767 Patience Ball & Ruth Shaber:

We talk a lot on this podcast about why women entrepreneurs receive only 2% of the venture capital pie – a number that’s barely moved in two decades – and the opportunities for massive returns – both in financial and societal terms – that are being missed by investors who overlook the innovations of women in business. Patience Ball and Dr Ruth Shaber have made it their mission to change the game, and today share the way forward based on their own impact on investing in women and the research that forms their groundbreaking book the XX Edge.

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’ve lived the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses as a 5-time serial entrepreneur, now Podopolo, the socially interactive podcasting platform. Wherever you are listening to this, take a minute and download the Podopolo app so you can us in conversation in the Wings episode comments 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 all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet two inspiring women on a mission to change the game for women in business. Patience Ball and Dr Ruth Shaber are authors of The XX Edge, their research proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that women entrepreneurs and CEOs outperform men – and what must happen to ensure women get a fair share of investment capital and C-suite opportunities.

Today we dig deep into the edge women bring to business with Patience Ball, the founder and CEO of the Women of the World Endowment, and Dr Ruth Shaber, co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures and the founder and president of the Tara Foundation, which promotes health, well-being, and opportunity for women and girls.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the World Bank’s Christine Lagarde said, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, things would’ve been different.”

And now comes the proof with the well-researched book, The XX Edge.

Turns out women have the edge in business because we are low ego and more collaborative, we take the longer view, and possess much better awareness of risk.

Yet if 98% of the people making investment capital decisions continue to be white men, investors are missing out on huge opportunities for outsized financial returns – and the world on innovations that will solve society’s most intractable challenges.

Today we talk to the authors of the XX Edge, two women who have made it their mission to connect women to capital investment. Patience Ball deployed $16 billion of capital to women entrepreneurs as Principal Investment Officer and Global Head of Banking on Women at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and she is the founder/CEO of Women of the World Endowment, an investment nonprofit focused on centralizing women as economic, environmental, and social changemakers while delivering market-rate, risk-adjusted returns, and impact at scale.

Co author Dr Ruth Shaber is the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures, a group of foundations and investors that collaborate to bring new types of capital and enterprise to the field of reproductive health in the United States. An Obstetrician and Gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente from 1990 to 2012, Dr Ruth is also president and founder of the Tara Health Foundation, which promotes health, well-being, and opportunity for women and girls through innovative evidence-informed programs. Ruth was featured in Forbes 2020 Impact 50: Investors Seeking Profit—and Pushing for Change for her contributions to the field of impact investing.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Patience Ball and Dr Ruth Shaber, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Ruth and Patience, welcome to Wings.

Ruth Shaber:

Thanks for having us, Melinda.

Patience Ball:

Thank you very much, Melinda. Good to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m so excited to talk to you about your book, XX Edge. It’s a personal mission of mine to get more female founders funded, and I know this is central to what you’re doing. What brought you together to write this book?

Ruth Shaber:

This is Ruth. We’ve been on very different journeys, but have been collaborating for about three years. My background is I’m a physician, I’m an obstetrician gynecologist, and I had a career at Kaiser Permanente, both as a clinician and as an executive, where I learned about the power of evidence-based practice, systems change, systems engineering, and performance improvement. When I started Tara Health Foundation in 2014, it was with the intention of bringing all those skills to bear in the fields of philanthropy and impact investing.

At Tara Health, we’ve created a 100% mission aligned investment portfolio across all asset classes, so investing in early stage companies and entrepreneurs in addition to the public markets and debt. We also do quite a bit of grant making to help build a field. That is what brought me to meet Patience and she can tell you her history.

Patience Ball:

Yeah, thanks, Ruth. This is Patience. A little bit about myself as well, a little bit of my background, I have been doing investments all my life, first in infrastructure with the International Financial Corporation, which is the private sector arm of the World Bank, and then in distressed assets work, and finally in financial markets, investing in financial institutions around the world, but also looking at opportunities for private equity and venture capital. My journey to start focusing on women specifically started after the 2008 financial crisis when Christine Lagarde said, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, things would’ve been different.”

