698 Sarah Dusek:

Women founders of companies with the potential to become billion-dollar Unicorns only get 2% of the available pool of venture capital investment – a number that has not changed in more than 20 years. My guest today – Sarah Dusek – has had enough, so when she sold her company for more than $100 million, she decided to reinvest in women and women of color with her own venture fund.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock, and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder-CEO of the social podcast app Podopolo, and I know only too well from my own struggles raising investment for my businesses, including Podopolo, how hard it is for women to get venture capital. If you’re new to Wings, we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … on every business topic across every industry across almost 700 episodes now … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. Wings is all about women lifting as we climb, so share the love by sharing Wings and our big catalogue of back episodes with an entrepreneurial friend so they can accelerate their dreams! And join the conversation over on Podopolo where my guests and I are on hand to answer questions, offer advice and much more!

So, let’s get into it – venture capital. Why is it so scarce for women?

Sarah Dusek sold her glamping company, Under Canvas –- for over $100M, after spending many years struggling to get investment, which slowed her growth. Frustrated by her own experiences and learning most other women entrepreneurs only receive a small amount of all available funding each year, Sarah launched Enygma Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on investing in women-led businesses in Southern Africa. Enygma has now invested tens of millions of dollars in over 20 companies. We’re going to dig deep into what stands between female founders and funding, the secrets of venture capital, and much more.

Sarah Dusek is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of Enygma Ventures, a venture capital fund. She invests in women-led businesses in Southern Africa, creates solutions to wealth disparity, and provides access to capital for women.

It took 8 years for Sarah to attract investment into her glamping company Under Canvas, and after she successfully sold it for more than $100 million, Sarah launched Enygma Ventures. In that same year, Under Canvas received a spot on the coveted Inc. 5000 list, and Sarah was named to Ernst & Young’s EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women list.

Sarah began her career in the nonprofit world in her early

twenties working in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. But she became disillusioned with the lack of change resulting from her non-profit efforts and soon realized that the most effective vehicle for driving change and solving big world problems is business. Businesses are sustainable solutions to problems. They drive economies, create self-sufficiencies, and change our world. Business can, and should, be a force for good.

So in addition to funding startups led by women and diverse founders, Sarah offers online courses for early-stage entrepreneurs via pranary.com, and over the past year, 5,000 entrepreneurs have gone through her programs to become investor-ready and learn how to build valuable companies.

Sarah is also the chairwoman of the Women’s Giving Circle for The Global Good Fund, a social entrepreneurship leadership development program, and sits on the board of ten (and rising) startup companies in Southern Africa, as well as Under Canvas. She is a regular contributor to Forbes.com, The Telegraph, and TRT World.

So, let’s get to the bottom of why women aren’t getting funded and what to do about it – plus, Sarah will be on hand to answer your questions and give advice on the Podopolo interactive app. Download it now, and let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah Dusek.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah Dusek:

Thanks so much Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m so excited to talk to you because you are one of the rare women who exit a business and plow that right back into investing in other female founders. I wish there was more of what you are doing around. What was the inspiration?

Sarah Dusek:

I wish there were more of us too, for sure. The inspiration really was my own frustration with my own journey with raising capital, and just the statistics around how little funding women get and my own belief, really that women build great businesses. They solve problems that other people are not seeing. That diversity in the field of growing and building businesses is really critical for building a better world for everyone, not just for women, and non-white people, but for all of us, actually. That diversity’s good for us and that it builds a better world. It builds better futures. It just will lead some different directions than the world is currently being led.

That really was my inspiration for feeling like, well, if no one else is doing it, I should probably get in the ring and start making some noise about this issue and start seeing and learning about investing, which obviously is a different animal from being an entrepreneur yourself. But hopefully feeling like I have something to offer our entrepreneurs that we invest in that can support them to go on the journey that I’ve been on myself.

Melinda Wittstock:

Everything you said resonates with me more than you know. As a five time I’m serial entrepreneur, I know how hard it is for women to get funding. Here in the United States, it’s still 2% of the VC money. That number hasn’t changed in two decades, and these are among companies that qualify for venture funding. They could potentially be billion dollar unicorns and then some, and yet those numbers aren’t changing. What do you think the reason is that women have such a hard time raising money?

