, resources and tools to get the education for business and careers, which used to be focused primarily on male students.
It’s critical to offer and attract young women at the high school level to take courses in business design, coding, and engineering to give them a window into the future career opportunities they can pursue.
On-going support with funding, mentorship, advisory and partnership opportunities will enhance and accelerate success
There’s a brilliant new company Levo League, which calls themselves a social good startup, that elevates young women in the workforce. They do this by providing career resources to women of all ages, enhancing their skills, resources, and network to achieve personal and professional success.
In the Bay Area, a group called Broad Ventures Leadership provides high level advice and community building to women leaders in business politics and social change. They specifically address and support challenges and issues affecting women in positions of prominence and high power. This is great news for women leaders and for male leaders working with women as they become more influential and impactful in leading the change for our future.
Supporting female entrepreneurs is a Mindful principle.
While we at Mindful Ventures select each of our entrepreneurs based on their talent, passion, and drive, we’ve had the good fortune to invest quite successfully in women led companies.
We are seeing a flurry of new companies led by brilliant and passionate young female entrepreneurs who have great merit and promise for both the economic returns that they will generate for investors as well as the positive impact their companies will have on our lives.
Many of the female entrepreneurs’ businesses are in the area of health, where we are focused on investing. We believe that many of the leading companies in our future will be founded and led by this new breed of women entrepreneurs and we are eager to support them.