I started really thinking about that. What would’ve been different had women been centralized in the infrastructure of risk management in financial institutions? I ended up building a platform for the IFC to invest in women entrepreneurs around the world. That platform is now deployed or influenced the deployment of more than $16 billion of capital to women entrepreneurs. I founded Women of the World Endowment in 2018, and our focus at Women of the World Endowment is to really centralize the role of women as solution drivers, as change makers. And that includes women entrepreneurs and more.

We are also 100% mission aligned entity. We invest across asset classes and across sectors with one commitment, that all our strategies have to centralize women in them. Ruth and I met three years ago now, almost four years ago. Ruth had a sheet of paper on which she had met down financial capital markets or the system of capital markets. She and I were having breakfast and talking through this and realized that part of what needed to happen was to really understand the levers of change in capital markets and how women could be centralized around those leverage points.

And then we ended up writing this book to make sure that the data that we were working with and the case stories that we were witnessing around the world were also visible to men, because the success of any strategy is really one that happens because of gender diversity, both men and women at the table. And that’s really what brought us together and the thesis of the book, The XX Edge.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, how wonderful that events brought you together on this really important mission. It’s vital. Female founders and entrepreneurs are doing incredible things, and yet here’s a number that hasn’t really moved in two decades, 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. These are companies that are actually qualified for venture investment where they could be billion dollar unicorns.

And all the same, women really, really struggle. What do you think is the root cause of that apart from just generally how we’ve been socialized or these perhaps unconscious or sometimes conscious biases of the folks, largely men, running venture capital firms? What’s being left on the table there? Why are they missing out on great investment opportunities?

Ruth Shaber:

This is Ruth. I’ll take that question first. I think that you hit on some of the really important factors, which include bias, but this is a problem that perpetuates itself in capital markets across all diversity issues. If you have 95, 97, 98% of the people making capital decisions, whether it’s in the public or private markets, are of one single demographic, and in this case it’s white men, they tend to only see the types of solutions that make sense for them.

While there’s been great progress in the world over the past several hundred, several thousand years in terms of innovation and new product development and all the things that we have made our lives better, because the same type of people keep making the same types of decisions, we’re missing out on huge opportunities. I think that it’s a self-perpetuating system when there’s lack of diversity in decision making.

When we can bring in more women, more racially diverse, more age diverse, more geographically diverse people into these financial markets, they’re going to see things that their colleagues might have missed. I think that’s one of the first things that we need to change in order to get more money.

Melinda Wittstock:

You’re saying it can be an addressable market. Say in the femtech space, for instance, that men just don’t even understand and even understand that it’s a big market, for instance.

Ruth Shaber:

Absolutely. This is Ruth again. I think that if you look at femtech or women’s health that it’s perceived by men that it’s something that’s not that important, or they don’t understand it. They’re less interested. They’re less inclined. We’ve been working for quite a while to bring more capital into femtech and women’s health spaces. I’m sure Patience has something to say about this as well.

Patience Ball:

This is Patience, and maybe what I could just add to what Ruth said is the fact that it’s not just about a lack of understanding of the innovations that women may bring to the table or the types of investments that women might want to make. What we have detailed in The XX Edge is the fact that that results in missed opportunities, missed opportunities that actually could bring about outsized performance returns, financial returns, but also solutions to some of the challenges that we’re living through. Our view, and we did quite a bit of research in this book, is that there are three characteristics that women bring to any decision making table that are really critical.

Whether that decision making table is an entrepreneurial table or an asset allocation table with venture capitalists themselves, we should have more women in those investment committee rooms. Women bring three things, what we call The Edge. It’s low ego, which means they tend to be more collaborative in their leadership styles. It is the long view, which means they are looking at investments both for what returns one is able to generate or the investment is able to generate, but really looking at the long-term either financial returns or impact returns of those investments, as well as risk awareness.

There’s just greater risk awareness that women bring to tables. And then from a context perspective, to your point about femtech and men not really investing in that, our belief is that proximity challenges makes for better innovations. Women tend to be proximate to quite a number of the challenges that we’re trying to address across markets, whether it’s climate change, education, healthcare, you name it. And that proximity to those challenges actually allows for differentiated opportunities for this investment dollars to actually target and then end up making outsized returns on. It’s a missed opportunity basically.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think women see things a little bit differently, obviously, than men. I think women sometimes come up with different business models that are a little bit more let me just say matrixy than the more linear A to B quick flip exit kind of model that a man would come up with, where we see things a little bit differently. I’ve seen this so many times where it’s really mixing a number of different things together to really transform a whole industry from a very unique perspective.

