Attracting a sponsor takes more than doing good work. It takes more than delivering above expectations and getting it right every time. It takes more than offering to do work outside your scope and beyond your responsibilities.
Because while doing all …
My grandmother had a saying for when I used to complain about something–“Well, black folks, especially black women, are the mules of the world. We work full-time jobs, are full-time mothers, and are full-time caretakers of the community. …
“I was super excited,” Tanya Garcia tells Fast Company.
And no wonder. In 2017, when she was just 30 years old, Garcia got promoted to director of operations at a Phoenix-area renovation company that worked on foreclosed homes. “It was kind of that moment where you’re like, ‘Okay, this is it. I’m really making it,’” she says.
But soon after, during a meeting with an area manager at Opendoor, a startup that helps people buy and sell homes online, everything changed. “The passion coming out of this guy’s mouth” translated into curiosity to learn more about what the team was working on and the company itself. So while she was happy with her current situation, what she discovered about the fast-growing startup piqued her interest enough to explore the possibility of working for them.
There was a hitch.
“I looked at the job postings,” says Garcia. “I didn’t see anything that was for my level, so to speak, but I applied anyway.” She figured if they ever did have something more advanced, they might reach back out to her.
OpenDoor’s recruiter didn’t wait. He called and asked if she wanted to come onboard as an estimator. Garcia was initially crestfallen, knowing it would be a step down from her recently hard-won promotion. “I do have experience in it,” she remembers telling the recruiter politely, “but it’s not quite what I’m doing now.” He reasoned that she should at least have the conversation, so Garcia agreed.
“When I talked to the hiring manager, that passion, that belief in what the company is really is a constant,” she explains. “From recruiting, to vendor management, to the hiring manager, and he really sold me.” Garcia remembers him saying that they realized it was a step down, but they were interested in her talent and the potential she could bring to the company’s rapid growth. He told her to at least consider it.
For most people, this would be considered career suicide. How would you explain to any prospective employer going forward that you willingly decided to step down when career trajectories are traditionally upwardly mobile? Millennials like Garcia are particularly interested in getting consistent raises and promotions because they’d prefer (contrary to the stereotypical job hopper) to stay at one company for years. A recent survey of 1,500 millennial workers conducted by Qualtrics revealed that 90% of millennials said they’d stick to one employer for the next decade if they knew they’d get annual raises and upward career mobility. But it’s not always about the money. More than half (64%) of employees surveyed say that they’d take a higher job title without a raise, up from 55% in 2011, according to a report from staffing firm OfficeTeam.
“I had my doubts,” Garcia confesses. “What if this doesn’t work? What if it’s the wrong move? I worked so hard to get to where I was at at the moment.” Garcia’s wife was also questioning the move. She recalls conversations where they debated what would happen if it didn’t work out, and her wife pointing out the perception problem that there might have been trouble from the previous company, or worse, that maybe it was her who was the problem.
In the end, Garcia’s faith in her intuition and the work ethic she says she inherited from her mother prevailed, and she took the lower position, which also meant a 15% pay cut. This, she says, wasn’t terrible because of her spouse’s income making up the shortfall. And she wasn’t on the lower rung of the ladder for long. Garcia has had three promotions since she was hired two years ago, and she’s now head of home operations.
Looking back, Garcia says her age was definitely a factor in making the leap backward. “I’m young enough and I work hard enough so that if it doesn’t work out, I can get through it and work my way up again, even if I start at the bottom,” she says.
With a supportive spouse and no dependents, Garcia was easily able to take the risk of a step down. The stakes get higher the further up the corporate ladder you climb, though. But it’s a move many women elect to make to balance their family obligations. Research from McKinsey and LeanIn.org suggests that women don’t get promoted as often as men, but anecdotally, organizations interviewed by Fast Company say they are losing women at around the seven- to nine-year career mark because of the demands of caregiving.
