The Power of Diverse Leadership in Driving Billion-Dollar Growth w/ SISTAFUND, Korelya Capital, Xtramile, & Dell Technologies

SCS (Intro): 

Is Europe ready to back its next billion-dollar businesses, or is the funding gap still holding founders back? This week's conversation features a panel I moderated in Paris as part of my firm Beyond The Billions Billion Dollar Series powered by Dell Technologies.

We sit down with Fleur Pellerin, former French minister turned top VC, Tatiana Jama, exited founder turned investor, Stephanie Nenta, AI entrepreneur, and Liz Matthews, Senior VP at Dell. We discussed how late stage capital remains Euro’s weak link, why female founders outperform, but still struggle for funding, the real hurdles of scaling in today's market and how corporates are shifting how they invest and innovate.

If you are looking for where the smart money is going next in Europe, this is the conversation you can't afford to miss. Let's get into it.

SCS: 

We will have a conversation. We've got someone who served in government for the longest time that has contributed to the La French Tech movement. We've got an innovator in AI that has been building in Paris and London. And of course Tatiana, who many of you will know, is our counterpart here in Paris working on SISTA, the NGO to solve the venture funding gap, and has also now moved on to become a capital allocator herself with a fund. And of course, Liz Matthew Senior Vice President at Dell Technologies, who is going to tell us a lot about strategy, marketing, and creative experiential marketing in the future is in her hands with Dell and part of why we're here today. 

So let's start Ladies and Gens.

I mean, what we wanna do with this panel is to really understand the landscape for. A lot of folks have traveled as far as Finland, America... I see some from Asia that have flown in, but we are excited to hear about the venture landscape, what the challenges, what are the opportunities and how do we move forward, right?

I think we've always taken us Beyond The Billion, a very problem solving approach. We acknowledge that there is an issue, but really we're here to highlight these leaders. As experts in their field and to give us a little bit of flavor so that you all can walk away. You know that the one thing I always say is, all right, what's the $1 billion move we can do today?

What can we do to move forward? What's the tangible thing, as Liz will always, challenge us, right? That we've done from this convening. It is really takeaways from your years of experience so that you all don't have to make the same mistakes that we all have made in our careers in building and in growing, and, you know, walk away with something inspirational that you can. And expand in your realm of influence. 

So let me start with Fleur. Many of those in the French ecosystem understand the significance of who you are and what you've done. But tell us, you know, for those who are traveling far and abroad, how'd you come to this work as a VC? 

Fleur Pellerin: 

So it was not a, you know, very straightforward past. I used to serve as the high civil servant here in France, and I was in the Hollande administration from 2012 to 2016, serving successively as a minister for digital innovation and small businesses, minister for foreign trade and tourism and minister for culture and communication. And that's when I did this very radical switch to ‘the dark side of the force’, set up my venture capital fund at the time actually where there were some women, some female founders.

Starting probably, Tatiana, I don't know that you will correct me, but in 2016, there must have been maybe less than 10 female partners in the whole private equity landscape in France. But at the time, there were some female founders starting their own private equity or VC firms. 

So that's what I did in 2016 when I received a very strong backing from a Korean LP investor and without this LP investor that invested in me. While I had absolutely no track record whatsoever as an investor, I would never have been able to do what I do. Today we have €750 million assets under management. (Tatiana: Bravo!) 

But I realize now, and probably Tatiana will tell you more about that, how difficult it still is to go over the hurdles that we face as female founders, whether that be a GP or a corporate founder. So that's who I am and I think we are making some progress, but we're not there. 

SCS: 

And Fleur, because you've had the specific lens of being a minister and you were very involved in the French Tech movement, which has become global. We all look up to it even as Americans. In terms of the initiative that you have put together.

Tell us a little bit about your sense of where the French ecosystem is. You know, that's always something that I ask a lot of founders. Do you think there's enough capital pool? Is the talent being developed? What is your sense of where we are today? From when you started years ago? 

Fleur Pellerin: 

I think there's been a lot of progress for sure. When you look back at the beginning of the 2010s, there was much less capital. The fundraising rounds, European players were almost absent. I mean, investors were almost always absent, plus series B. So now you have much more mature ecosystem when it comes to the financing of innovation.

But, and you know, probably if you look at Europe as a whole, the funding gap between the Europe and the US is closer a bit, but still, we still have, I think, difficulties in the late stage and the gross equity sector because of the lack of exit opportunities, because we don't have a financial market that is as efficient as a Nasdaq in the US.

Probably less also deep pocket kind of corporate investors who can, you know, spend billions in acquiring and doing M&A or acquiring a successful company. It's still challenging, but of course there's a big progress that has been made. And actually the best reward is when you speak to foreign investors and when they say, when I look at France, you know, today and where France was in the beginning of the 2000s or 2010s, it's been a very big difference.

