Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Has anyone looked at market cap diffs for female- vs. male-founded companies, vs. investment? If there's no substantial difference, someone should go get rich. If there is, that's more a more explanatory property

First Round probably did the most quoted study, with 60+ percent higher returns from female founders, but they excluded Uber (because it was an outlier, in a market defined by outliers) so their results are viewed with skepticism by those in the know (re Uber exclusion)

That chart and fortune article make a pretty convincing case for the underfunding of female founders. This does mean that the marketplace has provided an opportunity to invest in female founders and achieve significant profits.

They kinda... don't! Unless you assume that female founders are, as a group, statistically identical to male founders in e.g. the industries they're tackling (ex: tech vs. consumer goods). This is a *really* complicated question that's very difficult to discuss critically

Okay, sure women founders may start relatively more consumer companies and fewer high tech and biotech companies. An those consumer companies may require much less capital. But as the article states, its not just transaction size, but total # transactions as well.

You would expect transaction size & # of transactions to trend together in this context. VCs care a lot more about the returns they can expect in a range of plausible best-case scenarios than anything else. There's a lot of overhead. Within reason, larger deals are preferable.

There’s a lot of overhead in what?

Since you decided not to respond, allow me to opine that VC is hands down one of the least overhead heavy industries in existence. I spent 5 years at a quality firm in VC, and switching industries, to quote a favorite film, ‘tis but the work of a moment.