1001 Naseem Sayani:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP 1001 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Venture Investor Naseem Sayani

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Naseem Sayani:

It’s a matter of what the capital stack looks like right now because the largest LPs, the ones writing the biggest checks, they are still, in some cases, not all, still carving out a part of their allocation to do diversity investments or to invest in a female fund manager. And it’s a different pool of capital than what their broader capital looks like. And so all of the female fund managers are all after that’s carved off…

Melinda Wittstock:

So, they’re all after a small slice of the pie.

Naseem Sayani:

I don’t need the diversity sleeve. Just treat us like everybody else, and let’s do it because I promise you a lot of those first-time male fund managers don’t have any better track record than I do. But because of all the societal reasons like the pattern recognition, they get perceived different.

Melinda Wittstock:

If you listened to episode 1000, yes that’s right, 1,000, of this show you heard Naseem Sayani with this rallying cry to fill a stadium full of women changing investment in female founders as we know it. It is time we accelerate the inspiring innovations of female founders, who still to this day receive less than 2% of all venture capital investment. 

Melinda Wittstock:

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 believe in paying it forward, so as a five-time serial entrepreneur, I started this podcast almost 10 years ago to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. Please take a moment, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode, tell your friends and colleagues, and we appreciate it when you help this wisdom get discovered with a 5-star rating and review. 

Melinda Wittstock:

What has to happen to get women entrepreneurs the funding they need? If you listened to our Episode 1000 special earlier this week, you heard some snippets from venture investor Naseem Sayani, and today we share her whole interview. Naseem is founder and CEO of GCWC and GCWC Capital, a media platform and investment fund focused on tech and AI-anchored innovations across HealthTech and fintech. Naseem shares my mission to get more women writing checks. She’s a dedicated ecosystem builder, who also leads the Innovator’s Circle at WHAM, is an Advisor at Tower Capital, and hosts The Capital Flex, a podcast focused on the fundraising experiences of female founders. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Now, I love some back of the napkin math, so here is some from Naseem about how to create a $50 Billion fund to support women’s innovations. You see, there is a massive generational wealth transfer to women right now, and here’s how she calculates it: There are about 100 million women over the age of 35 right now, and if you take 1% of that and you assume they’re accredited investors, the SEC qualification to start investing, 1% of that is a 100,000 women. If every one of them put $50k into a venture fund, we’re talking $50 billion. Now imagine the returns on investment of that fund, given that women founders on average deliver 2.5 times better returns than male-founded startups, and according to Boston Consulting Group research, women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies, a funding gap representing a missed economic opportunity estimated at over $5 trillion globally.  

Melinda Wittstock:

So, bottom line, we’re good at this. So today Naseem and I go deeper on what has to change to get women to write those checks, plus other systemic changes needed to transform the entrepreneurial landscape for women, including how to overcome societal biases and mindset issues that can keep us playing too small a game.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, let’s put on our Wings on to fly with Naseem Sayani. 

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Hey, Naseem. Welcome to Wings.

Naseem Sayani:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is great.

Melinda Wittstock:

So excited to talk to you because we met, oh god, I don’t know, couple years ago.

Naseem Sayani:

Couple years ago. Couple years ago.

Melinda Wittstock:

And we shared this mission of how can we change the game for female founders, but also get more women involved in investing. And this was the mission of this podcast, and why I started this was to catalyze this ecosystem. Let’s just start at the beginning. What was the spark or the genesis that made you want to really change the game for women? VCs, women investing, supporting female founders.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. Yeah. So, it is it came out of my life, at the consulting firm where we then built a product studio, which then grew up into a venture incubator. I was doing all digital strategy innovation work, and this was early two thousands. And so, Silicon Valley was moving kind of in parallel to what we were doing. And we started to find that our clients couldn’t build product. They didn’t know what UX, UI, tech, etcetera, didn’t mean anything at the time. So, we launched a product studio to help actually build experiences, and then those products ended up needing different governance, different KPIs, different leadership.

Naseem Sayani:

So, it grew up into a full venture incubator, and the proposition became instead of just building product or building a startup, we’re actually going to build a startup that would otherwise put you out of business. And that’s what we were talking to our clients about, which was tremendous. This is 2012, 2013. Right? So, we’re still kind of Uber hasn’t landed in New York City yet when we’re doing these things. And so, it’s wild west.

Melinda Wittstock:

I remember those days.

