775 Coco Brown:

We all know the numbers: Only 2% of the venture capital money goes to women founders a number that hasn’t moved in 2 decades – and women are still woefully underrepresented in the C-suite and on company boards. And those women with wealth have been slow to invest in women-led startups. So, what can we do about it? Coco Brown is on a mission to help women take their rightful place – as investors, board members, C-suite executives and get fair access to investment capital. We’ll find out in a moment exactly how she’s changing the game.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who has made it her mission to advance women in entrepreneurship, the C-suite and onto corporate boards.

Coco Brown is the CEO and Founder of Athena Alliance, helping thousands of women leaders grow and advance their executive careers, bringing more than 400 women to corporate boards from growth stage private companies to name-brand public corporations. Athena is also now helping women founders get access to investment capital, as well as encouraging women to invest in startups – and each other.

What would the world look like if more women … invested in each other’s’ businesses? Sat on more F1000 boards of directors? And made more of the investment decisions at top tier venture capital and private equity firms?

The research bears out consistently that women are a great investment: Startups with female founders tend to get to exit one year faster than average, and the value of exits by female founders has skyrocketed to $59 billion – more than 40 points higher than the overall market. Meantime women-led startups yield twice as much as the invested dollar: companies with female leadership have a higher return on equity by nearly 3%, and Fortune 1000 companies with female CEOs saw returns that were 226% higher.

So why the disconnect and what can be done about it?

Coco Brown founded Athena Alliance to help women – and help women help each other – to change the game in business. As the first Executive-Education-As-A-Service platform, Athena offers live and on-demand learning, networking, coaching, and access to career opportunities. Whether preparing for a board seat or a career transition to scaling a company, growing a team, or raising capital, Athena members are one-degree separated from the most pressing business insights, connections to other leaders, and access to career-transforming opportunities.

After Taos, the company Coco was brought in to turnaround, was sold to IBM, Coco started a dinner club for a small group of executive women, and she’s never looked back. She’s served on 10 commercial and non profit boards, she’s part of Nasdaq’s Governance Insights Council and she’s often called on to share guidance on the modern boardroom and leadership.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Coco Brown and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Coco, welcome to Wings.

Coco Brown:

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

What led you to found the Athena Alliance?

Coco Brown:

Well, actually the origin story starts well before I knew I was going to found the Athena Alliance, which is back in, gosh, 2001. I took over running a company that I had been the vice president of professional services for a professional services company. So that was a big title, a big role in the organization. We had been about 100 million in revenue just before the dotcom bust, and we crashed in the bust to 10 million in revenue. Lost 90% of everything. I had to lay off 90% of the team. We lost 90% of the revenue. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m just feeling that in my body.

Coco Brown:

I know. I have this horrible distinction of having laid off probably at least 1,000 people in my career so far. The story starts even before that. But yeah. At the time, I was 30 years old and right after laying off all of these people, I took a maternity leave. I had my first child and came back, and the two owners of the business came out of retirement and said, essentially, “Nice to meet you, Coco. We fired the CEO and we want you to do a turnaround with us.” And so at that point, I became COO, and very soon after that, president and COO. And the entire company reported to me. I was the one to report to the CEO and proceeded on a turnaround. The first order of business is keep the company out of bankruptcy. And that first order of business was this moment of, “Wow. I wish I had someone to talk to other than just lawyers.” I mean, what I did was I brought in a bunch of lawyers and interviewed them all with the idea of how do I not hire them?

But what I really wanted to do was talk to other people who managed to stay out of bankruptcy. But we managed not to hire all those bankruptcy lawyers. And we did a turnaround, landed a really big sale that really saved the business. And about a couple of years later, around 2005, I started a dinner group for Women’s CIOs, chief information officers. And the reason I started it was because the company was in the deep IT infrastructure space. And so servers, networks. Think all the plumbing of the business, the cloud, DevOps, database, network. And that space, I always knew that space had a dearth of women. It was really anemic in terms of the representation of women in technology. And so I knew and understood and expected that I would be somewhat lonely, but I didn’t realize that that challenge spanned well beyond just the technical realm. I mean, it made sense that you wouldn’t find women at the top if you didn’t find them in the rank and file.