Sarah Dusek:

Well, I don’t know that it’s one thing, but the obvious problem is that not many women fund managers are actually investing. You’ve got 90% plus of all venture capital being deployed by white men, which obviously is so much easier to invest in people and products that you understand and can relate to. The investing world, as, as I learned as an entrepreneur, and I continue to learn it on a daily basis now, as I try and raise my any from my own it is a world that relies on networks. It relies on social status. It relies on being connected to people, having gone to the right schools, talking the right language. I have discovered, as we’ve been very intentional about going to focus on investing in women has been that women are often not understanding their language.

They’re not communicating the right steps. They’re not understanding the rules of the game. I think there are very specific rules of the game, intentional, unintentional, and that disadvantages women. It disadvantages people of color. It disadvantages anybody that doesn’t look like the investor. I think that creates unintentional bias because people like to back people that are like them or that they can relate to, or they can understand the product that you’ve got because you are maybe a consumer. For me, that problem, the ultimate problem with that problem is that the way funds are directed means like you said, that a very small segment of society are the beneficiaries of funding, which means we’re only going to solve certain problems. We’re only going to attend and address certain areas of society. That is leading us in a direction that is making our world more and more unequal, which ultimately, I believe is bad for us all.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, 100%. I think something you said earlier that women see problems and solutions to problems that say a white male investor doesn’t. Whole markets that they undervalue. It’s extraordinary to me because it’s like those VCs are leaving so much money on the table. It’s not good for them either.

Sarah Dusek:

Agreed. You’re quite right. It creates new opportunities in new markets and my own company that I founded for example, was under Canvas. When I went out to raise capital, nobody really understood what glamping was. We created and built the largest glamping company in the United States and really defined a whole industry. It was like nobody understood it at the time. Nobody really understood what I was trying to do and why we were trying to do it. Huge opportunity missed and then people realized later, oh, wow, this is a whole new segment. This is a whole new market that didn’t exist before. Now there’s an opportunity, but it’s like, we’ve got to be able to spot those things in entrepreneurs as they’re spotting them, and back them.

Melinda Wittstock:

A 100%. Take me through your experience with Under Canvas. You sold it in 2018, you had lovely exit over a $100 million. That must feel good. But in the early days, how did you get it going and how long did it take you to raise the funds you needed? What did you do?

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah, we were forced, which in some ways has been an advantage to us. We did not raise institutional capital for about eight years into our journey. Which meant we bootstrapped ourselves, we funded our own growth through profit. We borrowed debt wherever, whenever we possibly could to help lever our own efforts. But we did not receive our first institutional check until about eight years in. We were almost doing about $8 million of revenue by that point in time. We went a long way on very little cash, which was very challenging, but we realized we just, the speed at which we could grow was really limited because of the amount of cash that we were able to put back in the business.

They call venture capital rocket fuel for a reason. It’s this idea of, can you put money to work, and extrapolate and speed up and accelerate the growth of a company? We realized if we were going to really define this market and really capture the opportunity that we believe we had, that we really needed to put some fuel in the engine and we needed more money than we could produce every year. That set us on a journey for looking for outside capital.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s an interesting thing because on one hand, yeah, we don’t have the money to really succeed as big or as fast and yet women are put in the position where we’ve had to be really good or get really good at capital efficiency. I know with my own startup on, less than a million dollars, we’ve achieved something in a year that say if we compared ourselves to some of our competitors like Spotify or Apple podcasts or whatever. Multiple millions of dollars invested in those companies.

Sarah Dusek:

Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. The double edge sword of bootstrapping versus being funded. You’re right. You can’t grow very fast if you don’t have capital to inject yourselves. But the positive thing for us really was that it forced us to be profitable and forced us to figure out our business model and prove out and test the theory that we had and the business that we had, and forced us to push through until we could find that profitable point.