Naseem Sayani:

No. No. Exactly. Right? That that is how insane it is. So, we don’t remember a moment when we didn’t have some of the tools that we have right now. And what I saw most two things happened once we were now building startups was one, there were not enough women in the room. And so, when you’re starting to do observational research and insights and pulling data together on what features something needs, if you don’t have a variety of voices in the room and a variety of lived experience, you miss entire categories of opportunity and growth. You’re just not building for it because you don’t know because it’s not the lived experience of the people in the room.

Naseem Sayani:

So that was a that was a big miss that I kept seeing. The second was we didn’t have enough women applying into the CEO jobs for the startups that we were building. It we were it was just a long list of incredibly talented men, but not enough incredibly talented women. And this became a problem for me because I wanted to hire women into fully funded CEO roles at a startup. Right? Like, where are the women who could do these jobs? They have to exist. So, I went looking for them, you know, at the startup events and, you know, spending my extracurricular time trying to meet female founders and trying to convince them to say, hey, I’ve got this CEO job at this great startup. Why don’t you apply? You’d be perfect for this. None of them wanted anything to do with it.

Naseem Sayani:

They’re building their own companies. They’re very happy being independent and building what they want to build. And it is in that dynamic that I also I realized or saw more acutely the huge differences in funding, in resources, in ecosystem, in networks that sit around female founders in contrast to what sits around our male counterparts. And that just became too hard to live with. It was it was such a stark contrast when you have incredibly talented people over here also building, also hustling, but cannot access the same things that simply by being a male founder, you have all of these organic things around you. So, I decided that I needed to redirect my energy and my expertise and my knowledge of building towards the female founder half of the ecosystem. And while I could do all the things in the stack, the last big piece was moving capital.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Naseem Sayani:

And if I can be part of moving capital well beyond angel checks, I was writing angel checks. I love that, but it’s not system changing, and I wanted to be system changing. And so that’s why the stack had to include moving capital as well. And that was the leap into venture.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. This is the big thing, system changing. Because we’re at that point now where the ecosystem needs to shift. Like, there’s a lot of progress has been made. Yep. You know, I think of my own trajectory, like, say ten years ago, I’d had an exit. I wasn’t a huge exit, but it was a comfortable exit. It was respectable.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m like, what am I gonna do next? And having lived through all the challenges being a female founder and, like, my first company, I didn’t even know what I didn’t even use the term entrepreneur.

Naseem Sayani:

Like, it like, nobody knew. Like, I Nobody knew what that entrepreneur was.

Melinda Wittstock:

I was like, I’m going into business.

Naseem Sayani:

Like, I have this expertise. I’m just gonna have this idea. I’m just gonna go into business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? There were no masterminds. There were no accelerators. There was nothing, nothing.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right? It was all trial and error. So, by the time I got to that exit, like, how can I give back? So hence the podcast. And over the years and it’s funny because all the male VCs talk about pattern recognition. And I have all this pattern recognition, funnily enough, from interviewing all these female founders. Yeah. All the things that we have to overcome. And one of them, which is interesting, is isolation, I guess.

Naseem Sayani:

Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

And another one is just the internal mindset of thinking, like, can we do it? Like, all the imposter syndrome, that perfectionism, all that kind of stuff. And, like, literally giving ourselves a permission slip to just go big. Yeah. So, creating the systems that allow for that, let alone actually raising the money. Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. Well, it’s a fundamentally different experience because there you know, we we’re now building the communities we need in this ecosystem, and female founders are building networks of other founders around them so they can share notes and look at term sheets together and make sure that, you know, they can find predatory things before it happens to them. They’re we’re now doing more events that have more women in the room and trying to cross the gender divide. Right? And you it we can spend a lot of time in rooms of just women, which is wonderful and fun and magical. But if we don’t cross the gender divides, we’re leaving one, we’re not optimizing the relationships. And two, we need that social capital to move so we can access the capital that’s sitting on the other half of the ecosystem. Because that’s until you and I have big funds with lots of money, the big funds with lots of money are still led by our male counterparts, and we have to be able to build those relationships.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. And they do what feels comfortable to them. They do what they know. Like that that pattern recognition thing. I guess, there’s some sort of safety in that for them. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Like, a white dude in a hoodie and, he must know what he’s doing. He’s dropped out of the right school, so, my money’s probably safer. And yet the stats completely belie that. Like, women are returning 78 on a dollar per invested, male teams, 31¢. Right. Women are getting access faster. They’re utilizing capital better.