To a male investor seeing that, if they’re not thinking in that system’s thinking way that women are more able or more relational in a way to do, they see that as lots of points of risk rather than understanding that women are more likely to create a business that’s more akin to an organism. Have you seen that in terms of just the types of business models where there’s a disconnect in that, there’s a way of thinking, or how we architect or even the types of business ideas that women tend to come up with?

Ruth Shaber:

Melinda, this is Ruth. I love your matrixy word because that really speaks to what Patience mentioned in terms of the collaborative nature of many women. We also want to make it clear that these are not absolutes. While we talk about women as, because often the research that we interrogated was around cohorts of people that self-describe as women, but this is fluid and there are plenty of men who have these qualities. There are plenty of non-binary people who have these qualities and plenty of women who don’t.

But in general, women tend to be more collaborative, and that notion of being more relational and more matrixy I think is really true that they tend to approach problem solving differently, where they’re looking at how can everybody win in a situation, how can I create a business model that’s more likely to be sustainable, because it is a shared resource across many different populations. We can think of what that looks like in healthcare or in education or business. But the notion of this relational matrix I think is beautiful and absolutely panned out in our research.

Melinda Wittstock:

Even my own current business, Podopolo, is like that. It’s definitely a flywheel where everybody wins because the component and underlying technology, the AI, helps podcast listeners. It helps podcasters in the context of the creator economy. It also helps advertisers get a predictive return on their investment all while having a social impact. whereby doing one thing you’re having a multiplicity of outcomes and leverage across all of it, where everybody is better off for this experience.

The entrepreneur can come across as, kind of ADD or unfocused or whatever. Does it really translate to them like, “Oh man, this woman doesn’t have focus, or this company doesn’t have focus,” when in actual fact it’s highly focused?

Patience Ball:

I would add to your point, Melinda. This is Patience, by the way. More than being highly focused, it actually has the greater opportunity for differentiation. And also my view is it’s actually more strategic. Something that’s a straight line to an exit might actually not take into account the things that are not straightforward, the things that you don’t see in a straight line, what you see around the corners, as it were. These are the types of businesses that women are building. To give you an example of an investment that we’ve made here at Women of the World Endowment, and Women of the World Endowment itself is a c3, but it’s an entrepreneurial entity.

I could explain all the different things that we do that seem complex, but that complexity is what necessary to create the kind of systems change that we want to see. One of the examples of an investment we made is in a little company called Ethos, and Ethos is actually founded by men. People will say, “Why would you invest in a male founded company?” But what we’re looking at and for every investment that we make, we’re looking at is this likely to actually deliver inclusive access and inclusive opportunity in addition to delivering the returns that we want to see? For this investment, for instance, ESG is the new big thing.

We’re having a lot of capital chasing this new asset class, I guess, broad asset class called ESG. We know that with so much capital following that, we want to embed and make core to ESG the fact that women have to be centralized to these strategies. We invested in this company. It’s a small company. We did a seed investment, and what it does is it provides data to other asset owners and asset managers on how to look at their investments vis-a-vis ESG metrics and standards.

We knew that with an investment into that company, we’re likely to make financial returns, but also likely to influence them to embed gender and centralized gender, and thereby end up in the rooms with asset owners who would otherwise not have an opportunity to be inside. What this gave us was financial returns and strategic returns, as well as impact returns that we’re going to get because it’s influencing a certain way of investing. We sit on boards. Somebody else would look at that and say it’s a small company. It’s complicated. What is it doing? But because we’re looking at that opportunity for leverage and influence and doing more than one thing at a time, this was an investment that we liked.

I think Ruth has done quite a bit of systems building with Tara Health Foundation, and maybe, Ruth, you want to give an example as well.

Ruth Shaber:

Yeah, absolutely. This is Ruth. Melinda, what we saw is across all asset classes, whether it’s in public-private debt, real estate, that when you have gender diversity, so when you have teams that include both men and women, that the financial performance is off…

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s off the charts, right?

