Cariana Morales
Welcome to the Atlanta startup podcast. I’m carrying umbrellas and associate a venture capital firm, valor ventures. Today we’re extremely pleased to welcome Lauren Kane, whose mission is giving investors to open their checkbooks for market-disrupting female entrepreneurs. Welcome to the show, Lauren. We’re really glad to have you today. You’re an expert in pitching and you’re especially focused on helping female entrepreneurs find success with investors through your company called VC Worthy Business. We’d love to hear a little bit more about that. But first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Lauren Kane
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me here. This is so much fun. I love being able to do this kind of stuff. A little about me, I was in the corporate world for about 18 years. The last six of those I spent as Director of Operations for one of the country’s largest Angel groups, Golden Seeds and that was my intro into the VC world. Golden Seeds has an angel group arm and a venture capital arm and I was always lucky enough to be the face of Golden Seeds and was the person that companies would report to. I got to meet a really great group of female entrepreneurs because Golden Seeds invest in only women on women-led businesses. That’s where I learned very quickly that female entrepreneurs have a hard time raising capital, they either come to a tape, learn about it too late or kind of fumble their way through. It’s inherently hard for them to fundraise and there, they receive a lot more scrutiny in the room and I am really, you know, now mission-driven, I think Golden Seeds sort of spark that in me, mission-driven to support female entrepreneurs on their journey to grow and scale their business because we need a community that can do that.
Cariana Morales
Yeah, definitely. And you mentioned that female entrepreneur’s will kind of fumble into raising or not really be very aware of it. Why do you think that is?
Lauren Kane
You know, that’s a very good question and I think if I could figure it out, that’ll change the world, but I think it is something that is ingrained in all of us. I don’t want to just say it’s a male thing or a female thing. But I think when a man starts a company, what happens is, you know, people say, “Oh, I want to introduce you to this person, and you need to talk to so and so. And I’m so excited for you to grow your business.” When women start a business, it gets viewed as a hobby especially if they have a family and children. It gets viewed as a hobby. I think the only way that that’s going to change is that we have more really successful female entrepreneurs that are changing the world. And that will change the view on female entrepreneurship. But I think that that’s the main reason that it’s not, they’re not necessarily taken seriously, from the get-go.
Cariana Morales
I completely understand that. So tell us a little bit about your business, VC Worthy, that helps out these female entrepreneurs.
Lauren Kane
Sure. So what I do is basically pitch strategy. I work with female entrepreneurs to hone their pitch from their story to grab the attention of investors. I like to say I get investors to open their checkbooks for market-disrupting female entrepreneurs. It’s really taking those disruptive female entrepreneurs and it’s big D disruptive or little D disruptive, and giving them the ability to really attract the investors that are right for their company. They are either going to invest and be silent as long as they’re doing what they said they were going to do or going to help them grow and scale in whatever way they need it. Because I’ve seen so often, entrepreneurs take in money and it has a negative impact because they come from a place of really being desperate. I work with my clients to make sure they’re not coming from that place of desperation, they are in a place of power, and that they take in the right investor dollars.
Cariana Morales
Yeah. And can you tell us a little bit about how you started this business? How did you go about finding clients? How did you go about your pricing model? I think that’s a great point to talk to, for a lot of female entrepreneurs listening that are at those early stages of their companies and trying to figure out those pain points.
Lauren Kane
Sure. So oddly enough, I actually started as a business coach. I left Golden Seeds and wanted to continue to support female entrepreneurs and became a business coach and I joke that I became a business coach at the same time that everyone on the planet became a business coach. It was a really crowded market space and I struggled with that to find clients and I would find a client and celebrate and then go, “Oh my god, that was exhausting. How am I going to do that all over again? I don’t know that I can.” And during that time, I was constantly being asked for advice from entrepreneurs about their pitches, how to talk to investors how to navigate this world, because the venture capital world until you need it, you don’t really know about it, or most people don’t. It’s kind of a foreign place to be. And I always kept to toe in the startup world in Atlanta and other places in the country. One day someone said to be a mentor, which I recommend everyone has a business mentor, say to me, “Why aren’t you pitching, helping female entrepreneurs with their pitches?” And I thought, well, that’s a really great question. Why aren’t I and so I decided to pivot and I think that that is something to take note of when you have a business is what you think or who you think your customers or clients are, versus the reality of who they might be, could be different. And so when I took a step back, I looked at what were people really asking me for what they were seeking me out for, and it wasn’t what I was doing. I pivoted and, and that’s where the business was born out of. How I thought through my pricing model if you know, it was trial and error. It was really doing some customer discovery, and seeing, “Okay, you know, what, what are what do I want to offer? What is the outcome that I want my clients to have and what value can I provide them?” I’m a service-based business. It’s a little bit different than a product-based business. But I really looked at, “Okay, what is the time that I’m spending and how much time do I need?” My clients and I started out with a smaller package of three months and now I work with my clients for up to a year depending on how long it takes them to raise. I thought originally three months was going to be enough. I realized what I need to be around for that entire raise. I need to be there to support them. Sometimes my clients can raise money fairly quickly in three months. In this time of COVID, it’s taking a little bit longer, but I wanted to be there if it takes them a little bit longer if it’s for instance, a medical device company or drug company, that’s going to take a little bit longer because the due diligence is a little bit longer. And usually, the raise is a lot larger, but I didn’t want to just leave them and so I’m basically with my clients through their raise and so I took a look at my pricing model from that perspective.
