Lessons - Why Women Founders Stay Small and How to Fix It | Sarah Dusek - Under Canvas Co-Founder ($100M Exit) & Enygma Ventures GP

In this lessons episode, discover why mindset and access to funding remain major barriers to entrepreneurial growth. Understand how bigger ambitions can create greater impact. Explore how mentors and networks help build scalable businesses and uncover practical ways to overcome limiting beliefs and think bigger. Another stat that's really concerning and it's shocking, and I always get these shocking stats, which are actually quite depressing when I do these interviews because I speak to the people that are researching them and they're in these worlds. So 3.4% was the funding for women entrepreneurs pre-pandemic. I don't know what the sample was for that. Maybe it's North America. It would probably be North America, yeah. Yeah, but it reduced from 3.4% to 2.4% of overall funding, which is absolutely wild. Those numbers are so horrible. But... I guess if these are the numbers, these are the numbers. Well, and the crazy thing is, is that stat hasn't really, it's not really changed. I mean, yes, that's like a little, but the stat has been around that. I have issue with more of the 3.4% than anything. Like it's like the 3.4%, the 2.4% sucks. But the issue is not that it went from 3.4 to 2.4. The issue is that it started at 3.4. Yeah, exactly. And just that it's been like that for decades. It just hasn't changed, that there's been no major movement in decades. It's not like, oh, last year was a bad year and we had a dip and we were on the up every other year prior to that. No, that's just not the trajectory of how that's been. And, and we're not moving the needle on it and we're not, we're not seeing it change at all. And, and as you said, it's getting worse more than anything. So I, you know, that is a depressing, a depressing stat. And the only thing, there's two things, that will move the needle. Just like when we had to all get real with, it's no longer okay that we hire people that only look like us. We have to start diversifying who we hire and we have to start working a bit harder to find people who don't look like us in our hiring and that becoming a much more mainstream approach. And definitely we're not over that hump yet. But But definitely it's in our radars. Most senior execs would have it in their radars that they should be thinking diversely about hiring for their companies because if nothing else, it will make their companies likely perform better because diverse teams generally perform better. I think we have to have the same realization with venture capital that that actually our portfolios might perform better if we had a more diverse group of people sitting at the table, getting capital and building businesses. And so that's the first thing really, the gatekeepers absolutely have to start thinking differently about it being okay to not be okay to only invest in people that look like them or, you know, a monocultural approach to investing. We've got to do something about that. We've got to do it quickly and we've got to do it overtly. And that means people of color have to be sitting at the table and women have to be sitting at the table. So that's that's the first thing. The second thing is women have got to start thinking bigger. So the other problematic stat is that only two percent of women led businesses ever do more than a million dollars of revenue. So there's a question. Get out. Are you serious? Yes, exactly. So only 2% of all women-led businesses do more than a million dollars of revenue. So women have got to start thinking differently about the women that they build. If we want to be more investable, we've got to be building different kinds of businesses. So that's the thing we can control, right? We can't control the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers have to do that by themselves. But the thing we can control is building bigger, thinking bigger, taking the ceilings off the things that we think about and the things that hold us back to be able to build businesses that are completely different than what we're doing today. And how do we do that? Well, we surround ourselves and we find people to help us think differently than we already think. We get people to help us get unstuck. We get coaches, we get mentors, we belong to associations and networks and we join WPO and EO and organizations. We do what we, you know, our chambers of commerce and we get help because it is okay for us to say, I don't know how to do this. I have no idea how to build a business that does more than a million dollars of revenue. I don't even know how to build a business that does a million dollars of revenue. Get help. Because women, if we don't, this is what we're saddled with, right? And women have to start thinking about building different kinds of businesses and businesses that scale. And we have to give ourselves permission. We have to say we are able, we are capable, and we will find the resources to be able to do that. And we will do it because I think the world needs us to do it. I think the world will be a much better place for all of us if women do it. And yes, I know we have childcare responsibilities and, you know, an unequal burden for managing our homes and managing our children's lives. But it is possible to do it. We just need to ask for help and not be afraid to ask for help. Do you notice in some of the women founders and entrepreneurs that you work with, they had a vision when they came in and when they raised money from you, but then being in your ecosystem, just being around you all the time and having these different conversations, do you see the vision start to change? 100%. Absolutely. It's almost like... you give women permission. And when I first hear them pitch and they, they give me their realistic pitch. And then I say, okay, let's multiply that by a hundred. Let's think about doing that a hundred times bigger than you're imagining today. And then they go, oh, Okay, all right, let's do that. And it's not like, it suddenly is like, oh no, I can't do that. It's like somebody giving you permission to think like that. Somebody saying, that's not overly ambitious. That's not inappropriate for you. we could do this. Let's do that. And then suddenly that's a game changer for women, because then you've taken off the mindset that you've maybe come to the table with, and someone has helped you shift your thinking. And you're surrounded by other women who are thinking the same, which is really powerful, because then you don't feel like you're crazy. Then you just feel like, oh, this feels much more normal. And that's what we need for women. We need it to feel much more normal to be talking about doing $100 million of revenue. That needs to be normal. Well, if you equate it to that stat you just dropped, you said less than 2% do a million. So say that there's probably a stat for men and it's going to be much higher, I would assume. So say that I'm going to pick a random number, say 50%. So that just means that 5 out of 10 of your friends have had businesses in your peer group, have had businesses, if you're an entrepreneur, that have done over a million. So that's normal. It's almost like if you don't do over a million, then you're actually in the minority. Nope. normal it's not normal exactly so if you take that if you take another equal peer group of of 10 women and two percent that means that well that means like one like with two uh two or no sorry that's that'd be 20 that would be yeah so that would be like less than less than one and maybe none in that particular sample size of 10 people has ever done a business of of over a million. So then all the conversations you have with everybody every single day casually is going to be like, well, you know, my business does this and it's basically a glorified job and it's making $200,000, $300,000 or $500,000, $600,000. That's pretty much a normal conversation. If these stats are valid, that's wild. And that would totally be a game changer. It would completely impact how I view business. Yeah, totally. Because you'd be surrounded by people who were having different conversations than you were having. And your normal would now be a different normal. And the amazing thing about our normals changing is that when our normal changes, a whole load of other people's normals are changed, right? So imagine the difference your business can make if you go from doing $1 million in revenue to $10 million in revenue. Imagine how many jobs you just created. Imagine how many single moms just put their kids through school or college or whatever. Imagine what you are able to do by building a bigger business. And I often think women think it's like inappropriate to build something big. It's because we don't want to be seen to be like, you know, we don't want to be like the boys. We don't want to be like the boys club, right? It's ugly and we, you know, capitalism's ugly and, you know. There's lots about it that we can't identify with. But when you start thinking about the impact that my business could have when I'm a $10 million revenue business or a $20 million revenue business as opposed to a $100,000 business. The impact's extraordinary. You know, the number of lives, the number of people's families, the education people can get, you know, the opportunities that people will have. It's just totally different. And the impact and the causes that we care about, we have a platform for them. And that we can do something about and we can drive change. And, you know, and I think when women have wealth, they have more choices. They potentially have the opportunity to have better lives. And, you know, the ripple effects for our communities will be extraordinary. And that's, you know, that's what we've got to start wrapping our brains around and not just thinking, well, I don't think I can. But start asking ourselves, why can I not? Why can I not do that? And what's it going to take for me to make that happen? And start putting yourself in the room where you don't feel like you belong today, but spending 10 minutes in that room will make you feel like, no, if they can do it, I can definitely do it. And that's what we need to do. We're putting ourselves in rooms where people are doing bigger and better things than we're doing. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.