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Melissa Hanna worked hard to sit at the table of Silicon Valley's biggest investors. However, she did not think she would be described as "brave" and "cute" – especially by presenting her all-in-one platform to manage the care of pregnant women and children, Mahmee. But she did it.
"One of the problems that under-represented founders, like me, face today, is that we do not have the usual track record compared to the previous generation of Silicon Valley founders." ", she told Business Insider. "We are not part of the San Francisco White Boys Club, Palo Alto."
It should not be surprising that white men receive most of the funding at risk. Investors are more likely to give capital to those who look like them – on paper and in person. And even if companies built by black women generate millions of dollars, they receive 0.0006% of risk capital, according to the Diane project. However, statistics like this one do not stop founders like Hanna.
Held at a higher level
Hanna founded Mahmee in Los Angeles with her mother, Linda Hanna, in 2014, when they found the gap between large health care providers and networks of independent maternity care professionals who are not physicians like nutritionists or badfeeding specialists.
In 2015, Mahmee participated in the start-up venture capital fund and the seed accelerator, 500 startups, while Hanna and her team developed their all-in-one platform, which connects health systems to maternity experts. Soon she was in fundraising mode: face-to-face with high-level venture capital firms.
But after leaving a meeting a few years ago, she felt helpless. In a room filled with men, a senior investor began to question his law degree because he had never heard of Southwestern University, the private college in Georgetown, Texas, where Hanna had received a full scholarship.
"It was difficult for me to introduce the rest of the group and the other men because he was older, they did not say anything or prevent that from happening," she said.
In a study conducted by Morgan Stanley in December 2018, investors questioned did not "see the significant funding imbalance" that characterized the founding women, despite the "imbalance of investment decisions" and the maintenance of stricter standards. for minorities.
Calling brave investors
The number of black women entrepreneurs doubles each year, but the percentage of venture capital raised is virtually non-existent. Of the $ 424.7 billion in funding raised since 2009, only $ 289 million went to black women.
This kind of transactional inequality between capital guards and minority entrepreneurs is what Hanna called a two-way street.
"We can help more people of color to train STEM, we can create more programs that help start-up founders grow their business, we can do everything we can to help founders and their businesses," he said. said Hanna in an internal interview of the business community. "But investors must also be brave enough to take risks and invest in people who do not look like them."
The increase in the number of women of color in the digital space with organizations such as Google's Black Girls Code and Women Techmakers is more important than ever. But the increase in the number of women belonging to a minority in the technology pipeline is only part of the equation, the other half being the fight against hypocrites investors – something " we can not change ourselves, "said Hanna.
"I see people who are proud of themselves and who are very proud to say that they support diversity and inclusion and that they are interested in meetings with founders. not typical, "said Hanna. "It's great, but meetings do not fund, people take meetings all day, they do not check."
Mahmee plans to expand to Pittsburgh in 2019, where she will begin to tackle the city's rising infant mortality rates.
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