Ruth Shaber:

It’s off the charts consistently. There are certainly gaps in the research and there maybe places where more studies should be done, but we never saw a situation where all male teams versus gender diverse teams where gender diverse teams didn’t outperform. Certainly for your audience around entrepreneurship, when there’s at least one female founder on a team, that you’re going to see better performance, more sustainable companies. But the other thing that I think this notion of a matrix is important to consider, it’s not just about financial performance. But when you add more diverse people to a team, whether in this case with women, that you actually get many other benefits.

It’s not about replacing men with women, it’s about making more room at the table. When you do that, it actually grows the number of opportunities. At the highest macro scale, you’re going to see economic growth when more women are included in leadership and in the workforce. At the micro level, by increasing the size of the decision making team and adding women, you’re actually going to see, and this played out also across all of our research, you’re going to see more opportunity, you’re going to see more growth, you’re going to see social returns.

We know that when women have more access to capital, they tend to run their companies more efficiently and there’s more money then for other things such as growth, such as pulling into their communities or to their families. This plays out in small subsistence farmers in developing countries or for CEOs of large companies.

Melinda Wittstock:

Perhaps the scarcity of capital makes us be much more capital efficient. This has been true of all my companies, you just have to figure out how to do more with less. It allows you to be really creative. But I also think just a different approach to leadership and management makes a big difference as well. Because women, as you mentioned, are more collaborative or more likely to give agency to a team and really attract and mentor and grow a team, that that team is going to work better with obviously more empathy. So many factors in that. I like to call it, it’s the archetypal feminine energy, right?

We’re talking about intuition, empathy, really understanding other people. You mentioned at the beginning of this, women are more likely to leave their ego at the door. They don’t have to be right all the time. They’re going to be more likely to empower others. I tend to think that that’s really the future of business, because we see so much changing where the command-control. Just watch what’s going on at Twitter right now. In that command-control scenario, it’s just not really working. There are so many other ways, better ways to do that.

I wonder, there was a moment in time back in the ’70s with Milton Friedman where everything became short-termism and everything was about the next quarter and purely financial, not really thinking about the impact of a business on the world, on society, on the team, on all of these things. Do you think it’s an opportunity right now with more and more women coming into entrepreneurship to really change the way the game of businesses played in a more positive direction?

Patience Ball:

Melinda, 100% you’re quite right. This is Patience. Funny that you should reference Milton Friedman because in the book, we almost call this book More Pie because like you, we believe that with more women around the table, different decisions are made and there’s an opportunity to actually grow the economic pie. This idea that the pie is limited and so shareholder primacy is what needs to happen versus stakeholder primacy, which is I think to your point where if we had more women sitting in decision making rooms would evolve more towards stakeholder primacy.

Stakeholder primacy is essentially what you described, that in addition to making strong returns, financial returns, we’d see other impact returns as well or positive social returns. You also made the point about capital efficiency and I think on one hand is one of the reasons why women-owned, women run businesses don’t scale at the same pace because we are aware that if I got a seed round or an A round, Series B Series C capital is just not waiting there for me to have. There is that dirt of capital that’s chasing the ideas that women are innovating a round. That just makes you much more capital efficient.

We love the data in the book that comes out of reviewing debt portfolios that are gender desegregated and actually noticing that the non-performing loans in women majority portfolios actually have lower NPLs, lower non-performing loans, in them. Ruth and I always joke about the fact or she jokes about the fact that during her mother’s time or our mother’s times, it used to be that when a woman went to bank to ask for a loan, she’d actually be asked to have a man come and cosign. Instead, it should actually be the other way around because women tend to be much more capital efficient.

But the other thing is that in a startup, we also know that startups with just one female in the founding team have a 63% likelihood of actually doing better or performing better and being more resilient. This is just data that’s out there that you…

Melinda Wittstock:

But why is this research, Patience, not getting through to all the VCs? Why are they not getting this? Because the research is there, the numbers are there, they’re all about numbers, and yet it’s very difficult for women to get access or even get in the room sometimes because so many of the way that VCs, particularly Silicon Valley, operate, it’s kind of like a club. If you know someone, if you have a warm introduction, if you’re part of the almost social circle, that’s critical. A lot of women don’t have that access or don’t know how to get it or don’t know how to be part of that. There’s this barrier right there just even getting in the room.