Melinda Wittstock:

Actually a fantastic stat is something like 33% plus of women led startups are exiting Yeah. Even though we’re getting less than 2% of the capital. Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

Well, it’s such an interesting stat, that one in particular, because despite lower investment, those founders those female founders are still exiting more quickly and with more cost more efficient cash flows and balance sheets and run rates. And so, the one response I’ve heard is, oh, okay. Great. So even with not enough money, they’re still getting there. And you go, well…

Naseem Sayani:

That’s not the takeaway. Could you imagine how much faster and how much bigger this business could be if she had funding? And if there’s more like her, just consider how much more, liquidity there could be on the other side if we were actually refunding more people like her. Right? That that should be the takeaway.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. So, we’re sitting here on this whole kind of AI is gonna kill us all moment. Right? And it’s not the AI. It’s the people who are creating the product.

Naseem Sayani:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like, it’s so easy to say, oh, it’s the AI. I’ve lost control of it. It’s like, not my bad. I have nothing to do with it. Like, what? And so apart from that, how do women if you think of these big frontier, AI companies, the OpenAI’s, all of it: How would they be different, do you think, if they were run by women? 

Naseem Sayani:

One of the big ones would be the ethical guardrails that would be wrapped around these companies quite inherently. It’s just that the lived experience of women is rife with so much, like, safety issues, lived experience issues, you know, health differences, you know, how we interact with teams, how society perceives us, language differences, and how we talk to people. And none of that is built into AI right now because we’re not in the rooms or we’re not the AI experts or the AI programmers or the machine learning scientists and experts that are building these things. And my god, if we were, just consider how much smarter the AI would be and how much more thoughtful in parallel to being smart these platforms could be, and we wouldn’t have these safety issues. We wouldn’t have people going down really hard mental health pathways in a platform because there would have been thinking around how to manage for that and how to spin them out into actual care rather than letting them spiral into a platform where they think they’ve built a relationship, but they haven’t because it’s a tool. And then the problem solving we could do around use cases that are well beyond, you know, just space tech, which is important. We absolutely need that for lots of different reasons. But how do we think about education differently? How do we think about health care differently? How do we think about the care economy differently? How do we think about building families in this now very, you know, 3.0 version of family building? It’s not nuclear families anymore.

Naseem Sayani:

Right? We have families that are spread out. We have families that are adopting more. Surrogacy is actually much more common. We have, you know, say mixed gender and same gender parents coming together. And so how does AI understand all of that in a way that can be thoughtful and inclusive? And that’s missing from what’s getting built in AI right now because there’s not enough women involved nor in leadership positions to ask these questions and say, hey, what about and what about and what about in a way that would expand the real rich thinking power of these platforms in a way that was ultimately much more human than what it’s doing right now.

Melinda Wittstock:

A 100%. And I I think you could say the same thing about social media.

Naseem Sayani:

Oh, 100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. That evolved. And I mean, you know, this goes into my background as well, the way I was approaching it back in the day compared to how it was approached. Understanding the danger of filter bubbles or how people can get, ultimately sort of isolated by an algorithm rather than connected by it.

Naseem Sayani:

Like you know, the echo chambers that get built and what Facebook does right now, and the bottom line is always revenue. The bottom line is not safety when the bottom line should be safety.

Melinda Wittstock:

Or getting there quickly. The blitzscaling thing, right? Of just getting there incredibly quickly no matter what. Right? Which is very, very linear way to think. It sort of doesn’t really think about society. It’s a very sort of, I guess, I don’t know, in the American cultural idea of this kind of rugged individual kind of, like riding into town on a horse with a cowboy hat and, like, you know? 

Naseem Sayani:

It’s a build fast and break things that, doesn’t consider human outcomes at all. Exactly. So yeah. Women need to somehow figure out how to…

Melinda Wittstock:

take charge of AI because I I’ve watched these guys. They’ve been so reckless in a way that they’ve with a technology that has so much potential.

Naseem Sayani:

Mhmm. 

Melinda Wittstock:

They’ve eroded all trust in it. Like, it’s almost embarrassing to say that your company uses AI, right, from a consumer standpoint now. Like, in large chunks of society.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. They just won’t use it.

Melinda Wittstock:

It feels like in their kind of haste in this in this this way that they’ve gone about it have actually are in danger of destroying the shareholder value that they’ve built. Right? So, on one hand, they’re carrying the entire economy. But on the other hand, it’s like, oh, man. They and so I use this as a way to start in this conversation because I think women approach business differently.

Naseem Sayani:

Mhmm.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like my own pattern recognition from the podcast. I think we’re more likely to see to actually care about our team members or care about the impact or even create a business that is gonna have an impact akin to, say, a mission of a charity. Not that it is a charity. It’s business. We want to create wealth, but you can do well by doing good. Right. Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Women just have this different approach. And what’s interesting is when you marry that approach with the fact that we actually return better, it’s interesting to me.

