@firstround publishes a yearly #startups survey and the results are in - hugely useful data for all founders of all genders. But we have some thoughts when you look a little closer... stateofstartups.firstround.com/2018/
1. Only 17% of respondents were women, and results are not broken up by gender. So it calls into question finding #1, that most founders believe AGE is the #1 investor bias in tech.
1a. Obviously, if 83% of respondents are men, and never personally experience gender bias, this finding is massively biased itself.
2. A similar thought with finding #9: big tech has a perception problem: 77% of respondents think tech giants are PERCEIVED as evil, but only 50% think they actually ARE behaving badly. Who wants to guess what this would look like if the survey has a more robust gender split?
2a. Hint: 100% of those who participated in the #googlewalkout think @Google is behaving badly.
2b. For the record: we don't believe any large tech company is inherently evil. But we do think there's a lot of room for improvement in our industry's collective behavior. And also: where there's a will, there's a way!
3. Finally, a sad statement for future gender equity in #VentureCapital: respondents believe that the next generation of great startup founders will come from @Uber , @SlackHQ, @stripe and @Airbnb - all very promising companies with at least a stated commitment to diversity.
3a. That said: all of these companies at best have ~30% female leaders & in technical roles, and between them, only a handful of female board members. If they are training the next generation of founders, the future is going to look a lot like the present.
3b. We see differently - #femalefounders come from non-traditional backgrounds, and yet they outperform all-male teams (see @BCG study that proves #femalefounders return 2x the revenue per dollar invested): bcg.com/en-us/publicat…
3c. Also see: @firstround's very own findings that their female-founded or co-founded portfolio companies outperformed their peers by 63%: 10years.firstround.com
WE BELIEVE: The future is what we make of it. And we're making a bet that #femalefounders will change the world. Watch this space in 2019 for our own data and findings on what the world will look like for #femalefounders