But what I would find is every once in a while I’d find a female CIO and she’d say, “Oh. I’m the only one in the Valley.” And I’d say, “No, there’s all these others, Jerry Martin Flickinger and Sunny Asday and Marty Mancho and Gina Rae Hague.” And these are all women who were amazing then back in 2005, and they’ve become just even more amazing. And I got us together and started a dinner group with us, and it was eight of us in our first dinner. And it was small for a couple of years, grew to at most 20, so 12 at any given dinner, if we were lucky. And then it kept growing and growing.

By 2012, I stepped down from running Taos and I stayed on the board two more years. And during that time I had said, “I want to open this up to any woman at the top.” So CIOs are always talking about how, “We don’t have a seat at the table and we’re reporting to the CFOs. Let’s bring the CFOs in. And CMOs are going rogue. Let’s bring them in.” And this dinner group wasn’t about, “Woe is me. I’m a woman. This is hard.” I mean, obviously we talk sometimes about family, but mainly it was about, “What are you doing with this strategy and that strategy and how are you going about it?” Without any of this background noise of people thinking, “Why are you here in the first place? Should you be here? Does that question indicate that you shouldn’t be here?” As opposed to just, “It’s a question anybody would ask. I just happen to be a woman. Stop looking at me.”

So that was the purpose of these dinner groups. And it grew. And by 2015, we were now about 150-some women. I think it was 152 or 153 to be exact. And Senator Mark Warner was out from Virginia, this was late 2015, doing a hearts and minds of Silicon Valley tour. And I was invited to a roundtable discussion with the senator and about 20, 25 women around the table. And he said, “What’s on your minds?” And someone said, “The boardroom.” And I got this flurry of emails the next day because that’s all we talked about the entire hour that we had with the senator was the boardroom, and why aren’t we in it? And I’m looking around like, “Oh, my God. This is an amazing crew of people. The top partners at law firms and COOs of amazing companies. And why aren’t we in the boardroom? That doesn’t make any sense.”

I was in my own boardroom, so I hadn’t really thought of it as much. It wasn’t really something that I thought of as the destination. I’d always thought CEO is the destination. But this was what they wanted to focus on, what the focus was. And I got a flurry of emails the next day saying, “That’s it, Coco. You have the community. We know this isn’t a pipeline problem. What is the problem? And let’s solve it. Do you want to solve this problem? You’ve been looking for what your next endeavor is.” I was going to always be an entrepreneur from that point forward when I left Taos, and so I was trying to figure out what my next company was going to be. And that became it. It started though as a non-profit, just as like, “Oh. These are all my friends. Let’s figure this problem out.”

And it started very much as my own sort of PhD thesis experience of four years of what’s our theories of change and experimentation and figuring it out, and why does this work and not that? And along the way, we brought over 400 women, two boards, and then in January 2021, we launched a commercial company. And that’s what Athena is today, which is much more than getting women on boards. It’s a platform for community and executive development for people, really. I mean, we’re just starting with women, but for people who are in and around the C-suite, the CEO’s office, the boardroom. So that’s entrepreneurs. It’s investors. It’s executives. It’s C-suites and CEOs and board members. And we’re really accelerating their path to whatever goal they have. And usually they have more than one at a time.

Melinda Wittstock:

What an amazing trajectory that you’ve been on. And so how much of this remains really a pipeline problem, or is it more than that? In your experience, what are some of the main things that hold women back either from getting to the C-suite in a corporate context or getting funded as a founder?

