Who did you have to come on board? Which El Pais are interested? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on behalf of my partner, Heidi Patel, and the rest of our Thinking Back team. Yeah, we're very excited to have announced more than $250 million raise, the largest fund backing female CEOs. And we were fortunate, despite the trends that Dylan shared, to be able to do this in this market. And it was in large part due to major institutions who came on board to support the fund. What sort of institutions are willing to almost take what now feels that the pendulum has swung on a more I focus to investing. Yeah, I think people, major institutions. We had more than ten university endowments. We had more than ten major foundations. We had, for example, a hospital and others that really do care about returns and I think have realized that investing in women and gender lens investing is not just something that feels good, but

is actually good business. And so they came on board, along with many individuals, self-made billionaires like Sara Blakely of Spanx and sneaks to Melinda French Gates, that major philanthropists, and to many others. And we think the combination of big institutions that I named, a global bank like UBS, Cambridge Associates, their LPs, these kinds of institutions have realized that this is now a mainstream opportunity. We were just looking at some of your previous portfolio from the first fund. The vintage is good. The billions that you've managed to raise well, these founders have now managed themselves valuable at Guild Education, for example, Spring Health, and Invest. But these companies haven't yet exited per se, some of them. When do you think that that might occur in the first fund? How is the IPO pipeline? Look, if you do, these female founders want to go to IPO, are they looking at M&A opportunities?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think that data has shown that female entrepreneurs do deliver higher revenue, more than twice as much per dollar invested, and tend to exert, on average, a year faster than their male counterparts. And these companies, you know, like all companies, there's been a slower IPO market, but we invest sometimes as early as a late seed. And so, it can take companies typically eight, ten years, as long as well as an open IPO market. Of course, there's also M&A opportunities, PE buys, and others. And so, depending on the company, different outcomes will occur. We were just hearing from the people who've jumped on board to commit capital in and what I kind of already referenced of this moment where the pendulum has swung, we are hearing more pushback against funds that focus on women, people of color, minority founders, rather than wanting to embrace them. We've seen the Fearless Fund, for

example, actually have legal issues being able to allocate its grants to women of color. Was that anything that you heard of when you were out this summer raising the money? You know, we really mostly heard that people were excited by the opportunity that investing in women is no longer just a passing trend and wake in the wake of the MeToo movement. And I think this race makes clear that this is good business, good for the economy, and certainly here to stay. So that's mostly what we heard. Male-founded companies continue to get 98% of investment capital. And almost all of our companies have men and women in the top team. And we think gender-diverse teams outperform. And our goal is to grow the pie here and grow the economy, which is what we're doing by backing these great female leaders. Oh, boy. Jenny. But you say that stop just 2% basically a VC money going to female-founded companies and it isn't changing.

And I'm interested as to why you think that is occurring. If you give us all the statistics that they're managing to exit quicker, they're building revenue faster. We're seeing better outcomes. Yeah. You know, I think this is the moment where it's starting to turn to us. This raise from rethink impact that we announced. It really shows that these mainstream investors, these institutional investors see the opportunity and that the opportunity between the data and now examples of companies like many that you held up, you know, a company like spring getting a $3.3 billion valuation last month and many others, we think that's going to be the turn that leads to capital being more allocated in ways that grow the pie. So we're excited. We think this is that moment that things are going to finally unlock and change that data point that's been stuck for a while.

Rethink Impact Founder on $250M Raise, VC Outlook

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Rethink Impact Founder on $250M Raise, VC Outlook

Rethink Impact Founder on $250M Raise, VC Outlook

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