Ruth Shaber:

That’s right, Melinda. This is Ruth. I think that was what the problem we were trying to solve in writing this book. We really were targeting the men who are deploying 98% of the capital in the world, in the US, and don’t realize what they’re missing. We want them to understand that The XX Edge is actually about enhancing their financial performance in their portfolios. I think that inertia has a lot to do with this, that folks who are making great decisions as they are don’t realize what they’re missing out on.

As long as the people who have been pushing the envelope and really focusing on the importance of women as financial decision makers are really just talking to themselves, and they’re over there in a great lane doing really important work, solving problems, creating great companies. But until we can jump the fence, it’s not going to happen. Our goals in writing this book and starting a campaign is to change the amount of money managed by women. A lot of work has been done to improve the pipeline of women entrepreneurs and folks in finance. Those numbers are growing, although slowly.

But what really matters is the number of dollars and the assets under management. We’re hoping that your readership can help us with that, whether it’s by sharing our book with the men in their lives, sharing the book with the venture capitalists that they’re going to pitch their ideas to, or to their own investment advisors that this idea that they’re missing out, that men are missing out on this opportunity to include a gender analysis and gender diversity into their investment decisions. We’re going to all have to work on that. It’s not just going to happen organically.

Patience Ball:

Melinda, this is Patience. Just to add what Ruth is saying, we need to increase the amount of… The point that we need to double click on is the fact that we need to increase the amount of capital that is being allocated by women, right? You said it, 2% of venture to women. As long as those rooms, the investment committees of those venture capital of those GP teams remain male, all male or mostly male with a token female, we’re not going to see different outcomes. The portfolios downstream will continue to look the same. We really need to get a movement going to change the face of capital markets so that more women are in those decision making rooms.

And not just in middle office, not just in the back office, but really in the investment committee, the PM roles, the people are making the decision about where the capital is going because that’s where change is going to happen. That’s part of what this book is about and the campaign we’re launching around this book as well. We’d love your partnership in that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%. I mean, it’s a personal mission of mine. I know that when I exit Podopolo, my goal is to invest $10 million in female founded businesses, but I don’t see enough women getting to that point of exit where they reinvest in other women. The whole point of this podcast and why I even launched it is how can we create an ecosystem where women are buying from each other, mentoring each other, investing in each other. What’s the impediment there?

Because I have seen over the last few years there are more and more female run venture firms, for instance, but perhaps they’re overrun or there’s just too much deal flow for them and they can’t. But it’s like I’ve found it’s really hard to get a meeting even with the female venture firms. I’ve had more success with men fundraising ironically.

Ruth Shaber:

Well, Melinda, this is Ruth. This notion of numbers of people versus assets under management, yes, there are more women coming into venture capital. There are more venture partners that are women, but they tend to have smaller portfolios, which means that they tend to have more deals, more smaller deals, which means it’s harder to get on their calendar. There is a problem of access. But there are lots of ways to move the needle. Just as we think about ourselves as consumers, every time we make a purchasing decision, we’re actually investing in that company we’re buying from.

If you pull up your Google app and you say women-owned businesses near me, you’re going to get a really interesting resource that can allow you to direct your consumer dollars. In the same way, whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re looking for a new investment advisor for your 401(k), wherever you sit in this ecosystem of finance, there are small decisions and big decisions you can make every day that help direct capital to other women and to gender diversity more broadly.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s also a mindset shift I think a little bit too, isn’t it? Because women, we’ve been in such scarcity for so long. I mean, is there any impediment for women supporting other women? I mean, more than just a “you go girl” kind of sentiment, but actually putting money in them. There’s work there to be done too.

