Last year, I was driving home from a startup pitch event, perturbed that only one company had a female founder. Out of ~12 companies, only ONE was led by a woman. If your a regular reader of this blog, then you know in my day job, I run a PR agency that does a fair amount of startup PR. Of the dozens and dozens of startups we’ve worked with, I can count our female clients on one hand. Crazy, right?
Did you know only 30% of all companies in the US are owned by women? In the documentary Miss Representation, there’s a line, “You can’t be what you don’t see..” Presumably, the converse of that is true: “See it. Be it.” When young girls and women see other women successfully starting businesses, they’ll start more businesses.
That’s why supporting women-owned businesses and amplifying the stories of women who are doing amazing things is important to me.
With this in mind, I’m excited to introduce theEM.co, where EM = empowerment. The idea is simple: Empower women through entrepreneurship by supporting female founders with investment, mentorship, networking and collaboration.
As a board member for The Women’s Fund, I’ve learned that philanthropy isn’t limited to people who donate millions of millions of dollars. Anyone can be a philanthropist by giving a combination of their time, treasures and talents. Similarly, I think more of us can be valuable investors in early-stage companies. While everyone may not be in a position to invest dollars, we can all invest our time and talents to empower women. And, who doesn’t have a little time to invest in women?
Through theEM.co, I’ll be supporting three styles of investment and encouraging others to invest in one (or more!) of these ways as well:
- Investing money. Funding is often a key part of launching and growing a company, and women typically receive less investment dollars than men. That’s why theEM.co will invest money in a handful of female-founded startups each year. While this won’t solve the problem, it is a step toward changing the ratio. I’ve already invested in one company started by the talented Marissa Hu, and look forward to supporting additional emerging companies in the coming months.
- Investing time. Networking, introductions, providing feedback, and offering advice – all no-cost initiatives that simply take time. Dedicating time to help any entrepreneur, especially female, is invaluable. For me, theEM.co simply formalizes what I’ve been doing – lending time and talents to women who are building amazing businesses.
- Investing in community. And finally, theEM.co believes in taking an active, participatory role in communities that empower women. Celebrate successes. Learn from each other. Facilitate connections. Build partnerships. As the community grows, we all grow.
Whether you’ve already started your own company, or you’re just discovering your entrepreneurial spirit, I hope you’ll subscribe to theEM.co’s enewsletter. It’s one part connector, one part motivator and one part educational:
Starting tomorrow, we’ll be sharing 30 ideas in 30 days on Facebook. Each day, we’ll suggest a new, relatively easy way that you can invest in women-owned businesses. If you’ve got a tip to help us support women in business, share it in the comments, and maybe we’ll feature it during our 30-day push!
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P.S. This doesn’t impact prTini or Geben at all. While Geben works with a variety of clients, about half or work is in the tech/startup space, so there are certainly some synergies between that and theEM.co; however, Geben, and our clients, are still my top priority. theEM.co is something I was compelled to do to help empower women. Periodically, I’ll share updates here on prTini, but you can continue to count on the same PR-focused content that you’ve come to expect on this blog.