Naseem Sayani:

It should be a no brainer. Right? It’s that easy.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s kind of like, duh. Okay. So, with that in mind, just anecdotally, I was talking to a guy who’s a big, Microsoft innovator on the audio AI side of things. And he said, ‘you know what, Melinda? All these guys, they’re jealous of women’s ability to create. So, they want to create. Like, because you guys can have kids…

Naseem Sayani:

…create life, you mean? 

Melinda Wittstock:

And they’re, like, jealous of that, and that’s, like, a motivating factor. And I was like, wow. You know, I’ve never heard anyone say people. Right?

Naseem Sayani:

Such a deep-seated insecurity if that’s the thing. Right? 

Melinda Wittstock:

I hadn’t really thought of it before, and it came from, like, a 50-year-old white guy. I’m like, wow. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe that’s it. Yeah. But there is a real difficulty or just blindness of a lot of men to invest in in in women.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, whatever motivates that, that’s over there. So, what do we have to do? We can just sort of ignore these guys and, like, create our own thing. We can help change them and persuade them. There are some good men. We can be inclusive, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, all that stuff.

We can do that.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

But I still think we have to do our own thing. So, what is our own thing? What does it look like? Like, where you’re sitting right now, so you’ve run a fund. You’re creating a new fund. You’ve been involved in lots of different lots of different things. what what’s the most important thing to do first,. to really get this ball rolling of really systemic change? 

Naseem Sayani:

The first order business is getting women more connected to each other.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

And that that for me is so, so important because we are kind of coming out of the nuclear family experience and, you know, the two parents, two and a half kids, and everyone’s in their houses. And that that from where we came from, where we lived in in in tribes or in communities that were much closer and, all the women raised all the kids and the men we believe were hunting, but there’s disputed evidence. 

Naseem Sayani:

We won’t go down that path. But from the spaces where we live so close together and we had multi-generational families in the same house. We don’t have those things anymore. And so, it separated all the women into our homes. And then society, because of maybe this insecurity, embedded a lot of scarcity into how women work and how we share and how we talk to each other. And it’s, you know, there’s only one seat at the table. And so, there’s sharp elbows to get there, or we, there’s chafing, because, you know, she’s beautiful, and I want to be as beautiful as she is. And so, you end up in a world of hate rather than a world of love. And those things were created.

Naseem Sayani:

They were almost put upon us. It’s not necessarily how we’ve always behaved with each other. But getting us back to a place where we’re in community and we know each other and we’re sharing and we’re in abundance and we realize again how much power there is in that. That’s baseline. Right? We’re doing that more and more with having communities of women do things together or have events together or actually spend time talking to each other for goodness’ sake. Without the guards up. Right? And we start there. I think that’s probably the most important starting point to make sure we can get after.

Naseem Sayani:

And from there, we can then get to redesigning reimagining, I’m gonna say, financial systems. 

Melinda Wittstock:

I totally agree with what you’re saying. I mean, getting out of scarcity into abundance thinking. So, if you’ve kind of grown up in a society where resources are scarce and you have to scrap for everything, you’re gonna, you’re gonna be less likely to either have the wherewithal physically or even like mentally or emotional, emotionally to want to support somebody else. And so, there’s a big philosophical or maybe it’s, I don’t know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a change of thinking. There was a certain point when I realized that if I help other women, that’s going to help me. It’s not going to take away from me. When another woman succeeds, that’s amazing. That helps me.

Naseem Sayani:

It’s great for all of us.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Right, exactly. And so, but I still think there’s this kind of this false division almost. It’s a scarcity because maybe we have scarcity of time. We certainly have scarcity of time. We’re spread too thin, most of us. And so, what we prioritize isn’t necessarily the thing that’s gonna be the most transformational. And the thing that’s gonna be the most transformational is that relationship, something that men have done forever, where they’re on the golf course or in the club or they’re over cigars and a whiskey.

Melinda Wittstock:

They’re like, I have this opportunity. Like, are you in? I’m in. You know? Women aren’t doing that so much.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. Well and that that’s a byproduct of, yes, we’re now walking into more abundance and really getting to know each other again. And we are starting to shift our family dynamics. And so, we still carry you know, we over index on carrying the burden of the household and the burden of our family still sits with her. But we’re starting to see more family structures where it is actually even or where, you know, dad isn’t a character in the family, but actually plays a full parent role or a full partner role. Right. That I think has to permeate more broadly. We do we have to see those dynamic shift.