Patience Ball:

I agree with you 100% Melinda, and this is Patience. I think that capital markets has traditionally defined women as victims and beneficiaries. Large scale capital does not go to victims and beneficiaries. It goes towards actors and solution drivers. There is a mindset shift that needs to happen, and it needs to happen among the men who allocate 97.8% of capital, but it also needs to happen among the women and other diverse folks who control less than 3% of capital. There’s the dearth of capital, the fact that they have so little capital, but unfortunately, their mindsets might also be polluted a little bit with this idea of I need to invest in the guys because guys are building solutions.

When I give capital to a woman, I’m giving her capital, I’m not investing in a solution. Do you know what I’m saying? That’s a really critical difference, if we can change the paradigm of women as actors and solution driving, and we’ve seen it. I mean, look, mRNA, what got us out of the pandemic, that’s female. That science is so female. From the CRISPR science that was behind it, to the mRNA science itself, that’s very female. Most stories of women as actors really solving significant huge problems, maybe that begins to change that mindset. But today, capital markets really absolutely does see women as beneficiaries and victims.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think sometimes women themselves in the sense that how many women are really playing that big game where they stand up and say, “I’m going to create a $10 billion business.” Women tend to be more likely to say, “I’m going to kind of start small. I’m going to create this smaller business,” and that doesn’t play because the venture capitalist wants to know you’re swinging for the fences. You’re going to disrupt a whole industry or completely change behavior or do something really, really big. I was hosting a retreat a couple of years ago and I remember talking to a lot of the women there just even in the sales calls around getting women to this retreat.

I was like, “How can we play a bigger game?” I noticed in a split second in their eyes this moment of fear like, “Play a bigger game?” It was almost like they thought, “Oh, I’m already doing so much, that means I have to do a lot more,” but they’re underlying that fear. I’ve noticed that when women really stand up and are ambitious in that sense, “I’m going to create this multi-billion dollar company,” other women around them are like, “What makes you think you can do that for you to say that?”

There’s a deep fear of being cast outside the tribe. Do you know what I mean? I think there’s a fear that holds women back from really swinging for the fences in that sense. How much of it is a mindset shift that has to happen there with women in the entrepreneurial community?

Ruth Shaber:

Melinda, I think this is a topic for a whole other book, so I’m just going to skim the surface. But we certainly know and our research shows that women tend to be more reluctant to volunteer for a promotion or to aggressively promote themselves or to run for office, all those things. There are these gender traits that show up. But I think it’s important and hopefully our book, we’re talking to men and hoping they recognize the missed opportunity and The XX Edge that they can bring to their financial decision making, but also we’re talking to women and hoping that they’ll see this as a reminder and encouragement to lean into their own skills.

In my mother’s day in the ’70s when she was an extremely successful consultant and economic advisor, she minimized her lived experiences. She never talked about her children or the crisis that she was managing at home with childcare or her parents or whatever. Instead, she showed up and channeled her masculine traits as much as possible, and she was very successful for it.

In our generation and certainly our younger generation, what we’re seeing is that the things that in many cases make women different from men in the workforce, they’re juggling their sandwich of their parents and their children, that they had more difficulty raising money to go to school or whatever it was in their lives, those are actually incredibly valuable lived experiences that they must bring to the table in however they show up professionally. We don’t need to act more like men.

We need to act like ourselves. If you’re more collaborative by nature and you have a different way of analyzing risk by nature, lean into those traits and celebrate them and be confident that they are actually going to be an essential contribution into the workplace and that you’re going to make your enterprise more successful because of them.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’ve found that in my evolution, and I think this is true for men as much as women, is when you’re leveraging both archetypal traits, like the archetypal masculine of getting things done, the confidence, all these things, and the archetypal feminine, and we’re talking kind of in archetypes, you know which lever, what you need when, and you’re applying that intuition to that. It’s sort of like reading the room in a way. But to really build, scale, grow a really successful enterprise in a very competitive environment, I mean, anybody, a man or a woman I think these days, needs both of those skills.

Patience Ball:

And that’s the reason why you see financial performance when both of those archetypes are in the room. Melinda, maybe we’ll end with challenging you. You said that when you exit your business, you’re going to invest $10 million in women run companies. I’m going to challenge you to 10X on that because your business is going to do incredibly well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Podopolo seizing one-10th of 1% of our six addressable markets and we’re a $2.5 billion company, and so yeah, I could probably 10x that.