But the challenge with that of course, is that many people and I consider myself exceptionally privileged, do not have enough bandwidth to test and test and prove something and put capital into something, and deploy all their own personal resources to be able to get to the point of profitability. For some people that’s just too big of a leap. They just don’t have the resources to be able to do that. That in itself is problematic and I don’t know that we’ve solved that yet with how you prove traction, how you get funded or how you self-sustain until you can get profitable, prove your business model. It’s a very tough animal and tough not to crack.

Melinda Wittstock:

No, it really is. On one hand, I do think that a lot of companies do get funded too soon, before they’ve really proved product market fit. You see a lot of mail run companies absolutely falter in the growth stage and lose investors, huge amounts of money, just with crazy spending on stuff that’s not proven. On the other hand, women get funded the sort of too late. There’s got to be some sort of happy medium there.

Sarah Dusek:

Agreed. That’s why I think the women are a great bret, because typically women are more conservative and more determined to make something profitable, the numbers work, or they tend to be less cavalier, which also can con correlate to being less big risk takers, which also can be bad. But I think on the whole women are smart. Women make calculated risks. Women don’t necessarily think as big as men typically do, but I think with the right team, the right track, if they’ve proven they’ve got a great track record and are building something that’s got real potential. I feel like we’ve yet to really see the full potential of women in business, really, at least, because what we’ve got right now, a handful of uniform ones out there, literally a handful.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yep.

Sarah Dusek:

Of female owned companies. We really haven’t seen the fullness of what women are really capable of yet. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg for really this beginning to what women can pull off and women can make happen.

Melinda Wittstock:

I totally agree with you. I want to pick up on something that you said about not thinking big enough. We talk on this podcast a lot about what’s at the root of that. Because of course the VC wants to see that you think, and you believe, and you actually have a good plan or something that can be a unicorn and more, but if we’re not thinking big enough to begin with or think we’re being really prudent, whatever numbers you show a VC in my experience are always going to discount anyway. If you show them what you think you’re actually for sure 100% can commit to, they’re going to just assume that it’s a really tiny business, because they’re just going to cut that in half.

Sarah Dusek:

Yep, absolutely. I think part of the problem of not thinking big enough is not having seen enough women making big things happen. It’s a bit of a chicken egg scenario, I think, because when no one else is doing it, you could have been pretty ballsy to think you can do it. When no one looks like you and there’s hardly anyone on the planet making crazy ginormous, monstrous, outlandish things happening. That’s a pretty big leap for most women to make, to have that much confidence to say, I can do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

I totally agree with you and I find even with other women entrepreneurs who’ve launched businesses that they’re going to be happy if it gets to seven figures. Only 3% of women, by the way, even get to seven figures. That’s seen as a huge success and then you come along, you say, okay, well I’m building this thing is going to transform an entire industry or vertical or disrupt a whole space. They look at you like you’re a little crazy.

Sarah Dusek:

Nuts.

Melinda Wittstock:

Even you, other women is [inaudible 00:15:25].

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah, agreed. Because it’s such an outlier place to be in function. That’s very lonely, and women, we’re very relational typically. Without being too generic about women, but we are relational. We need great support structures. We’re highly capable and we’re highly efficient most of us. We manage homes, and children in school, and businesses and lunches, you name it. We are handling it, but it’s like to say out loud, I’m going to build a multimillion dollar business. Those women are few and far between. It’s hard and most women have to have built a multimillion dollar business before they can say out loud, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.

Melinda Wittstock:

See, I must be one of those crazy ones. Especially with all the kind of bleeding edge stuff that I’ve done. That’s the hardest thing is when you are really a pioneer and you see something others don’t, and you cannot get the funding. I recall ages ago, I had created one of the first ever crowdsourcing news applications, way back. We were really at the beginning of mobile UI, at the beginning, really of machine learning and natural language processing. At the beginning of cloud. At the beginning of user generated content. We were applying all these things. My app and the backend technology was able to understand and evaluate the relevance and the reliability of user generated content. This is back in 2010, 2011. We had innovated this mobile app and we had about 500,000 users and the thing was really getting going and on fumes.