Naseem Sayani:

And that is that is as much giving women permission to be and I’m saying permission. I don’t really mean that, but, you know, quote, unquote, permission to be independent. In as much as we give men permission to be empathetic and to be softer and kinder and kinda drop the masculine shields that they walk around with because society has also put that on them.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Patriarchy hurts them too.

Naseem Sayani:

No, 100%. Absolutely. It does. Breaking that down and it’s that’ll take time. But if we all say things out loud and my, my favorite example of that is, you know, I have a seven-year-old son. And in our house, we’ve been very deliberate about the housework just being the housework. Somebody cooks, somebody cleans, somebody handles laundry, somebody takes out the trash. It’s just all work. It’s jobs to be done.

Naseem Sayani:

And somebody takes care of the job to be done. If it’s not mom’s work and dad’s work. And so, for his baseline relative to the baseline I grew up with, which was highly gendered, it’s night and day different. Right. And if, if we all took it upon ourselves to take the genderization out of our households, in one generation, we could change everything.

Melinda Wittstock:

Completely. Yeah. Completely. And also, this thing, I remember I remember when I grew up, you know, it was considered impolite…

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

…To talk about money.

Naseem Sayani:

Money. Oh, yeah. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Like, especially for women who was somehow unseemly. And then there was this other pushback I got often from other women in my young days as an entrepreneur. There was like, I was somehow greedy or, like, I don’t know. There was just this weird vibe or sort of pejorative on that. And I don’t know what the animating thing was because on one hand, you know, you’re standing in the, I don’t know, in the school drop off thing. And I remember being the only woman there were other women who were kind of career women, you know, they had like powerful jobs or whatever, but I was the only entrepreneur for years forever, actually. All the way to kids growing up. And I just felt so misunderstood.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like, there was nobody like, just like, I like I felt like an alien.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. I have a I have a hypothesis on where the dirty came from, because it’s exaggerated in some cultures. But, you know, early on when we were already getting into, like, women are owned by their husband, or you have to get married or there’s somehow there’s something wrong with you. Right? And so, if a woman didn’t get married and maybe hadn’t had enough education, her alternatives were pretty slim. And so, what she might end up doing would be sex work as an option. Now she’s a single woman who has money because of the work she’s doing. And by a byproduct of the work she’s doing, it’s now interpreted as dirty money because it’s not nice and women shouldn’t do that.

Naseem Sayani:

And now, you know, it goes back to, like, whether we can own our sexuality or not. But because unmarried women in some cultures would end up in that type of work, right? They were now the women who had money. And so now it’s perceived as dirty because, oh my goodness, how did she get that money?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Now that’s true. Maybe with being a movie star or something as well. Right.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. It was in you, and, but you weren’t married. Right. But you had money. And so, you were perceived as some kind of outcast who had money. The real dark underbelly of that is that the only reason the sex work exists is because men partake in it. Right. There’s a demand.

Naseem Sayani:

Supply and demand. There’s demand. Right? And so, it there’s it comes from so many different, like, gaps in what society has allowed or not allowed or created as opportunity. And then this perception of dirty has just stayed with us. It’s one hypothesis, but I for me, it checks out.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, look, we’re we all swim in the same soup. So, and we’re open brought up with all these cultural things. And if you believe in things like epigenetics, like, so fear of spiders can be passed down epigenetically. Right? Like, so literally things like scarcity around money or, like, money mindset issues or just, you know, fear of that. I think women also to some degree, I mean, we talk on the podcast a lot over the years about fear of failure, but Oh, yeah. We’ve actually talked a lot about fear of success because for a woman to really succeed, whether it means being really visible, it means because in that success where you have a lot of money and you have some sort of fame or you’re visible in a in a way that you need to be to create, like, a game changing company.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, imagine, like, a female Sam Altman right now and what kind of grief she would be getting. it’s nothing on…

Naseem Sayani:

…nowhere near what the vitriol would be if he was a woman…

Melinda Wittstock:

It would be a mix of, like, maybe jealousy or fear from other women. It would men feeling emasculated. It would be all this kind of stuff. I have this theory that women are actually a little bit afraid of success in that sense because what does that mean? Like, is it safe?

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great question. The media bias that runs in all of that is so severe because the fear of failure, if a female founder fails or when Whitney was asked to leave Bumble, it was the front page, top of the fold of the New York Times for weeks. Right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

Let’s not forget that she was invited back a couple weeks later. And so, ultimately, she wasn’t gone very long, but that didn’t get front page news. Yeah. But a male founder fails. Someone like Adam Neumann, that whole thing blows up.

Melinda Wittstock:

He failed upwards. I mean, he got…

Naseem Sayani:

He got funded again with $350,000,000.