Ketchum’s CEO Barri Rafferty recalls making that very difficult choice when she was head of the company’s global brand marketing practice. The job was one she had coveted for a long time and worked hard to get. However, she tells Fast Company, “I had two young children, and the intense travel and frequent need to be in the office late at night for overseas conference calls wasn’t aligning with my personal needs.” This occurred despite the company’s efforts to scale the job to make it easier for her to balance both.
Ultimately, Rafferty says she ended up leaving New York to take a new role leading the Atlanta office. “Many questioned my decision, they thought it was a step backward, or at least sideways, that would affect my ability to move upward in the long term,” she remembers.
But for Rafferty, the move was proof positive that she made the right decision. She didn’t have to take a pay cut, even though she stepped away from a global role. And in addition to helping balance her personal responsibilities, Rafferty says the move gave her the chance to broaden her skills. Learning to run a P&L on her own, says Rafferty, was key to helping her catapult back to New York to run the New York headquarters after two and a half years.
From there, Rafferty resumed her climb. She served as head of North America and global president before becoming Ketchum’s global CEO last year. “The decision to take a step down taught me about the importance of understanding your whole self and admitting what’s working and what’s not working,” she contends. “You only live once, so make sure you are enjoying it.”
For others contemplating a similar move, Garcia says it’s important to pay attention to your attitude. “I had many internal struggles, but I chose not to focus on them,” she says. “I tend to make decisions and stick to them, which in a way, made this easier for me.”
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When Polly Rodriguez started sexual wellness company Unbound, she struggled to find her place among male-dominated tech entrepreneur circles. “It was hard to be taken seriously in general because of the products that we were selling,” Rodriguez says. “And I grew up in the Midwest from a lower-middle-class background–so there was no one in my life that had started a business before.”
Instead, she turned to some of the enclaves for women founders in New York. “I think that’s how I ended up building a massive network of female founders,” she says. “I absolutely would not be here today if I didn’t have them to turn to.”
You’ll hear similar accounts from other female founders, many of whom feel shut out of more traditional networks of mentors and entrepreneurs. (Not to mention they’re starved for venture capital dollars, which are largely reserved for male founders: In 2018, just 2.3% of total capital went to women entrepreneurs.) Elle Huerta gave up on general networking events while starting Mend, a self-care app for heartbreak. “It was always interesting to me that a lot of people–men especially–couldn’t be imaginative about something that they didn’t have direct experience with,” she says. “This is something a lot of us experienced, so after a while, I stopped going to those events because they were just a waste of my time. I was like, ‘It would be more valuable for me just to go home, focus on building my company, and get traction so that I can be taken seriously.’”
For these women, building out networks of their own–much like the “mafias” of homogeneous founders spawned by tech exits–can be key to their success. In Silicon Valley, the moneyed alumni of tech heavyweights–and soon, the likes of Airbnb and Uber–have long offered guidance and financial backing to their peers and friends. For investors, entrepreneurs with that pedigree can seem like a sure bet. “They are looking for any indication or sense of validity because they’re inundated with pitches,” Rodriguez says. “You see time and time again that the generation of PayPal and Facebook went on to fund the next companies that went on to fund the next companies. And that’s largely because the VCs are like, Well, if he did well there, he’ll do well here, too. For women, we don’t have those examples to point to because all of us are basically first-time founders.”
Rodriguez often felt that potential mentors and investors in the Valley evaluated her work largely on the merits of her tech stack, and how it ranked against tech companies in more traditional verticals. “But I think women get it,” she says. “They get that making products is really hard. Branding is hard. Marketing is hard. It just doesn’t demand the same respect in the world of Silicon Valley when it comes to mentorship.”
What Rodriguez and Huerta also found was that female entrepreneurs were more candid about the challenges they had faced. “One of the reasons we bonded was because we all have this shared experience—the categories that we were in were ones where it was harder to raise money,” Huerta says of a circle of women entrepreneurs she frequently turns to, which includes Rodriguez. “But I have continued to really cultivate the relationships I have with my friends who are female founders of companies because they are so open and honest.”