Patience Ball:

You have it. You have enough money. There you go.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, I think back to one of my earliest inspirations, which was my Aunt Bea in Canada who became Canada’s first female stockbroker. How did she succeed? She created a whole new market by serving women who were divorced or widowed or whatever and persuaded them and taught them to become great investors. She became the top performer in her firm. I mean, it was just a different way. I mean, I had that role model growing up, very feminine, but she figured it out. All these other guys were, “How come Bea’s doing so well?”

Patience Ball:

It’s the undervalued opportunities that nobody else is seeing. Because they’re not seeing it, it’s blue sky and you’re able to then make outsized returns out of that. That’s part of the point we’re making in the book, that these missed opportunities become undervalued opportunities that anyone, any investor should really want to pick up because you will have outsized financial outcomes if you do that. I’m sure, Melinda, your business is going to just knock it out of the park.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, we’re right at a nice inflection point right now with a nice $10 million super seed round lined up dropping anytime in the next couple of weeks. That’s very exciting. But it’s been really, really, really hard to raise that money. Really hard. I remember very early, a very game changing startup that I was doing. We had 500,000 people creating content, six proprietary technologies, including the ability to actually assess crowdsourced content for its relevance and its reliability.

This is going back into 2011, 2012, ironically solving the fake news problem and had innovated on mobile, had innovated on cloud. I remember taking a meeting with a major VC. I gone through all the pitch, the traction, the model, everything that we were doing, all the successes, everything on fumes. He said, “Hey, well, this is a great idea. Somebody’s going to do it.” I was like, “What? I am doing it.” He explained to me that he invested based on pattern recognition. I was like, hmm, that’s interesting. Some of our algorithms are related to pattern recognition.

Hmm, how interesting. As I was leaving, ushered out, I was thinking, okay, let’s see, where do I not fit the pattern? I’m female. I’ve been an executive of major media companies, not in my twenties. I don’t eat ramen noodles. There are too many carbs. I’m not inventing something in my garage because I don’t have one. Let’s see, how else do I not fit the pattern? I mean, it was literally that. Oh my god! How many times, how many ways do women live that experience, where no matter what you’re doing and you can prove, it’s still not enough.

Patience Ball:

That’s the reason we need more women in asset allocation seeds. We need more women who have made enough money to be asset owners and allocating it in a different way, realizing that women are solution drivers. And then we need to get the guys to realize that this missed opportunity is not just holding their portfolios back in terms of wealth, but it’s holding the full global GDP economic pie back because there is so much to be invested in and so many solutions that can solve so many problems to the point of what your aunt was able to see, the blue sky. I think a lot of women are really innovating into those blue sky opportunities.

It’s just different lived experiences. The guys just don’t see it. If you bring me something that needs translation and there’s no translator in the room, there’s no woman around that investment committee table, you are, unfortunately, going to walk out without a penny and asking yourself, “How am I different?” If you didn’t walk into the room with your pitch and a guy walked into the room with their pitch, they would likely get the capital.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it’s so true. Well, there’s so many different parts of this big puzzle. I’d love to have you back on, both of you, on the podcast into next year because this is a really big topic that has so many different facets to it. There’s so many different things that have to change. But I also think that really women have an opportunity to really improve the world through business. I think there’s a lot of change that’s going to happen really quickly. This is a wonderful, very inspiring interview. I want to thank you both. Make sure that people know how to get your book, we’ll put all that in the show notes too, but also how to find you and connect with you and your respective work that you do. What’s the best way? Ruth, you first.

Ruth Shaber:

We have a website, thexxedge.com, and you can purchase the book through your favorite online book seller. Also, it’s important to know that all proceeds from the sale of The XX Edge go to our nonprofit, Women of the World Endowment and the Tara Health Foundation. We’re very active on LinkedIn, that’s a good way to get in touch with us, and we look forward to your feedback. Thank you so much for having us, Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Patience, what’s the best way for you? Also on LinkedIn. Anywhere else?

Patience Ball:

I’m also on LinkedIn and on our website, womenoftheworldendowment.org.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you both so much for putting on your wings and lifting us all up today.

Patience Ball:

Thank you so much, Melinda.

Ruth Shaber:

Thank you, Melinda.