Melinda Wittstock:

That that just blew my mind on that day. I was just and then, you know, Elizabeth Holmes for all of her fraud. I just call it for what it is. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. Could have told you that there’s no way that anyway. So somehow she managed to persuade all these powerful men to invest in her, but that set back women back.

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. And it still stays with women. Right? The Elizabeth Holmes question is a burden every female founder in biotech carries with her. It comes up over and over and over.

Melinda Wittstock:

And that’s the story. That’s the question they get. I get a real not meaning. How are you different from Elizabeth Holmes?

Naseem Sayani:

Right. We don’t ask every male founder how he’s different than Adam Neumann. Right. Every female founder in biotech is like, oh, jeez. What if she’s another Elizabeth Holmes? You don’t do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

It’s not my burden to bear. Right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So, let’s get back to, like, what needs to be done. We’ve got this massive wealth transfer to women. Yeah. We have this lack of education. What’s this community of getting together, comparing notes? I’ve talked to female investors who say, look, I’m, I’m trying to find opportunities.

Melinda Wittstock:

I don’t know where to find them. And then you obviously the startups are trying to find investors. So, there’s like a big disconnect there. Resources, education. Yeah. What has to happen to get more women investing? Because I know this is a big mission or something I share. Like, what are all the things that have to happen to get them writing bigger checks?

Naseem Sayani:

So financial fluency is a big one. It’s just, you know, getting involved in understanding the terms, the language, the opportunities because a lot of women really only think about checking accounts and savings accounts.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

And, and that’s not wealth building. We’re not building generational wealth on checking accounts and savings accounts.

Melinda Wittstock:

Understanding leverage. Understanding leverage. Right? Leverage is a big gap, I think. Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

Understanding how to use debt to your advantage. We are all completely brainwashed into thinking debt is a bad thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Debt is good as long as you’re not spending it on your like, as long as you’re not getting into debt going on vacation. 

Naseem Sayani:

Very wealthy men use their stock assets as the collateral to get huge loans, and they live their life using the money from the loans. And because it’s a loan, it’s not counted as income. So, they also don’t have any income taxes. Yeah. But their stock is sitting there just fine. Yeah. Right? And so, they it’s just there’s a model by which men have accumulated wealth that just hasn’t been in how women are thinking about wealth building. And it single women and married women.

Naseem Sayani:

The dynamic is even more complicated because a lot of times they’re deferring all of those decisions to their partners.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes.

Naseem Sayani:

And not even part of those conversations because he must know better. And 90 nine times out of 10, he’s he doesn’t, because they are actually much more emotional than we are when it comes to investing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my god. This idea that men aren’t the most they’re the most they’re like such delicate little flowers.

Naseem Sayani:

And so, One, I want women who are in partnered relationships where they want to have more of a voice in the financials and the wealth generation of their households. And Sally Krawcheck said this, I’m totally borrowing it. You have to move from being the treasurer to being a co-CFO.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Naseem Sayani:

Because right now, a lot of us a lot of women function as the treasurer. Food is bought, clothes are bought, bills are paid, etcetera. But you’re not up here at the CFO conversation, and that that’s the graduation. And then within that, it’s not about pushing your partner out and saying, hey. I know better. It’s about asking questions, and it’s about learning. And it’s about if you want to start investing, you know, one strategy that I’ve seen that often becomes hard to manage is, you know, you might want to make three or four angel investments or one fund investment in a year. And so you’re kind of asking for that funding each time you want to do it.

Naseem Sayani:

You say, well, can I put $25k here? Oh, can I you know, what if we did this? Instead, what I’ve heard some women do, which I think is actually much more thoughtful and strategic, is when you’re making your financial plans for the next year, you say, you know what? I would love to have $150,000. That’s my allocation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Naseem Sayani:

To decide where I want to invest it over the next twelve months. Right. In that way, you’ve already pulled your capital. And within that, it’s your decisions to make, but you’re not going back for the ask each time to that household bank.

Melinda Wittstock:

And that also has the advantage of educating the partner or the husband. Right? Because your deals might be doing better. 

Naseem Sayani:

Just compare your portfolios. Have this kind of conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

That makes a lot of sense. And I think I said this on, on your podcast, like how many times that I, in, in the context of raising money for my startup, would talk to really high net worth women in New York who’d made, like it wasn’t just inheritance money. They’d made their own money either through the law or Wall Street, and they’d say, oh, my husband makes all the decisions. It’s like, wait. What? And these were otherwise really strong, powerful women. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, taking that agency, it it comes down to, like, you can’t force someone to learn this. But the more we have examples, like, the more we’re connected, the more we talk about it, the more we set up ways for people to learn, but also get I think a lot of women want to do, like, dip a little toe in. They don’t want to necessarily go all men are more likely to go all in. It’s okay. I’m gonna do this. I’m just gonna go big. But women don’t do that. They’re more likely to be quite I don’t know.