Because we hadn’t really been funded. We had a little bit of angel money, and I remember having a meeting with a top tier VC who had funded Twitter and a bunch of others, and he listened to my presentation, and he said, well, “this is really great Melinda, somebody’s going to do it”. I was like, I am doing it. It’s here. Download the app, see it’s working. We’ve got all these users, we’ve got advertisers interested. I said, why on earth would you not?

He said that he invested based on pattern recognition. I was thinking to myself, okay pattern recognition. Let’s see. Okay. I’m not inventing something in my garage because I don’t have one. I live in Manhattan at the time. I don’t eat ramen noodles because they’re too many carbs. I’m not in a hoodie. I’m not 20 something. I’m going through oh yeah, right. I’m a woman and he kind of was showing me out.

Sarah Dusek:

It’s demoralizing, isn’t it? It’s so hard not to be insulted by it at times. In some ways, the anger is fuel. The anger just pushes us on but it’s wild how real these situations are day in, day out and you just think pattern recognition. That’s just another word for bias.

Melinda Wittstock:

It is.

Sarah Dusek:

I’m not even conscience bias. Just declared bias.

Melinda Wittstock:

Declared bias. Yeah. I wasn’t like a-

Sarah Dusek:

You don’t fit my norm. You don’t check all my boxes. You don’t look like the people I normally invest in. You don’t sound like them so therefore I can’t invest.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Sarah Dusek:

Even though I think someone is going to do what you’re going to do someday, I’m just like, oh gosh.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, like you, we do see a lot more women starting funds or at least angel investing or joining VC firms and whatnot. I’m wondering how much that’s changing things. I know there are a lot of women run angel networks here in the states and some VC companies, but I’ve talked to so many female founders that have a really hard time with them as well.

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

What do you think is going on?

Sarah Dusek:

I agree. I think very little is changing, and very little is changing anytime soon. My biggest realization about this over the last couple of years now, as we’ve been out fundraising for our fund, I think I naively assumed the problem was just not enough women wanting to get in the ring or not enough women fund managers out there. I actually now think there’s plenty of women fund managers of capable women able of managing funds or being partners with funds. There is more than enough women who are capable of being in this space. The problem is the flow of funds to those women. See, here we are with the same problem of gatekeepers of the wealth. Just like we’ve got mostly male dominated VCs. We’ve got mostly male dominated controllers of funds who dictate and flow where money flows.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. An LP is going to say to this female VC fund. Yeah. Okay. We’ll give you the money if you invest in these sorts of companies, but if you invest in these sorts of companies, your fund’s not going to be funded. Is it really as simple as that?

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah. I don’t know that it’s quite that simple, but certainly, I know plenty of first time female fund managers, for example, and all of them without question have struggled to raise funds because they’re either first time fund manager is a problem. You don’t have traditional track record that people says, well, you’ve proven that you can deploy and manage funds and manage them successfully. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. If you can’t get the funds to prove that you can manage a funds successfully, how do you get funds? That’s a bit of a circular problem. I think the other problem is thesis because women are choosing to have thesis like mine, but there are plenty of other theses out there that are also coming under question if that’s a viable thesis. I’ve heard even from other women VCs actually that you’ll never find enough women to invest in. There just aren’t that many.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, I hate that. I’ve heard that too. Oh my goodness. That’s frustrating. Isn’t it?

Sarah Dusek:

That’s very frustrating. I think, well, my stance on that is if that is true, which I actually don’t believe that’s true. But if that is true, shouldn’t we be doing something about making sure that we support, enable, teach and educate women what it looks like to become investible in so that they know the rules, the game, the speak, the metrics and what they’ve got to prove and how we get them there because that’s a problem. It’s not okay to just say, well, it’s not enough women to invest in which, whether that’s true or not is regardless, because if it’s not, we got to fix that problem. Or if it is true, we’ve got to fix that problem. If it isn’t true, then we’ve got to work harder to go find them in the first place.

