(Determined) Hope
Starting Companies Series
Taking an idea, starting a company. That’s hard. The Coach platform makes it easier.
🏁 Start like you mean to finish 🏁
Hello! How is the long weekend? Happy belated 💚 day.
OK..Picture this. It is twenty-hundred and sixteen. Or do you say, the year was twenty sixteen? Whatever it is, I found one of my first pitch decks for The Mother Love, dated 2016, when I was searching for a folder I think I deleted on my computer. The deck is 27 pages, ultimately asking for angel-level investment dollars - $50K.
It is ridiculous to have to provide that much proof, but when you’re one of two founders creating and validating a market (Kate Ryder from Maven Clinic was the other founder in my pitch deck), it is what you do. Especially in male-dominated industries like tech.
At the time, the advisors helping me with this deck were two of the women on the team that built Minute Clinic (acquired by CVS Health) and a seasoned marketing leader from Minneapolis. Seems like we would have been able to trim some fat from the content of this deck, but nope. This is what I published, until I got further coaching from the pitch competition that this deck was accepted by.
Here’s why 27 pages is ridiculous, and I never want anyone to make a pitch deck with that many pages..especially if you’re a woman or marginalized person.
Here’s why (turns towards data):
In 2024, all-female founding teams received 1% of total venture capital funding—down from 2% in 2020. We’re not moving toward equity. We’re moving backwards.
Women hold only 15.4% of decision-making roles at VC firms. Nearly 3 out of 4 US VC firms don’t have a single female investing partner.
62% of female founders teach themselves financial management because no one is teaching them (or they don’t know where to start - enter Coach Speak to get them started)
Early-stage funding for women dropped 6 percentage points since 2020. 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼
At current rates, gender parity in VC won’t be reached until 2065.
The data for Black, POC, and LGBTQ+ founders mirrors this. LGBTQ-owned businesses contribute an estimated $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion to the U.S. economy. In 2025, approximately 10% of all new entrepreneurs identified as LGBTQ+. They’re 30% more likely to offer benefits than their non-LGBTQ peers, and 79% more likely to offer health insurance. But when they apply for financing, 46% receive nothing—compared to 35% for non-LGBTQ firms.
But here’s what else is happening:
Women started 49% of new US businesses in 2024.
Women-led startups generate better ROI than male-led ones.
Women outperform men on crowdfunding platforms by 32%.
Female-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested vs. 31 cents for male-founded startups (Boston Consulting Group)
Women founders exit 6 months faster on average than male founders
The infrastructure exists. The founders exist. The capital exists. The success metrics exist.
What’s missing? Access. Still. In the year, twenty-twenty-six.
This is for women, Black founders, POC, queer and trans entrepreneurs, people leaving jobs to build something—anyone who’s been locked out of traditional networks, VC boys clubs, and the inheritocracy.
Here's my foundation:
I operate from two core values:
(Determined) Hope – Hope keeps me moving. Hope is an active principle—it is how I SHOW UP. Hope is my internal orientation, and I move freely from this place because it inspires people to wake up each day and do brave work they love. Hope is radical, it takes care so that we move towards justice, equity, and inclusion.
Sturdy/calm – that’s the secret sauce, and it is my knowing. It is grounding, the anchor in chaos. The calm is developed security and a sense of Self. It is knowing and trusting that my foundation is sturdy and that I have all the resources, the love, the support, the people, the play, the love, the care, and that my needs and wants are met. I am home in this energy.
Here’s what (determined) hope looks like in practice:
Whenever I pull the data on women starting companies, and marginalized people starting companies, I am reminded there are 8,000,000,000 people on the planet and even if that company gets 1% or < 1% of the global population to be their customer, that company is going to succeed.
But if we don’t start teaching people not in the boys club how to start companies—will the funding data improve? Will more people understand the power of equity when they’re going to get jobs in their 20’s and 30’s? Will they do something with the idea or just let it go to someone else who will help it materialize? I don’t know. Will we make it better, together? I sit here with (determined) hope that we sure as shit will.
That 27-page deck reminded me of what an uphill climb launching and scaling TML was back in 2016. While I believe if you work hard at something you love it hardly feels like you’re working, time is our most precious resource.
The more time we have to regulate between the efforts of hard work, the better our bodies and systems adapt.
The systems we’re navigating right now? They’re not broken. They’re working exactly as designed—just not for us. I used to say we needed to fix the broken thing. But my awareness has become more informed: these systems were built for someone else. VC funding models. Pitch deck expectations. Access to capital. They’re functioning perfectly—for the people they were designed to serve.
I’m writing to you during a BIG week of change. Mercury trines Jupiter today, which is good for spreading a message far and wide. Tomorrow, February 16th, is the Lunar New Year—we enter the Year of the Fire Horse. AND, on Tuesday, there is an eclipse. On Friday, we have a big deal Saturn-Neptune conjunction, a rare, powerful “reset” point signaling a major new collective cycle.
The cosmos is literally saying: build new systems. Burn down what doesn’t serve. Move with determined hope. So we need new systems entirely. That’s what we’re building.
I pulled together 8 pages of starting companies data (2024-2026) and links to resources if you’re curious to dig in deeper, and/or want them for your pitches. Respond to this email, or comment “HERE WE GO,” and I’ll send it your way.
At the end of the day, we need to be taking our ideas and putting them into the market. We're building a world that is abundant for everyone.
Let’sFngGoooo ❤️🔥🐎!!!!
Enjoy the momentum that comes this week. Stay hydrated. Take ample rest breaks. Do not overschedule yourself.
See you soon!
Sending hugs,
Becca