The female unicorn: how quotas can help
The next crop of tech unicorns — $1 billion-plus start-ups — will be started by women.
The next crop of tech unicorns — $1 billion-plus start-ups — will be started by women, says Expert360 co-founder Bridget Loudon, but making that a reality could potentially require putting in quotas to help them move up the ranks.
Speaking at the The Australian and Credit Suisse’s Sharing Success forum in Melbourne yesterday, Ms Loudon said that it was critical to get women into every stage of the technology ecosystem — but that would require patience.
“What we need is to have women in each of the important stakeholder roles whether as investors, lawyers, accountants or entrepreneurs,” she said.
“People inherently invest in, hire and do business with people who are like them, so we need to invest the time and effort to get more women into the system.”
The Sydney-based Expert360 is aimed at disrupting the consulting market. The start-up, which counts Qantas, Virgin, eBay and Mastercard as clients, matches freelance consultants with businesses seeking advice and has recently opened a US office.
One potential pathway to fostering change across the technology sector, according to Ms Loudon, could be the use of quotas that mandate roles for women.
“I was previously somewhat averse to the idea of quotas but then I realised that unless we put them in place women are not going to put themselves forward,” she said
“This is not about putting people who are incapable of fulfilling the role; it’s about creating a space, creating a mechanism that gets women to put their hand up.”
According to Ms Loudon, there’s a gap in the start-up culture between men getting the resources to solve problems inherently specific to their gender and women getting the funding to do the same.
Bridging that gap could open the doors to future billion-dollar business, Ms Loudon said, citing the example of subscription businesses that focus on women’s products.
“We have had a business like Dollar Shave Club sold for $1 billion; they are in the subscription razor business, but what’s the women’s equivalent of that business? Tampons. And that business was started recently and backed by venture capitalists.
“So for me this ‘chic coefficient’ is a real thing and there will be big unicorns started by women provided the venture capitalists are willing to back them up.”
“Entrepreneurship is about solving problems and there are a lot of these issues inherent to women that have not been addressed.”
Square Peg Capital founder Paul Bassat, also speaking at the forum, said that diversity was critical to building successful start-ups. Mr Bassat said that the Australian agricultural sector had been criminally neglected amid all the talk of disruption and innovation. “The biggest opportunity for Australia is food and as a country we are playing that poorly at the moment,” he said.
Meanwhile, businessman Alex Waislitz told the forum that aspiring entrepreneurs needed to recalibrate the entire notion of addressable market.
“When you think about markets and which ones are the biggest, we talk about China and India, but if you look at it, Facebook has more people on it than either of these countries: it’s the biggest global market.”
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