I listened to an interview. I think it was last year. It was multiple VCs on the panel talking about the issue of gender in the VC space. One member of the panel said, well, more women just need to get better networked. To be able to get in for and of a VC, you need to have a warm introduction, which we all know is true. If you want to get in front of a VC, you often have to have an introduction to be able to be taken seriously. But it’s like, if you don’t move in the right circles or you’re not from the right socioeconomic background, or you don’t have any friends who know VCs, how on earth would you get an intro, a warm introduction from somebody. It’s like, we’ve got to get smarter about realizing the club that this is, and start dismantling it and breaking it down and making capital more accessible and figuring out what the barriers are for people, and certainly the networking piece is a barrier for many people.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I’ve found that’s been an issue. There you are, you’re bootstrapping it and you’re constantly doing all the things to raise money, All the things, right. Create a great product to get all the marketing, your sales, get profitability, you’re working on your business. Fundraising takes an amazing amount of time. Networking, especially, during COVID or, how do you get the connection? How do you actually get your foot in the door? I think that’s actually really hard.

Sarah Dusek:

It’s very hard. If you are of someone who’s moved in particular, certain spheres in your life, went to a certain university or have a particular alumni that’s useful. Maybe that’s a really great starting point. But many people don’t have that. Many people, if you didn’t grow up in the right city or for example, I married in Montana and British, married in Montana and we started trying to build our company in Montana. There is one VC in the whole of Montana. We were not on the radar, not moving in Silicon valley circles or New York circles. It’s like I had no clue about how to access this world. It’s a closed world and I certainly didn’t know anyone who could make into for me. I’m white and middle classed.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. No, that’s a thing.

Sarah Dusek:

No, do you know what I mean? It’s like…

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m white middle class, privileged went to a particular university did all know what I mean. If you look at my resume and all the things that I’ve achieved, but it still doesn’t seem to be enough.

Sarah Dusek:

Not enough and not enough. If you even compare the fact that if you’re a person of color and from a lower socioeconomic background, wow. You just even quadrupled the impossibilities, you’re stacking these things up against yourself. People often ask me all the time, why are you investing in Africa? This is the reason. We are convinced that inequality, not just with gender, but also race and geography is a huge problem. It’s a huge problem for us on a go forward basis that we’ve got unravel some of these systemic issues that are holding whole continents of people back. It’s not just even certain demographics in certain parts of our country in the U.S. We’ve got whole continents of people being held back because of the lack of capital. As we talked about earlier, whole continent of opportunities that are extraordinary for investing in seeing great returns. Bias is a problem.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, absolutely. 100%. Enygma, your venture company. You’ve invested tens of millions of dollars now in more than 20 companies. That’s amazing. What do you look for Sarah when you’re investing in a company?

Sarah Dusek:

This is a question reflecting on all the time, because I’m constantly refining it. But some of the things that we’ve touched on, even in the last 20 minutes or so have been very relevant for us. But we are looking for, we invest very early stage. We’re typically a seed round or a pre seed round one or the other for ideas that we think have huge potential and scalability for all VCs is a thing, but we find ourselves, we find ourselves helping our entrepreneurs even think, take the ceiling off where they can imagine and what they can think about. We start by looking at their idea or their product or their service and going, how scalable really is that? Who else is doing it?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. How big is the market?

Sarah Dusek:

How big could it really be?

Melinda Wittstock:

How big is the pain, all the things.

Sarah Dusek:

All the same things really. The second piece is the person is the entrepreneur is, do they have a fire in their belly? Do they have a burning desire to build something great and what gets them up in the morning and do they have the grit that this journey takes? Because we all know this journey is exceptionally hard.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my goodness. Yes. [crosstalk 00:29:56] five times.

Sarah Dusek:

Terrifying.

Melinda Wittstock:

Totally. Oh my God. That would be like an eight hour podcast at least to go through the kind of…

Sarah Dusek:

We can talk about that. Yeah, exactly. But that’s a thing that all VCs typically look for, but there’s got to be some kind of spark in somebody’s soul.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely. But [crosstalk 00:30:21] too, because to get through, I know in my own experience and just also so many of the entrepreneurs I know who are successful as opposed to not it’s a big north star mission. It’s something that you can’t do. It becomes almost obsessive. Maybe it’s just a little will be unhealthy. I don’t know.