Coco Brown:

Yeah. The reason I responded to your getting funded one, I mean, women get 2% of venture funding. It’s absolutely maddening. And the almost compounding worst piece of that is that if you have venture funding, then you can get venture debt at incredibly low interest rates. But if you don’t have venture funding, not only do you not have the venture funding, but you also can’t get debt. You can’t borrow. It’s really hard to scale a business as a woman, really, really hard. But yeah. I mean, there’s a multitude of things. I mean, it’s not a pipeline problem. That is 100% true on so many different levels. There’s plenty of cash out there to fund companies. Everybody’s talking about how they’re sitting on dry powder with… Companies aren’t getting big investments right now at this time in the economy, but they certainly were. And now, there’s certainly a lot of money out there to deploy to smaller investments, but women still aren’t getting it. And there’s plenty of female entrepreneurs out there. So it’s not a pipeline problem.

And then if you think about boards, that’s for sure not a pipeline problem. There’s only 30,000 companies that require independent board directors on them at any given time. That’s the aggregate of public companies, private companies, ESOPs in the private company space. It’s ESOPs, it’s venture capital, it’s private equity-backed, it’s family-owned. I mean, this is not a giant space that we’re talking about. So you can certainly find that many really well-qualified high-level women. In some ways, it’s a matter of that continued. It’s an easy thing to say, “Well, there’s no qualified…” It’s easy to brush that off because it’s so easy to find other qualified people who just are in your network.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Is that the main thing, is that women just aren’t in these networks, whether we’re thinking about getting a board seat or getting funded? Because so much of it comes down to the relationship, and are you in the club? Are you part of that? And a lot of women, aren’t part of it or don’t know how to be part of it, or just even if they try to be part of it, don’t quite fit into it. I mean, what’s the issue there? Why is it still stuck at 2% of venture funding? I mean, that number hasn’t moved in almost three decades. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. It’s completely ridiculous. I think it was Harvard PhD student or professor that did a TED talk about this based on research she had done. And it was really great. It went viral. But the main reason women don’t get venture funding, I mean, there’s a couple of different reasons, but one of the challenges is in the way that women are approached in the investment conversation. So women are approached with questions of risk and downside where men are approached with questions of opportunity.

And so it’s always easier to get excited about throwing money to opportunity than it is to risk. But just generally speaking, it’s an odd thing that women get a lot more of the questions around the, where’s the risk in the business model? Where’s the risk in the market? Men get the questions around, where’s the opportunities in the market, in the model, and et cetera. Where could this go? How big could it be? And so there’s that.

I think the other natural thing out of this that is maddening and takes time, unfortunately, is that the first stock market was created over 300 years ago. And so if you think about it from that perspective, white European men have been doing business together for hundreds of years, taking risks together, sharing opportunity, collaborating on conquering the world. That’s been going on for hundreds of years. And so the ingrained bias and culture and everything around who to invest in and who’s investible and who has those conversations is entrenched, deeply entrenched. And I think the biggest way for us to get past that is for women to start doing that. Women are getting the biggest wealth transfer right now, ever. Baby boomers are largely transferring money to women, and trillions of dollars is going to women. And we are in a position to be able to invest in each other, but we need to do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

So that’s an interesting one because what stops that? I know in my experience as a serial entrepreneur, when you meet high net worth women who are potentially investors, my experience has been they have no problems writing a check to charity for a sizeable amount, but then really struggle. I’ve been told things like, “Oh, my husband does all the investments.” What? Really? And so what does it take to get women actually investing in other women or investing, period?

Coco Brown:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a muscle memory thing. Not to get way out on a limb here, but genetic memory. I mean, there is such a thing as genetic memory. It really actually exists. And I think women just have to start doing it. They just have to start doing it. And it is baffling. You see how much money you… For example, just even looking at MacKenzie Scott and Melinda Gates, you hear all the time about how much money they’re giving away, which is fabulous. It reinforces the whole charitable thing. It is fabulous that they’re giving all away, but I want to hear about how much they’re investing and-

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly, especially insofar as women tend to come up with, are more likely to come up with social impact businesses that are actually the business models actually making the world better than how they found it. And you could give your money to a charity or you could invest in a business that is actually going to arguably have a much bigger impact on the cause that you support. You think of all the climate change startups or health tech or all these different things that arguably can make a bigger, more scalable difference, really, and there’s an investment return. So what would it take to convince MacKenzie or Melinda, the other Melinda, to actually invest in female founders?