Cariana Morales
I love that one of my favorite sayings is “The magic is in the pivot.” For example, Instagram started as a check-in app and then they realize people want to upload their photos and your stories are very similar to how you were doing one thing, and then we’re able to pivot really fast to look into the market and see what’s actually needed. So I love that. And I think that’s really important for any entrepreneur is making sure that magic is in the pivot. You mentioned mentors, and then you earlier mentioned that also there’s just not a ton of really successful or big named female entrepreneurs in this space compared to men or other demographics. Do you have any advice for female entrepreneurs looking to find mentors?
Lauren Kane
Yeah, I think I can cast a wide net. I think a lot of times we look at mentors and want to have someone that we can sit in a coffee shop with and talk to or go have dinner with and that is great. I wish we could all do that. But sometimes you need to look broadly and you know, look throughout the US, look for someone who is several steps ahead of where you want to be not just one step or two steps, but really where you aspire to be in a couple of years. And not just one mentor, it can be a group. It could be a group where you form it together, and you all hold each other accountable. There could be people in the group where you’re a couple of steps ahead of them. It’s almost kind of like maybe creating a mastermind, but you hold each other accountable, and it is people that are going to stretch you and push you. It doesn’t have to be in the same world that you enter in. If you’re in the tech world, you don’t necessarily need a mentor in the tech world. Maybe you need someone who you know is really strong at marketing because that’s not what your strong suit is. Maybe you need someone who is really good at running the operations in the company and that you can draw on their area of expertise. Really think through what are your needs and not and not just at this moment in time, but where do you see potential issues or where you want to go in a couple of years. That person will help really be a guide. And who knows, you probably will end up providing a lot of value for them as well and so it usually ends up being a give and take relationship. But it’s really knowing what you want and going out and looking for it. I think right now there are a pretty decent amount of social networks specifically for female entrepreneurs out there that you can lean on. It doesn’t have to be just LinkedIn or you know, asking for someone to connect you but go into these networks and just start chatting away with women and looking at what they’ve done. Ask them if they are interested in grabbing a virtual coffee with you and sitting on zoom, chatting, and getting to know each other and you’d be amazed at how quickly friendships can grow that way.
Cariana Morales
Yeah, absolutely, I can definitely attest that from my own experiences, sometimes they’ll come in the most random ways you’ll meet somebody in a way you never thought you would. And they can become such a great mentor. So absolutely. We would love to hear some success stories, some of your clients, what happened, how much was raised? How long did it take?
Lauren Kane
Yeah. I just want to talk about the two stories that come to mind. The first one is I have a food robotics company that I started working with for about two months. We were working together and really working on the pitch. This is an entrepreneur who was not sure if she was going to do a small note about half a million or do a price around 2 million to really just take it from an idea to have a working prototype. It’s a crowded space. It is in a space where people have taken in investor dollars and companies have not performed so well. It was a space where people were a little suspect of new startups. From the time that we started working together, she started to really talk to investors, I would say about a month in and then a month into that she was in due diligence with a firm to do her raise. It was great to see that it was on the table to not only do the note, but they might want to do right, go right to the price round. So that was a really great story and just to see her work through the issues of, “Okay, this is a really crowded space where there have been some pretty big companies that have not made it happen.” And she was still able to show how powerful her company is and what they’re doing is going to provide to the industry that they are in. Another one is not necessarily specific to raising even though it is in terms of how much they were able to raise. But it’s more of a story that I want to share because I think it happens to a lot of female entrepreneurs. I had a client, one of my first, who came to me and had done a raise previously, and was going to raise her second round, started to pitch and was in a room of, unfortunately, all women investors, which breaks my heart still to this day, and got ripped apart. Absolutely ripped apart. She stopped raising. When she came to me, she was at a point where it was either she raises again, or reopen that round, or she’s going to have to close her company. She was at a crossroads before. She was terrified to pitch and we had to really do some work through on what were the things keeping her from standing in front of a room? Because this is pre-COVID so they’re actually in a room of investors reading her from walking into a room of investors and what she experienced in that one moment of women who I still don’t understand why they questioned her the way that they did. It was really working through a lot of her own personal stuff to see that she wanted this company to grow and thrive. She needed it to grow and thrive for her team, not just for herself, and to see her work through those issues and to go on to raise a million dollars. That was really to me, it still is probably one of my favorite moments because it was not necessarily about the company raising. But it was about this, this entrepreneur really stepping into her CEO-ness, and working through her own personal stuff to say, “No, I need to do this for my company.” And watching her make that breakthrough was amazing. It was such a gift that she gave me to be able to do this, that I will forever be grateful.