Sarah Dusek:

I agree. It has to be a little bit unhealthy. That’s a really good way of phrasing it because you do have to be obsessed by it. You do have to care at that much about making –

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. That’s how –

Sarah Dusek:

Many other things. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s how I am and I’ve always been, and you mentioned a word a little while ago that it’s lonely and it kind of is because there’s not a lot of people like you, and I think that is hard for women. There’s a certain toughness or resilience, I think maybe that’s required there too, that that’s not going to discourage you. You’re going to keep going regardless. I don’t know how to assess that.

Sarah Dusek:

I think interestingly women can bury those passions. I think women can put their own fires out pretty easily. We do need each other to stoke those fires and to unleash them, I think, and have permission for them to be unleashed because a bit like, we often see on these crazy memes that when women lead or women try and speak up, they’re being bossy. Whereas when men do that, it’s like, well, they’re just leading. Women need permission to feel like it’s okay to be obsessed by something it’s okay to want to change the world. It’s okay to say I want to build a billion dollar company. It’s okay to think like that and you are not alone.

If you don’t, maybe no one else will build that company or maybe someone else will and you didn’t. It’s like, we’ve got to have permission to say it’s okay to have crazy dreams and to go after them and to give them everything we’ve got, even if we fall flat on our face and it doesn’t work out. You just got to get back up again and go after that dream in a different way, maybe in a different face.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m just thinking about the playing big, that we were talking about earlier too, in this context. My company, we do something called the vivid vision where we imagine where we are three years from now and imagine it done. I look at our financial model and I look at what we’re doing so far, how we’re hitting every number, ahead of a super seed round that we’re in the process of hopefully closing very soon. But, as we look at it and we think God, it would be really hard assuming our current level of execution to not be a billion dollar company. In a relatively short order of time. All the men on the team are like, yeah, no problem.

Melinda Wittstock:

But I find myself, there’s a little [inaudible 00:33:38] there, like really Melinda, are you sure? Because I know so many women go through it at whatever level or whatever new thing they’re trying to transcend or a barrier they’re trying to leap or run through or around or underneath or whatever over, that we have that little niggle.

Sarah Dusek:

We do. We definitely do. There’s a lot of voices in our heads that will like to shut us down and turn us off and let us try and keep us playing small. We’ve been living in a world that has been wanting for us to play small and to stay in our own lanes. Some things have changed over the last 20 years and other things have not. But I remember my father said something to me. I first had children, I have two boys now and I have my oldest is 12. I remember thinking when I had my first baby, because I had all these amazing dreams and desires for my life. But also this feeling of, I also want to be a great mom and I feel passionate about having children. This feels like something I also want to do.

I’m not feeling like I’m crazy determined career woman at the expense of everything else. I also want to have a family and raise great kids. But when I first had my first child, I remember feeling so distressed at being a stay at home mom and serious kudos to anyone who can do it, because it’s really hard in itself. But just this idea, I had this thing in me that said, there’s something more and that I could do both these things. Oh, but I remember my father, he said to me, Sarah, we are living in a world where you have not been educated just to stay at home. He said, your mother had a different education than you had and did stay home and had a different life. But he said, the world has moved on enough for you to be able to live a different life.

I was like, wow, he’s right. The world has moved on enough for me to be able to get a job or start a business or do what I want. That context in some ways gives me hope because when we look back to my mother, who’s 30 years older than me, the world has moved forward. I think that’s the thing we have to keep hold of is we are moving the world forward minutely as it is and small tiny baby steps sometimes. But we are moving forward and we are taking tiny bits of grand and changing the world that our daughters and nieces will enter into the wider workplace. But it’s like, we don’t need to play it small. We don’t need to hold ourselves back and we do need to give ourselves permission for the things that are in us. I wanted to have a family and build a great big business and I did both. Definitely was not easy. I definitely can’t say I’m the world’s best mother.