Melinda Wittstock:

Take little, small baby steps, I guess, to begin. Right?

Naseem Sayani:

Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Because we’re not the muscle’s not built, right, to write a $250k check over a weekend. And so, starting small feels better, smarter, less risky. Right. And that for me is where, again, going back to community where volume can make a huge difference. And I’ve said in a few places that if women wanted to put billions of dollars into venture capital today, we could do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

We could do it. Like, look, seriously, if you had, like, a whole bunch of having done a whole bunch of innovations in the in the realm of crowdsourcing. Right?

Naseem Sayani:

Mhmm.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, just if every woman put a couple thousand bucks into a fund and …

Naseem Sayani:

I was backing into some math, like, if you know, how many women were older than 35 years old in, you know, let’s say, 2024, it’s about a 100,000,000. Yeah. And if you take 1% of that and you assume they’re accredited, which is the SEC qualification to start investing, 1% of that is a 100,000 women. A 100,000? Yeah. If they each put 50 k into venture, we’re talking about $55,000,000,000.

Melinda Wittstock:

We can invest in moonshots at that stage. Right? 

Naseem Sayani:

It’s a volume play.

Melinda Wittstock:

So that has to happen.

Naseem Sayani:

We can get we can get there. It’s like a stadium. It’s a sports stadium of people.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. So right now, say in the ecosystem, it’s very nice to see an increasing number of female, you know, female VCs,

Melinda Wittstock:

investing in, you know, female run VCs, investing in female founded startups. But they’re not raising as much money as their counterpart, so thus their check sizes have to be smaller. What are the impediments of these funds getting together and pooling resources, like funds of funds and things like that? Do you do you think there’s still this kind of weird scarcity there that they’re all competing with each other rather than actually collaborate?

Naseem Sayani:

There is some of that, and it it’s a matter of what the capital stack looks like right now because they’re the largest LPs. Right? The ones writing the biggest checks. You know, they are still, in some cases, not all, still carving out a part of their allocation to do diversity investments or to invest in a female fund manager. And it’s a different pool of capital than what their broader capital looks like. And so all of the female fund managers are all after that carved off…

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, so they’re all after a small slice of the pie.

Naseem Sayani:

Rather than like, what I I want I want my shot at the big bucket. Right? Like, I don’t need the diversity sleeve. Just treat us like everybody else, and let’s do it because I promise you a lot of those first-time male fund managers don’t have any better track record than I do. But because of all the societal reasons like the pattern recognition, they get perceived different.

Melinda Wittstock:

They’re sourcing from a bigger pie. So, you could be super experienced, but you’re still and then yeah. This is this is so messed up. So, what does it take to change all those LPs, like all the pension funds, the insurance companies, and… 

Naseem Sayani:

For me, I think women have to get it done ourselves and show them show the value. Yeah. Show them the money and we can keep educating and reeducating, but that’s taking a long time and it’s going to continue to take a long time.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right?

Naseem Sayani:

But if we could otherwise, you know, the hundred thousand women doing the $50k each into some big fund of funds, and then we start to deploy the money out to the funds that are run by women. Or to your point, the consolidation question has come up a lot because we have a lot of Fund One’s that raised $580,000,000.

Naseem Sayani:

Like, let’s just put all that there. Everyone’s touching different parts of similar thesis areas. Let’s collapse it and get to one much bigger fund, and then I’ll raise the next fund together. Yeah. Because it’s right now, we’re walking in as exceptions into every room. Like, oh, the female fund manager’s here. If we all walked in together, we’re no longer an exception.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Naseem Sayani:

And then let’s do that. Right? And let’s find a way to show up en masse, and then you can’t argue the proposition anymore. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, Naseem, we’ve come a long way, like, in the last ten years in many cases, but obviously the work is far from done. There’s still all these structural problems. Where do you see us being ten years from now? Like, I mean, it’s a hard question to answer given all the political instability and economic instability we’re facing right now. Like, there’s all kinds of question marks. You know, I just look at the bond yields. Right? Or I look at the supply chain disruptions, and I think, oh my god. Money is not really gonna be flowing for a little bit.

Melinda Wittstock:

There’s so much we don’t know. AI could kill us all. Oh my god. Right? Yeah. Assuming that we make it through, you know, all of that and, and, and the assaults in, in a way you could say the assault on women, like, and, and on science and all the stuff that we’re living through right now. But assuming we can overcome those things

Naseem Sayani:

Yeah. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Where do you think we can realistically be in ten years?