Coco Brown:

Yeah. I mean, Melinda does. I think that the thing is that what we hear in the news and what we emphasize, and maybe even it would seem what she emphasizes, is the charitable giving. And the problem with that is that because of our psyche around that, that’s like you’re not supposed to make money as somebody who’s in a non-profit. You’re supposed to just be in it for the good. And I had a guy say to me, “Coco, why do women take perfectly good business models and make them non-profits simply because they do good? Guys would never do that.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh. 100%. Oh, man. That’s been a little hobby horse of mine too for a while. And I say this as someone critical of myself because my very first business was a non-profit, and it hobbled me. It was the most frustrating experience in the end. And it’s like, “Why did I do that?” And I think it was just, maybe it is that epigenetic thing or something, that you’re supposed to be just doing good, taking care of everybody, But yeah. I soon learned the hard way on that. And so I am constantly mentoring other women, “No, don’t start…” I mean, if you really have to, be a B Corp, but you can be a full-on for-profit company and still make a social impact and arguably a much bigger one.

Coco Brown:

Right. And you as an individual, if you’ve got great business sense and you’re building an awesome company and you’re building some wealth out of that, then you now have the ability to reinvest back into other things. That’s what makes the world go round in that sense. So I mean, not to say that non-profits aren’t great. I do think it’s an odd model. I think it’s an antiquated, odd model. But I get it. I mean, get the tax aspect of it. But I think that there’s a couple of things. One is women need to start investing in women. It needs to be the thing that… We need to take risks. Where guys with some level of wealth will throw $25,000 at an idea that they’re here on a golf course, we need to do that too. Yeah. Throw $25,000 at an idea that you hear on a golf course. And if it’s not 25, then it’s 10. If it’s not 10, it’s 5. But start doing it.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how do we that? So say with Athena, is there something that you’re doing there that actually encourages women to invest? What’s the kickstart for that? What’s the way to publicize it? What’s the way to normalize it? Increase the number of women who’ve had, say, exits or they’ve had some sort of generational wealth pass through events or something to just start.

Coco Brown:

I think part of it is just talking about it a lot. For example, within Athena, we have peer groups, and so all sorts of different peer groups. And one of the peer groups is a peer group around investing. And it’s a really great peer group. And because our model is largely virtual, we do have in-person meetups, but largely virtual. People from all over are joining monthly peer group discussions around, “What are you investing in, and how are you investing, and what are you thinking about? What’s this new challenge that I’m hearing about, and have you heard about it?” And things like that. And that I think is incredibly important. A piece of a Athena is imagine if Netflix were for business. So we have hundreds of hours of original content we’ve created in our library, video content with experts that get categorized into different categories, whereas Netflix, it’s family and drama and comedy. Ours are M&A and IPOs and financial acumen and legal acumen, and also a bunch of categories dedicated to investing. So funding a business and angel investing, raising investment.

So I think just making it as important as climbing the ladder is learning what to do as you climb the ladder to diversify the portfolio of your career, which also involves investing. I had one of our members, she’s now a partner at an investment firm. She was an executive at Google X and she said, “Coco, my male peers were dabbling in investing 10 years before I was. And the difference in wealth creation between us, me and them, is tremendous. I should have been doing this a long time ago.”

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. I think one of the things that’s happening, it’s encouraging to see more women in say VC. There are more female-run VC firms. But then, they have an issue raising big enough funds. And so then they get overwhelmed with the number of folks. And so then the investment dollars into these companies tend to be pretty small check sizes that don’t really make huge amount of difference, and kind of stays stuck. So how can those funds get more from all the LPs and different wealth sources out there? Because that’s a big part of the issue too.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how the biggest LPs really behind a lot of the venture funds and the big private equity and whatnot, it’s endowments from universities. So I think the source, the pension funds, et cetera, I think maybe they need to think also about where they put some of their dollars because they’re definitely… When you’ve got an endowment that’s stewarding, I don’t know, $100 billion for Harvard, how are you putting that $100 billion to work? Obviously, you put some of it in the market and you put some of it in the private sector and behind significant venture capital and private equity. And traditionally, are you doing it in the Boston area because that’s what your managers know as a region and people to reach out to? So I think there are so many different layers to the problem. It’s like you’ve got to be attending to it from many different layers of the source, if you will.