Because we’ve definitely obviously had to make sacrifices, but it’s like, I think women hear a lot that you can’t have it all. You can’t do it all well. But I think the reality is you just have to be true to what’s inside you and what you want and getting clear about what you want.

Melinda Wittstock:

I had that same tussle about entrepreneurship and motherhood. I settled on this fact that was true for me, that entrepreneurship made me a better mother. Being a mother, made me a better entrepreneur. That the two really went hand in hand. I remember I was quite gratified when my daughter, when she was in fifth grade, asked me to come speak at her Montessori school about entrepreneurship. She said, “Hey mom, all my friends think…” and she did this motion, like stick numbers. She said, [inaudible 00:38:11] gets that, but I want you to tell them the truth. She did this kind of weight kind of I, you to tell the truth, you observing me right. It was kind of hilarious, but I was kind of the crazy person. I remember like my first business, I launched that, I was raising money for it and just getting it going and all of that kind of stuff and got pregnant in that process.

But we launched when my daughter was six weeks old and I look back now and I don’t know how on earth I did it. I grew this thing to be on like, 300 radio and television stations and newspapers. It was a political news agency and then all these awards and all this kind of stuff. I remember like in the first year I was hiring, I was doing the sales. I was even doing news stories running around the U.S capital. I was doing payroll. All of that stuff. I had these two things on my shoulder. One was my reporter kit and the other one was my breast pump around the U.S capital. It finally got to the point where I pulled out my, what I thought was my microphone at the end of a day where I’d sold something like 20 radio stations that day on our content.

I’d landed an advertiser and I’d reported like 12 stories. I’d like remembered to pump every two hours, remembered to eat. I don’t know, whatever. I was interviewing a senator and I pulled out what I thought was my microphone. It was actually my breast pump and I pointed it at her face without any idea, like I was so tired. I didn’t even know. It was a female Senator. It was Patty Murray from Washington. She was laughing so hard. I’m like, why are you laughing? This is like a really serious story.

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah. It’s brilliant.

Melinda Wittstock:

But I look back on those days now and I think how did I do it? I think the only reason I did it is because there was in my own mind, there was no alternative. It was just that’s what was required of me. I don’t know. People ask me that all the time and I’m like, well, you can always find a way for [inaudible 00:40:28].

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah, absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

But I think women do better at delegating though and asking people for help. I think we sometimes are weak in that area. We think we have to do it all, but we don’t. I think that’s part of the clue of why women don’t necessarily play as big because they see themselves already busy, already kind of burning out. Oh my God, I got to do. Oh that’s not for me. Yeah. When in fact it’s really about asking for help, mentorship, delegating, doing all these things, setting other people, building great teams, setting other people up for success. That’s what we really concentrated on with [inaudible 00:41:11] and previous businesses as well, but you don’t have to do everything yourself personally.

Sarah Dusek:

100%. I think that’s a really good point because we have to learn what we need to be able to make big things happen right and be able to go after it and get that done. We often can make excuses say, well, I couldn’t possibly do that because I would need childcare. I was like, well, let’s figure out what it would take to figure that out. What would that look like? How would we get that done? It’s like great entrepreneurs are great problem solvers. Unfortunately women need to even be even better problem solvers for figuring out how to manage their lives and their families and their homes and make crazy big things happen.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes we do. My goodness.

Sarah Dusek:

Like you, being for my kids too and haven’t been able to do that without the help of other human beings in our lives to help support us raising our kids. But you just have to figure out what is it going to take, and then go ask, well, why would I not do that if this is what I want. Why would I not do that and give it a try and see what happens.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. Well, you’re doing so many good things in the world. We could talk for much longer, but I know that you do also offer online courses for early stage entrepreneurs. You’ve got pranary.com, which is amazing that you’re doing that educative part as well as funding companies. I’m curious about that. How many people come through that course and then maybe through that course, they end up qualifying for investment. Has that ever happened?