If female founders tend to share more about the hurdles they’ve faced while fundraising or, say, hiring, Rodriguez believes it’s partly due to a lack of confidence. Finding a group of women founders who talk candidly about their experiences can also help silence one’s inner critic. “I think women are so much more forthright because we are more pragmatic,” she says. “We have to be. So when an investor is pressing you and is like, ‘Is there a possibility that this will fail?’ Most women are going to respond with, ‘Well, yeah.’”
Eva Goicochea, the founder of sex essentials startup Maude, has found these groups invaluable but wishes male peers were as forthcoming. “I would say the real value comes from the honesty around the topics,” she says. “I would love for men to be in the room if they would say they don’t have everything figured out. So yes, I’m pro-women and pro-women’s groups, but I’m also like, ‘Can we all just be honest about what it takes to build a startup?’”
What competition?
Of course, carving out a female-friendly space isn’t just about camaraderie—it’s also good for business and helps lay the groundwork for a new ecosystem of female founders and investors. When Mend tested an ad-supported model of its app in late 2018, Huerta broached Rodriguez, who agreed to sign on as their first advertiser. (As a company in the sex tech space, Unbound has to contend with countless ad regulations, so advertising opportunities are harder to come by.) “I know Unbound really well,” she says. “I know what their mission is, and I believe in what they’re doing. So I have no problem introducing that brand to our audience. I can feel good about that, and it’s mutually beneficial.”
On Valentine’s Day, Mend put out a gift box, for which she collaborated with a number of founders in her network, including Unbound but also the minds behind vitamin startup Ritual and feminine wellness care brand Queen V. And in February, Mend hosted an event with Maude in its Brooklyn space, free of charge. “That kind of thing makes such a big difference when you’re a startup and don’t have a big marketing budget,” Huerta says.
Unbound and Mend have both also benefitted from tie-ups with founders and companies that are much further along. Mend has done multiple events with social networking platform Bumble. “Being able to plug into that audience has been huge for us,” Huerta says. “For them, we’re a drop in the bucket. So when a company that’s really been able to scale collaborates with smaller female-founded companies–which they’re doing all the time–that really helps.”
And according to Rodriguez, having Zola founder Shan-Lyn Ma as an investor and adviser for Unbound has shown her what it must be like to have the boys’ club at your disposal. “I didn’t know what a good adviser looked like until she became one of our advisers,” she says. “She opened up her network to me in a way that I was like, ‘Oh, this is how the men do it.’ She sent off a bunch of emails–and when Shan emails somebody, they’re going to take the meeting because she’s been so successful.”
In other words, this isn’t the one-upmanship that the likes of Lyft and Uber engage in. These founders recognize that as more female founders rise to the top–and clock billion dollar valuations–it boosts all female founders. In fact, some of Unbound’s “fiercest competitors” in the sex tech space are also Rodriguez’s closest friends. “Ultimately, we’re not competing against each other,” she says. “We’re competing against the patriarchy.”
Huerta says that she sees a shared target audience across many of the companies run by her peers, especially as they invest more in, say, offline experiences. “We’ve all built digital communities, and we’ve also seen the value of bringing those communities offline and bringing them together,” Huerta says. “The likelihood is low that you’re going to be on a dating app, break up with someone, and buy a wedding dress all at the same time, but we have the whole ecosystem covered. So when we bring those people together in real life, a lot of times it does make sense to introduce all of our brands.”
One frustration for Goicochea has been that investors seem to either assume all female founders are friends or try to pit them against each other. “Women are supposed to love or hate each other, and there’s not much in between,” she says. “They almost make you feel like there’s only one seat for one woman in one category at the table.”
But the female founders boasting $1 billion valuations help prove otherwise. “They’ve built huge businesses in spaces that probably got dismissed early on,” she says of startups like Glossier and Rent the Runway. “Like, ‘You can’t build a billion-dollar lip balm.’ ‘Who’s going to rent clothes?’ But their businesses are amazing. It takes these champions and trailblazers to make it easier for all of us.”
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