Melinda Wittstock:

So let’s say the pension funds or the insurance or the endowments, all those folks that are funding LPs, I mean, venture seems to have changed quite a bit in that it used to be the venture firm had their money, and then startups pitched them. Now it’s more like they need to get their deal flow first, and then they go raise their fund. So I know I’ve lived this one, waiting for the LP to fund the VC funding us. It’s a lot of folks in seed, super seed, Series A or in that boat now. The LPs in that context have a lot more or increasing amount of say, or perhaps they want more say in terms of where their money is going. To what extent does it make sense to put the pressure on the LPs, the source of the money, to ensure more equitable disbursement of those funds?

Coco Brown:

Yeah. Precisely. I heard from one large private equity firm that one of their biggest LPs had come to them this past 2022 and said, “You’re lucky we’re going to stay investing in you because you just passed our first bar of our requirements around equity and diversity.” And this private equity firm said, “Wow. We didn’t even know you… What’s the requirement? What are we being judged on?” They didn’t even realize it because private equity is like, “Wait. What? You really are serious? You care about this?” They’re way behind.

But it seemed to me when I asked what was the criteria, it was largely about who’s investing. It was largely about whether or not they have female investors, which I think is great. But I think the other thing is who are you investing in? What’s the makeup of those companies? And getting just faster to requiring change because everyone’s buying into, “This is going to take time. It really is a pipeline problem.” And it’s not going to take time if you care about it. It really won’t. It’s like going to remote work. It doesn’t take time when a pandemic hits. You’ll realize you can do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. I mean, it’s so interesting that the actual stats bear out that investments in female-founded companies or companies that at least have women on the founding team outperform exclusively male-founded companies. I mean, there’s some research about NASDAQ companies or companies that have women in that founding C-suite, much higher returns. 90% of them actually make it past the five-year mark as opposed as much, much, much lower for male founded companies. There’s better use of resources, better team retention. I mean, on so many levels. And why is that data just not landing, I guess, with men? It’s like women are a really good at investment. If you want your capital used wisely, a woman’s going to use it more wisely. The research seems to bear out.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s a couple of problems. I mean, I think one of them is the thesis that these investment firms sometimes have really narrow the playing field to things that their primary investors care the most about. And that tends to be around things that they understand or can relate to. So that may not be some of the things. The problems that women want to solve in the world may not be what some of these firms are willing to invest in. So even when they say, for example, they say, “Well, we invest in enterprise software-as-a-service companies,” but then it depends. If your enterprise software-as-a-service company is a platform for executive development for women, suddenly that becomes like, “But that’s too narrow in a niche.” And you’re like, “Well, [inaudible 00:28:41]-”

Melinda Wittstock:

My goodness.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. You’re like, “Well, women make a bigger market than China and India put together. So how is that a narrow niche? Yeah. Executive women are only maybe a couple of million in the United States, but still, that’s a big market. What are you talking about?” So-

Melinda Wittstock:

Also, women make a lot of the purchasing decisions across the board as well.

Coco Brown:

Oh. Most of them. Yeah. Most of the purchasing decisions, even things that we always thought were male decisions, like buying cars. Women make 63% of the decisions to buy cars. So it definitely is odd. The other thing, it’s funny too. Financial managers, I have this conversation with financial managers every once in a while. They play to men, and it’s like, what do women do as soon as their husbands die? They change their financial planner because they ignored them. So I mean, there are so many things where it doesn’t make sense, but our model as humans is the safest bet is the one that looks like me. That’s the safest bet in our model as humans. That’s why we’re tribal on every level. So I think that’s a big issue.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it’s amazing work that you’re doing. So let’s dig back down into Athena then and how it works. So you have all these different peer groups, for instance. And so how many women are now involved in Athena?