Sarah Dusek:

Absolutely. It has. Yeah. Last year I think we had about 5,000 people go through our platform. I don’t know what the number is this year. I must look it up. But a lot of people have been through our programs. As I was saying before, that has been one of my biggest passion points this year, really, it was like, it’s trying to solve how do we help women be investor ready? How do we help women understand the metrics they need to understand? How do we help women work on their businesses so they can build the right kind of business and build a valuable, successful business. There’s been a really big piece of the work that we’ve done over the last two years and we’ll continue to do and have made some great investments. People who we originally said no to. One woman in particular comes to mind who when she first applied to funding for us, I said, no. I don’t think this is a business for us.

She was not taking no for an answer. She went through every single one of our courses. She did the work, she figured out what she was going to have to do in her business to turn this into a highly scalable platform. About a year later, we said yes, and funded her business, which is amazing to see because she completely convinced us. It wasn’t just, oh, she’s persevering really hard. She really grasped everything that she realized was critical for getting an investor on board. [inaudible 00:44:26] started acting on it.

Melinda Wittstock:

The best entrepreneurs aren’t only resilient, but they’re constant learners.

Sarah Dusek:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

Always curious, constantly learning, constantly thinking is there another way, a better way. She proved that to you in essence that she had [inaudible 00:44:45] DNA. Yeah.

Sarah Dusek:

Yeah. Commitment to learn and to commitment to evolve because not just willing to say, well, I know it already and you just don’t understand me, which is easy to dismiss when a VC says no to you say. Well, it’s their fault. They’re missing out on a great opportunity. But to go back to the drawing board and take every bit of feedback that you’ve had and act on it, is pretty incredible.

Melinda Wittstock:

Based on that, I found myself having to do that with all of my companies with [inaudible 00:45:16] is that when people sort of pass or they move the goal post, they say, okay, talk to us when you have 10,000 downloads. Okay. Oh no, no. Talk to us when we have a 100,000. There’s that kind of thing going on. But we just keep, we stay in touch with all of them that have passed or have just said, well, maybe next quarter or that kind of thing.

Sarah Dusek:

Yep.

Melinda Wittstock:

Continually update them. We keep showing them that we’re executing against every single thing we said we’d do and we do it. A pattern emerges over time. It’s just not giving up. They’re not necessarily quite fit. But the other psychological thing that I’ve learned here too, is that I think a lot of people, and I think this can happen to men as well, but we go to VCs with a mental attitude, like they’re doing us a favor. The relationship right from the get go psychologically is not on the right level because it’s really just an exchange of value.

You’re creating all this value. You’re creating a massive return for your investors. You’re giving them an opportunity and that’s something that took me a while to really internalize and understand, like if I go back at my very early fundraising days, I think I was kind of like, their sort of psychologically with a begging bull, as opposed to this is an opportunity for you. Yeah. Are you aligned, and qualifying that the venture capitalist is, or the investor is the right fit. That you’re going to go in the same direction. Because it’s a long term relationship like marriage.

Sarah Dusek:

That’s right. Yeah. Absolutely. 100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well Sarah, you’re going to have to come back. It’s a wonderful conversation, but I feel like I barely scratched the surface with you because I have like the zillion more questions, but I know that nobody listens to a podcast for longer than about 40 minutes as we’ve optimized this, and grown it to a million listeners. I’m going to say goodbye, but I’d love to have you come back on next year because I think what you’re doing is really inspiring and really speaks to me. Like I said, this is something that I intend to do when I exit Podopolo. I really want to put a lot of money back into female founded companies and around the world. Even Podopolo itself has a mission to take 10% of our earnings and put them to towards micro loans and other financing things for female founded startups in the developing world.

We’re a social impact company as well. I want to walk my talk on that, right from the get go and we are. I would love to be able to talk to you again on the podcast or offline, but thank you so much for putting on your wings with us and flying and I’ll make sure that everybody knows how to contact you in the show notes and all that stuff. If you’re driving right now and you want to figure out about Sarah’s courses or you think you want to talk to her about investment or whatever, you’ll know how. Sarah, thank you so much for your time today.

Sarah Dusek:

My absolute privilege. It’s been fantastic being with you today. Thanks so much.