Naseem Sayani:

So, the wealth transfer is significant. It’s a combination of wealth going to younger generations, going to wives because their husbands died or coming from boomer parents, you know, to whatever levels of family. And so that leaning into that as a mobilizing mechanism for how we move more capital for me is very important. And the most interesting part of that is the younger generations because we’re despite the chaos and what we’re seeing is all the political strife, we are seeing these points of light emerge. Right? We saw what happened in New York. We saw what happened in Michigan with these different elections. It is the young people showing up and saying, I am done with this.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly.

Naseem Sayani:

Also, they are they have a different mentality around impact. They have a different mentality around how they want to commit their time, and that’s gonna translate into how they want to commit their funding. And so, I’m increasingly seeing young women come out of MBA programs wanting to launch their own fund once and not join another fund, but they’re now the curriculum is built into their MBA programs. Yeah. So, they can come out and say, you know what? They could probably raise 10,000,000. Right. They have friends that are going to the bigger jobs or family that can invest.

[PROMO CREDIT]

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with venture investor Naseem Sayani.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Naseem Sayani:

They could pull together 10,000,000. Right. And we can have really smart, young fund manager fund ones. Yeah. And then they can also start to combine and raise the fund too. But their mentality around investing is so much further progressed than what we see as the norm right now. Yeah. I want to see more of that happen. I want more of these points of light voting behaviors show up in how money moves and how we’re preserving things around inclusion and preserving things around different populations and what they need and what their needs states are as far as economics and health care and lived experience.

Naseem Sayani:

And that I think is can be a powerful engine for how we what the future looks like later because we could have a lot more female fund managers with actually more capital because they’re using this wealth engine to fund what they want to build. And the rest of us would benefit from that.

Melinda Wittstock:

You know, I think that’s a 100% true, and I’ve also seen it even with purchasing behavior. Yeah. Companies are out of line or not, you know, like you said, what just happened between Target and Costco last year. Target gets rid of DEI, they’re, you know, fall off a cliff. What’s happening with just, oh my goodness. Like the, the ascent of MapQuest, right? Like Athena’s coming back again. It’s back again. Like America thing, right? And so, I think there’s an opportunity for women in that, just even outside of capital raising, to be on the right side of history there in terms of what we’re doing and provide the choice that consumers actually want.

Melinda Wittstock:

And that that applies to social. It applies to AI. It applies to having ethics and living values that a a good chunk, probably the majority of people, actually want. And people are becoming a lot more sort of educated or up to speed on that stuff, I’ve noticed. Yeah. It’s kind of encouraging in a way.

Naseem Sayani:

You know? Yeah. The way we hire, the people we bring in the building, the neighborhoods that we’re in, it the people we hire are critical to our bottom-line performance. There’s no way we’re changing strategy because we’re not gonna lose any money. What has been wrapped around DEI for so long has been it’s the nice thing to do. It’s the right thing to do. And on some level, that’s been paired with trading off something that could have been better where Costco is very clear.

Naseem Sayani:

This is business performance, and we will not compromise business performance for the sake of some person’s mentality around these things, but this delivers outcomes. And if everybody started talking about it that way and said it’s this is I’m not investing in female founders Yeah. Because it’s not charity. We’re the churning more than every dollar. I’m here to make money. 

Naseem Sayani:

Do a lot of good at the same time, that’s what I want also. But I’m not here to not make money. Let’s not misunderstand. And I want that language to get into how we talk about these things that it’s not like, oh, I’m investing women, but you go, no. I’m investing in women because that’s actually how my portfolio is going to perform. Yeah. And I can’t just have dudes in the portfolio because diversity always pays off, and I’m leaning into that payoff.

Melinda Wittstock:

A 100%. So, we’re going to go change the world. Yes. Ten years from now, it’s going to be very, very different. I think we do all have to get together. And I mean, you know, this podcast, you know, is a start, but I think it’s, like, literally just doing things, publicizing or doing, getting more and more…

Naseem Sayani:

And shouting the winds from the rooftops. Right? And just, like, amplifying each other every single day of the week.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. Naseem, thank you so much for everything you’re doing in the world, and thank you for putting on your wings and flying with us. 

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Naseem Sayani is a venture investor and founder and CEO of GCWC and GCWC Capital, a media platform and investment fund focused on tech and AI-anchored innovations across healthtech and fintech. She also hosts the Capital Flex podcast, so make sure you check that out.

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

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