Coco Brown:

About 1,300. It’s a paid membership model. So you pay an annual membership to belong to this incredible community where we really address three things. One is what I call wisdom at the speed of business. So back in the day, when I had to face bankruptcy, I really would’ve loved to talk to someone else who had gone through that, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Definitely.

Coco Brown:

So in our model, we’ll facilitate those connections. So we had a member who said, “I’m shutting down an office in Russia. Who can I talk to?” So we have real humans in the loop, and our real humans will make connections between members to address things that’s keeping them up in the middle of the night as that next big problem that they’re trying to solve, et cetera. So that’s one piece of Athena, is we’ll get you the person to talk to within the community, and we’ll facilitate that warm connection and so you don’t have to, and it’s very speedy and intimate and not awkward at all. So there’s that.

And then the second big thing we do is situation-based expertise. So the first is more about, “Which peer do I talk to?” The second is, “I need an expert. This is the negotiation of my life,” or, “This is the biggest stage I’ve ever stood on,” or, “That person terrifies me.” So there, we have a community, an ecosystem of executive coaches that our members work with that are top tier, trained in negotiation by the FBI and works with Olympic athletes, or-

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. And so that’s the second big part of Athena. And membership comes with two hours of coaching, and then you can just buy more if you want. You can also buy buckets and turn it into transformation coaching, work with the same person for a while over how to really nail the stage presence and things like that.

But the third big piece of Athena is asynchronous and synchronous learning around… Think of it as like an evergreen MBA experience around everything that’s going on in the world that relates to you running a business, governing a business, funding a business, et cetera. So the way we do that is every week, we’re producing original content through our live virtual salons, and they’re very powerful. Actually, at the end of this month, I’ll be interviewing the CEO of Bank of America as part of my new CEO perspective series where we talked to prominent CEOs about how did they do it and what are they thinking about now.

But we’ll talk about all sorts of things from experts on conscious capitalism, to experts on finding a financial planner, to experts on how to budget as a C-suite executive, all sorts of content that we record, edit, and becomes part of our library. And it’s just like Netflix producing original content. We tag it with the right categories, “Oh. This belongs in the CEO category and leadership and this one belongs in environment oversight.” And then our members asynchronously can go in and explore the categories and learn whenever they want. Put it in your ears and listen to it. Watch it on the big screen. Watch it on small screen. Read the transcript. So that’s synchronous to asynchronous kind of Netflix style.

And then the other synchronous methods of learning are peer groups. So we have the entrepreneur peer group, investor peer group, sales and marketing peer group. We have live meetups, and we have learning circles, which are like book clubs, but around videos. So for example, finance for the non-CFO over 90 days. And then, the final asynchronous way of learning is that our content in the library that you can explore by categories is also organized into pathways. So path to CEO, path to the boardroom, path to the C-suite. For example, path to the boardroom has 11 seasons and 73 episodes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow, that’s amazing like you’re a media company.

Coco Brown:

Yeah. Yes. Exactly. But with a lot of community in it because our members are in the live virtual sessions, you see someone asking a question, and you’ll say, “Oh. I want to meet her.” So there’s so much community and intimacy, and we do join 10 minutes early, and it’s like the time when the professor’s wiping down the whiteboard with the… And we’re sitting in the back bantering and talking. So we have lots of ways, our live meetups, our peer groups, to create community as well. So it’s like a media company with a huge community focus, and it’s fabulous. It’s really great.

Melinda Wittstock:

Who are the women that you’re looking for? So break it down. I mean, for entrepreneurs, is there any stage they have to be at? Do you have a mix? Is there a qualification? How does that work for people who are listening to this podcast to say, “Oh, wow. Athena sounds like perfect for me.”?

