Why is it so important to hold a summit completely focused on supporting women and empowering minority-run businesses?
As a co-founder of the VentureFWD Summit, I have to say that the event, the countless emails, calls, texts, tweets, Slack messages, and actually maintaining sanity -- all could not have been possible without my partners (Ric Gruber and Kevin Roemer) and the rest of our amazing team. The VentureFWD (For Women & Diversity) Summit and events like it are opportunities to significantly help create a platform for open discussion around scaling a business and seeking capital. These are critical issues for any entrepreneur and all individuals interested in their professional growth.
Here in the United States, one in five companies with a revenue of $1 million+ is woman-owned. One in five! Zooming in on Chicago, you can see the incredible work being done by women and minority entrepreneurs everyday with incubators like 1871 that support entrepreneurs from all walks of life and groups like Women Tech Founders, thanks to Terri Brax; and Black Tech Mecca, thanks to Fabian Elliott. But, even with this great support, looking around you’ll still find significant barriers. For some it’s hitting a wall on raising investment dollars, struggling to get a meeting with a potential client or VC, being taken seriously in meetings, overcoming the “I gotta guy” reality, and or being shut down from the get-go because the founding team “looks different”. It’s sad, but it’s true. This stuff happens every day.
I’ve been in the startup scene in Chicago for several years and nothing like VentureFWD existed. After attending networking events, panel discussions, summits, and conferences and seeing the same faces or same demographic of individuals on stage event after event it was clear. My colleagues at Brandless and I took the opportunity to help change that. I personally like Kanye West’s call to action, creating something that ‘shifts paradigm’, an event that is solely focused on supporting women and minority entrepreneurs. And creates an encouraging space for facilitating connections to investment capital and opportunity. The importance is beyond the day to day and leads both you and I, and the community to higher levels of success, greater chances of excelling, and is empowering to those around us and generations to come.
What is the goal of VentureFWD? How do you hope it helps minority and women entrepreneurs?
The goal of VentureFWD is to make a fundamental change in the approach to how we do business together. It’s a one day event aimed to help bring awareness to the major obstacles women and minority entrepreneurs - from tech to financial to healthcare and beyond - face every day. For the crew at Brandless, we proudly check off five of the six ethnicity boxes on government forms, plus ‘other’. I’m psyched I get to work with such a diverse group of people with a very forward view on procuring opportunities for women and men from all walks of life. And that we can have real conversations about our different backgrounds, views and opinions. We share the same goal: We want to see diverse groups of people on the stage at every type of event around the nation, as the norm. And one way we can help get there is by providing an open forum of ideas (especially important with our current political climate!), a chance to be #UnitedTogether as we say around our office. Most of all, to have some fun doing it! Words I live by, “business gets done when people have fun.”
Besides, the annual summit held this past year on September 23rd, what future events do you have coming up?
The sky's the limit here! We’re bringing VentureFWD to San Francisco (February 2017) and Boston (Spring 2017). And of course, VentureFWD returns to Chicago in Fall 2017! If you’re interested, be sure to check us out here to reserve your spot and keep up to date on speaker announcements and official dates: VentureFWD. Outside of that, at this point, I can only say that we’re working on a few other events in stealth mode and I will definitely keep you looped in!