When it comes to securing funding for a tech startup, we all know the depressing statistics. Men do better than women, white men do better than black men, they both do better than black women, and if you’re a black woman who openly identifies as lesbian or queer, you’re likely at the bottom of the pile.
Entrepreneur and author Octavia Goderema recently sent us an old but still astonishing statistic. In the decade between 2009 and 2019 in the U.K., just 10 black women received venture capital funding. That’s worth rereading. It’s not 10% of funding going to black women or 10% of black women who applied for funding receiving it. It’s literally just 10 black women getting funding in 10 years.
More recently, 2023 saw black founders receiving 0.48% of venture capital funding in 2023 — and, yes, black women saw a disproportionately small share.
Goderema (born in the U.K. but a longtime transplant to California) has embarked on her own funding journey for her career coaching startup Fire Memos. Her message to other black founders is, don’t look at the probabilities and just give up.
The funding challenge
Goderema recalls coming across the 10 black women in 10 years statistic. “That stopped me dead,” she recalled. “The numbers are just horrific however you cut and dice with the intersection of race, gender and so many other factors. I’m incredibly proud of having secured six figures in funding for Fire Memos to date.”
She also recalled a study that showed that for women founders who were able to get a meeting with a potential investor, the differences in the types of questions they are asked, compared with male founders, are “extraordinary.” Male founders are asked about opportunity, scale and potential; female founders are asked about mitigating risk.
“All those things were top of mind for me, but if you focus on what has been you will never move forward,” she said. “You have to bet on yourself before anyone else will.” Every “no,” she said, is a step towards a “yes.” “It will only move you backwards if you stop.”
The Fire Memos journey
“Fire Memos is a B2B SaaS platform that was founded on January 16 this year. Our aim is to empower employees to record and recognize their accomplishments at work in real time,” Goderema explained. “We do this by fostering the habit of recording your wins on at least a weekly basis. At the end of the month you select your top three and that instigates what we call a ‘check in,’ an AI-powered career conversation.”
The context for this initiative is Goderema’s awareness, from her career coaching background, that people move so fast they simply overlook or forget their achievements if they’re not recorded. Goderema has coached, over the years, at companies like Google and American Airlines. Some kind of written record can demonstrate career momentum that otherwise would not be apparent. “Learning how to self-validate your progress is one of the most powerful things for your career.”
If it’s a B2B business, that means Fire Memos is selling to employers rather than employees, correct? “Yes, to begin with,” she said. “Without a doubt, Fire Memos will eventually be B2B2C because even if your company isn’t going to have a subscription, you will have the option if you want to make the investment.” Business customers can decide not only how many subscriptions to take out, but also how to deploy them, whether it be supporting newly onboarded employees or people in a promotion pipeline.
It’s early days, she said, to know which teams within an organization are going to get the most value out of the solution. She also points out that, in the rapidly growing companies Fire Memos expects to attract, peoples’ roles change constantly.
“We are in the middle of raising our pre-seed round,” she said. “We are 24% of the way there and hope to close that out before Thanksgiving.”
Prep, push, pivot
The advice Goderema has for black woman founders is really an evolution of the career advice for under-represented women in the workplace found in her 2022 book “Prep, Push, Pivot” published by Wiley. Another statistic? “Only seven percent of business books are written by women — that are published, anyway.”
The relevance is that Goderema didn’t know that statistic when she was working with publishers to close her book deal and therefore couldn’t be discouraged by it. “I know I might have to have more conversations [with investors] and might have to hear more noes but I have to keep pushing.”
Goderema was recently talking to another female founder who described how a man with a very similar product was offered three-times the funding that was offered to her. This recalled our recent conversation with Phil Schraeder, the gay CEO of GumGum: “I walk around in my daily life with white privilege and white male privilege as a white gay man.”
Things are not going to change overnight, Goderema acknowledges. “Within the time frame that I have, I have to be prepared to push as hard as I possibly can to move my business forward and continue to secure the capital that we need in order to grow.”
There are, of course, groups that advocate for black women founders. As Goderema observes, they have recently come under pressure. “One of those groups is Fearless Fund, who have been facing an onslaught over the past year in terms of Supreme Court decisions.” Because Fearless Fund looks to invest in businesses led by women of color, they face the same legal challenges that face colleges practicing affirmative action. “It’s becoming harder and harder for organizations that are looking to support black female founders to have the ability to continue to do that.”
In the U.K., Goderema was involved in, not a fund, but a peer-to-peer social enterprise to support black female founders as well as future black women founders through work in schools and mentoring (she was awarded an M.B.E. for this work). She now sees the seeds she planted a decade ago starting to blossom.
She herself has been supported in her journey by the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network and more recently through a Techstars Accelerator program.
“We can’t change the systems within which we have to operate, but we can pay it forward for others,” Goderema said. “We can share what we’ve done.”