Coco Brown:

There is a qualification. I mean, let’s start with entrepreneurs. With entrepreneurs, what we expect is you’re building a company to scale. It’s not always going to be a one- or two-person company or a lifestyle company. It’s a company where you’re going to need to get funding in some way, or even if you’re self-funded, you’re scaling to the point where you will have an executive team and you will have a board. And so everything that we talk about and focus on is relevant to you. And so as an entrepreneur, you have this incredible community that are potentially your customers or voice of the customer and become advisors, maybe your board members. And they certainly are your peer set that you can run things by around funding or expansion or customer base, et cetera. So that’s the entrepreneur side of things.

In the corporate side of things, where you might be an executive, we say you need to be in or near the C-suite. So if you’re not in the C-suite, you should be a couple of degrees removed, and it’s relevant to you what’s going on there. You need that simulation training because you’re going to be there in no time, because we don’t do anything for… We assume everyone at Athena is in the C-suite. They’re either the CEO, a C-suite executive, on the board, or an investor engaging with that community. So if you’re going to be at Athena and you’re not yet there, then you need to be close.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so is it conceivable, do you have any women who are both in the entrepreneur and the investor group or-

Coco Brown:

Yes. Honestly, our last peer group of the year for those two groups, they got together, and we will get together periodically because… I mean, we have actually a number of things. We have a relationship with one of our members who’s an investor, and a venture capital firm does monthly open office hours for our members that are entrepreneurs and, “Just come ask me anything. I’ll help you. It’s okay.” And our investor peer group is always open to being invited by the entrepreneur peer group to hear a pitch and to give some ideas or to talk about what’s going on in one kind of an investment space. And so there’s a ton of overlap. And we really want each other to succeed. It’s amazing.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love what you’re doing. I mean, the reason I started this podcast was because I specifically wanted to catalyze an ecosystem where women promoted each other, bought each other’s products, mentored each other, and invested in each other, right?

Coco Brown:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is awesome, what you’re doing. It’s so, so important. I see more and more of these groups sprouting up. But what’s the best way for anyone listening to this podcast right now to get in touch with you or join Athena? What’s the process?

Coco Brown:

You can go to our website. And certainly, women can join directly from our website, and then we’ll validate that, “Yeah, this makes sense. We’re the right community for you.” And then we’ll welcome you into the community.” So you can join directly from the website. A lot of people would like a conversation before they join. So in that case, you can also just say, “Hey. I want to have a conversation with someone on the Athena team about my fit and about my goals.” And so we also have open coffee talks. So you can join. Every week, we have one or two open hours where anyone can show up and talk to people on our team about Athena. So yeah, there’s a number of different ways to do that. But certainly go to the website athenaalliance.com and explore, and then ask for a conversation with a team member. Just go to membership.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. I’m just in your website right now. This is terrific, Coco. You’ve done a good job selling me on it.

Coco Brown:

You should join.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think I will. I mean, I think it’s a really, really cool thing that you’re doing. So I’m going to dance around your website. And then in the meantime, what’s the best way for people to follow you, connect with you on social? Any ways?

Coco Brown:

Yeah. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I think we’re going to launch an Instagram presence. But I’m really active on LinkedIn. I’m always writing, sharing insights. And then, of course, go to our website and sign up for our newsletter. It’s very robust. So subscribe to that because we’ve got a lot that we talk about that’s really interesting. And also, we’ll give you a great sense of who the community is.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s wonderful. And then also you have Athena Radio. Is that essential [inaudible 00:41:09]-

Coco Brown:

Yes. We do. We have two podcasts. One is called Third Act. So that’s really when you have vocational freedom and you can do anything, what are you going to do now? People don’t retire like they used to. So Third Act. And then the other is Voices of Athena. It’s a great storytelling podcast around the stories of the women who are members of Athena.

Melinda Wittstock:

How wonderful. Well, I’m going to invite you to Podopolo, my interactive podcasting platform because both of those podcasts, if they have RSS feeds, are on there right now.

Coco Brown:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

So that’s fantastic. Well, I will subscribe to those podcasts as well and make sure that everybody on Podopolo knows about them. And that’s fantastic. Well, Coco, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Coco Brown:

Oh. Thank you for having me. It’s been wonderful.