Cariana Morales
Wow, that’s incredibly powerful and encouraging. So thank you so much for sharing that story. So given that you have so much experience with helping all these female entrepreneurs, find money and find themselves, do you have any general advice for women looking to raise or female entrepreneurs? I’ll give listeners the opportunity to connect with you and get your contact information a little later in the podcast, because I know they have to pay you for the really good juicy details but any general advice that you would want to give to listeners
Lauren Kane
Yeah. You know, I think the biggest one and it might not necessarily be new. But you know, I think sometimes when you hear it a couple of times, maybe it sinks in. You’ve got to make yourself noticeable right from the get-go. You have to get the investor’s attention right out of the gate. There are a couple of different ways that you can do that. It can be, you know, making a statement, it can be telling a very powerful story, it can be asking a powerful question. I always tell my clients, you have to come out of the gate and the first couple of sentences have to be something that gets the investor to put their phone down or stop looking at their email on their computer as they’re on zoom with you. It’s got to get their attention. If you are able to do that right from the beginning, then you have a better time of keeping that engagement and that attention through your entire pitch. The other thing is being really clear about the problem. Entrepreneurs so often want to talk about the solution that they have because that is their company. They’re like, “I really want to tell you about what we do, I can’t wait to tell you about what we do.” But you have to get your investors clear on the problem that you sell first. Because when you get them clear on the problem that’s out there, it not only connects them to you, right? So you can build that emotional connection that you have with them through the problem. It also can start to illustrate for them the size of the market that’s out there and the impact that you can make, and it gets them into a place of being uncomfortable. And they’re like, “Well, I really want to hear what you have to say, what your solution is, or where are you? How are you going to solve this problem?” It’s so important and then you can go into the solution. But you’ve got to spend that quality time in that problem space because that is where it’s going to be really, really impactful. And that is where you need the investor to see the potential.
Cariana Morales
Hmm, no, that totally makes sense. Thank you for that piece of advice. For listeners that do want the juicy details and want to get in contact with you, how can listeners get in contact with you?
Lauren Kane
Sure. So you can check me out on my website at www. vcworthybusiness.com or LinkedIn, Lauren Kane on LinkedIn, and on Instagram @laurenkanevcwb. If you go through my website, there’s actually a link to schedule some time with me. I love talking strategy with female entrepreneurs. There’s a place that you’re hung up on your pitch, and you’re not sure how to get around it, reach out and we can talk through it for you know, half-hour 45 minutes and I’m a connector, I love connecting people. So I’m sure I will also have some connections with people that, you know, entrepreneurs can talk to.
Cariana Morales
Great. And you also mentioned earlier that you had spent a lot of time with Golden Seeds for entrepreneurs, and just wanna get in contact with them. What’s the best route?
Lauren Kane
So Golden Seeds, it would be going through their website and Golden Seeds offers something called office hours if you don’t think you’re ready for the angel world. And even if you’re not sure, check out office hours. And Golden Seeds, those office hours here in Atlanta where I set and in New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, and Texas. We educate a little bit about the angel world so you walk away with some knowledge about what angels are typically looking for in the ecosystem that is local to each of the chapters, and then what Golden Seeds is looking for. You also get some time with one on one with an angel. It’s not a place where you’re going to pitch. But it’s a place where you’re going to be able to ask some questions. Usually, it’s about 15 minutes. So if there’s you know, you’re not sure if you should pitch yet. Are you ready or just a general business question, office hours are the place for you. And you’ll get that one on one connection. It’s a connection that will go away and so even if we meet someone through office hours, we stay in contact and meet when it’s office hours and because I’m now a member of Golden Seeds, Atlanta, y’all meet someone in-office hours. Now two years later, I’m starting to see them going through the Golden Seeds formal process. If you feel like you’re ready for the Golden Seeds formal process, you can apply through their website. But you know, please also feel free to reach out to me because it’s always good to have someone in your corner. When you apply to a group and you know, it’s a worthwhile company. I would love to be their champion.
Cariana Morales
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It was really great talking with you today.
Lauren Kane
Thank you. This was great. I had so much fun.
Cariana Morales
Awesome. Have a great rest of your day.
Lisa
The Atlanta Startup Podcast is produced by Valor Ventures as a service to the startup and investor community. We couldn’t do it without the support of our sponsors–Atlanta Tech Park, the global innovation center, and Write2Market, Atlanta’s favorite tech, and healthcare marketing firm. If you’d like to get your information on the Atlanta Startup Podcast, our share a message with our listeners, visit us online and check out our affordable rate card. All advertisements here are tax-deductible donations to the Startup Runway Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investor.
