Creative Collaboration: Women-Led Start-Ups Standing Stronger Together

What Women-Led Start Ups Do That Every Business Could Learn From is Creative Collaboration.

What we hear about women-led start up ventures, far too often, are the dismal funding statistics - female founders got roughly 2% of venture capital in 2017.

What we don’t hear enough about is this - Despite these staggering funding gaps, or perhaps in spite of them, women led ventures continue to outperform their male counterparts in just about every metric.

Female owned firms generate higher revenues than their male counterparts and they create more jobs. Women executives significantly improve start-up company performance. Women are known to be more effective in senior leadership roles. Women have a higher appetite for growth.

Living in a such a dismal funding landscape women entrepreneurs have had to become fiercely savvy in creating and building businesses. Women have long understood that access to cash is a struggle, so those embarking on start-up journeys know from the get go that they have to build a healthy and sustainable foundation for their businesses if they are to survive. They have to be hungrier, smarter, streamlined, efficient, and practical.

After endless years of institutional bias, it’s generationally ingrained in women to do so.

Now this is not to suggest that the institution bias against women in entrepreneurship, or in any other financial or social realm, has in any way benefitted women. Let’s be clear.  It has not. But it does seem, at a minimum, it’s about time we acknowledge, take note, and learn from these female founders.

And what they are doing with deft and acuity is collaborating.

You don’t need to look too far to see how women entrepreneurs are building, shaping and creating spaces and frameworks for community and collaboration. Women supporting women is the strength of women’s entrepreneurship and crux of keeping their operations lean and successful.

Take for example, the explosion of women’s co-working. Seattle-based The Riveter offers coworking ‘built for women’ and now has multiple locations in Seattle and in LA with plans to open in 6 other cities across the nation including Austin, Atlanta, Portland, Dallas, Denver, and Minneapolis. Similarly expanding, New York based The Wing provides a social club for women, including coworking, and states its mission as the advancement of women through community.  

Online communities like THE JILLS OF ALL TRADES™  are focusing on the growing freelance economy and aggregating a too often fragmented group of women freelancers and consultants, into an online collective of independent professionals. THE JILLS, as their members are dubbed, provide diverse services to businesses of every scale from solos and start-ups to small businesses and corporate giants.  They aim to create a ‘sisterhood for solos’ and tout the merits for women to work as independents and reinforce that this should not equate to working alone.

The newly founded, Madison based, DirectorHERy seeks to connect women-owned businesses with consumers who want to see them prosper through their online directory. And SheEO is tackling the female funding gap, by mobilizing women to build communities to support and fund women entrepreneurs through their model of ‘radical generosity’.

Women want to see women succeed. They know there are droves of amazingly talented women, like themselves, who are eager to work and create, having found very little of what they need or want in traditional workplace settings. They’re their friends, and neighbors, they meet at the gym, at playgroups and book clubs and more recently they’re finding each other through women based co-working spaces and digital community-based platforms.

They are building each other up and encouraging and designing a future of work that works for women. They know the critical importance of developing collaborative, reciprocal relationships within their communities to build their knowledge, their skills, and their teams. They are using collaboration to build businesses and build wealth. They are modeling and leading a new economy - the future of work.

For women led ventures, collaboration is winning over competition and building a strong ecosystem for women entrepreneurs to continue to grow and thrive.

If any of us is to find our path in the new economy, it’s about time we start to look at the women who are leading the way for us, and figure out how we might catch up.

Women- We Have The Power 💪🏼💪🏽💪🏾💪🏿

Women- we have the power to create the working world we want.

And it's not necessarily about shattering glass ceilings. And it might not be about 'leaning in'. 

It's about defining ambition... for yourself. 

Now that might mean the corner office, and the big salary, and the important title, if that's how you define success.  

But it might also mean a self-determined schedule so you can pick your kids up from school, or stay home during the day with babies and toddlers, or keep tabs on your teens while you also find time for your aging parents. 

Your ideas of success might include bopping around to different cities or different countries as you pop in and out of remote desks and offices and even apartments around the world. 

It might mean dabbling in your art, teaching yoga, and generating income on a project by project basis with your talent for visuals and quick wit on social media. 

Your ideas for success might mean time for travel, time for friends, time to read, time to write, and time to keep fit. 

You may be a part-time creative, full time parent, loving and committed daughter, with a clean house and a home cooked meal for anyone who arrives.

This may be your vision for ambition.  And it's critical that we honor and recognize all of these pursuits as ambitious and worthy of financial viability and financial security. 

For too long women have been told that in order to be successful, for their work and their lives to really count, they should want big salaries and big offices.  We've been told that we have to 'step away from ambition' to raise kids, and we have been told to accept and expect that 're-entry' after 'time out' from that singular ambition has inevitable and just consequences. In fact, we have entrenched systems that support this inevitability. We have come to accept the story we're being told about what ambition women want. 

And it is an acceptance of these systems that promote a one size fits all definition of ambition that indeed preserves this system. We have all become comfortable with it. There are more men named John and James at the helm of Fortune 500 companies than all the women leaders. There's roughly a 20% pay gap between women and men working the same positions with women receiving 80% of what men do.  Just under 20% of the US Congress comprises of women. 

And yet, we all know many, many women who are doing remarkable things every single day for themselves, their families, their communities, their companies, their organizations and for each other. And they may or may not be running a Fortune 500 company. 

Aren't these women also ambitious? Isn't their work also valid and valuable? 

We know, that, of course, it is. But if we are to change the tide and create the working world we really want for ourselves, then women must begin to tell new stories of ambition and we must honor and support these stories. 

It is the danger of the single story of an ambitious women that limits our potential. 

And so let's start to create the working world we want. A working world that honors, celebrates and supports, both socially and economically, the multitude of women's stories of ambition.  

We can shape a new working landscape for ourselves and for the future.

We will rise by lifting each other.