Fundraising while female

These are our lives. This is not a game.

Originally published on LinkedIn, February 2023

My experience #fundraising while female, in all its naked truth and nuance:

- You go in knowing the facts: <2% of venture dollars historically have gone to you.
- You strategize day and night -- how do I use my talents, my network, even my privilege to change the odds?
- You play the game, and in playing the game you realize: you are perpetuating the problem.
- You go in believing your strongest supporters will be other women in positions of financial power and influence. You do a double take: you realize this is the group most likely to judge you with a "prove yourself to me" critique. You love them and empathize nonetheless. To get to where they are, they underwent many a metamorphosis too. It turned them into pure steel, gold and teflon. Formidable. Impenetrable.
- You realize at some point that your style and tone of conversation is antithetical to the entire competitive BDE process itself. You collage shit on your wall to keep your confidence up and realize you spelled out "Gentle Witch Power" out of torn magazine words. Is that the same?
- 9 out of 10 passes don't affect you. After all, you're well on your way to becoming steel, gold and teflon yourself. But 1 out of 10 floor you for reasons you don't rationally understand. You workout to shake off the energy of not enough-ness.
- You do irrational things to stay resilient, just because they return you to yourself: you do you hair, you wear something that makes you feel strong even though zoom will only see you neck up, you lay on the floor to calm your nervous system between meetings.
- You become a hustler. Your output becomes unmatched. Your ability to manage hundreds of stakeholders daily gives you dreams of email, CRMs and spreadsheets.
- You get triggered by the gaslighting and then get numb to it. Half of investors don't write back. Half do write with feedback so short and kind you find yourself craving the real truth.

This, dear LinkedIn, is THE GAME. The one we don't speak about. Because we want what we want from it. And if we speak about it, the voice masquerading as wisdom tells us, we will weaken. We will push people away. We will lose.

AND YET! In the very same journey, I have found:

- People who believe. In us. And in me.
- People who see the future we see
- People who make me and the business better
- People who give so generously of their time, connections, and experience it expands my belief in the innate goodness of humanity
- And yes, capital

I have enough experience now to make a choice: I can double down in my playing of the game, or I can discern when to play it, and when to go rogue for the sake of a deeper mission.

The best capital comes from people I don't need to hide from or shapeshift for.

To truly add diversity to business-building, we all - investors, founders, operators - need to become more comfortable speaking the truth of how crippled we all become when we abandon the truth of our experience.

These are our lives. This is not a game.

Cristina