We have very exciting companies. There's a lot of hype recently on Gen-AI, et cetera. So you also see founders who came back from the US big tech and who are founding their companies in France. So I think that there are good signs. Still a lot to do. 

SCS: 

Yeah. And Tatiana, I mean, Fleur is almost like elbowing you there to give your comments on your landscape.

Tell us a little bit about SISTA as an NGO. What inspired you? I mean, you were an exited founder, we talked about this, so you have that lens of a founder now doing something for the wider ecosystem. Tell us what brought you to this work and if you agree with Fleur.

Tatiana Jama: 

I always agree with Fleur. Nobody wants to disagree with Fleur. So I started as an entrepreneur. I was absolutely convinced that it was the best way for women to climb the social ladder. And I still believe, but the problem is that the funding gap is so huge that now we have an enormous problem around access to finance. 

But it's still very true that entrepreneurship is the best way for women and minorities to climb. I mean, it's the story of my family. So I was brought up by a mother that was born in Cuba, and a Franco-Polish father, and they kind of made it through life being entrepreneurs. 

So there's many ways of being an entrepreneur. You can be a tech entrepreneur, but you also can be other kinds of entrepreneur. And it's still a space where the status quo is not a hundred percent true. And you still see amazing innovators that come from outside. And I believe that also, it's the case of women. 

So I was again, absolutely convinced that it was the best thing that could ever happen typically to women. And it's a little bit what happened to me and my partner because for 14 years we raised funds, we exited to Amazon, and that was even before Fleur launched La French tech. 

So it was an ecosystem where there was approximately €1 billion. Today it's €25 billion that is injected every year. And the French tech, if you take really the venture. So it did times 25 in a little bit more than 10 years. So it's still a huge step.

It was very happy in my entrepreneurial kind of journey, I had n't really realize that I was a women entrepreneur in 2018. There was all these questions and there's always all these questions about the fact that women lack ambition, and there were not even 10 women in the French tech ecosystem and where were the women?

So the French government asked us, a group of female entrepreneurs to kind of think about it. And that's where we started counting. And we tried to understand the noise that was going in because again, everybody was talking about the lack of ambition. I'm only surrounded by crazy ambitious women, very tiring.

And I didn't understand what people were saying. And we decided to count, and it became like a very important motto. That we needed to count women in order for women to count, because the cultural bias everywhere in the US in Europe is just huge. And you need data in order to kind of understand the problem.

And by counting, I realized that there was only 2% of the venture money that went to women entrepreneur in the past 10 years. And that was a real shock. Because I thought there was, of course, an error, and I realized with my partner that we were kind of a statistical anomaly. We shouldn't have raised funds, we shouldn't have exited, we shouldn't have been where we were.

And that was the beginning of SISTA trying to understand why with data, with venture capitalists, but also with entrepreneurs. How we can kind of co-create an NGO and try to change things. And that's when we launched. So this is the initiative which the beginning was a pledge where we decided to ask the venture capital to back at least 25% of the portfolio with one women co-founder as of 2025.

That's where it all started. Little by little I realized that it wasn't going to go quickly enough and that really. Nobody really cared and I had to go get every Euro myself. So I did, and I decided to launch a SISTAFUND, which is a hundred million target venture fund. We raised a little less than 80% with amazing entrepreneurs, amazing corporates, with European funds also.

And I think that all of them, and it's really a question that I would love for us to discuss. None of them had a gender mandate. We're all talking about the fact that of course we need a pledge. Of course we need money, but we really need money and we have amazing opportunities. Like at the beginning, everybody, when I started the fund, everybody said that, you know, we didn't have enough women entrepreneurs.

We received 200, 225 decks that are more like crazy. We invested in nine amazing companies, then three companies. Our first company announced a public year, a funding of €150 million this morning. It's The Exploration Company. It's launched by Hélène Huby, who is a Franco-German entrepreneur.

And I guess that living it, it's just absurd for me because I'm not helping anyone. I'm just, you know, taking an amazing opportunity where tomorrow, and you said it, most of the unicorns are going to be female led, so we shouldn't even do that much of meetings anymore. Just let us invest in the best tech company.

And it's just a question of, you know, having the opportunity today to prove in a financial state of point that. The literature is true. Diversity outperforms and female led company return better, uh, than all male companies.

SCS:

Yeah, absolutely. And part of our convenings has always been focused on catalyzing capital, right? We're not here to just talk among ourselves, but we're actually convening the movers and shakers to allocate capital. And we have gone beyond a billion. 

Stephanie, you are living it as a founder yourself building in the future, tell us a little bit about your experience. We talked a little bit about your fundraising journey as well, and some of the challenges, how you've had to rethink your strategy and you come from a bit of a track record actually.

Stephanie Nenta: 

Yeah, that's right. 

SCS:

Which people discount. 

Stephanie Nenta: 

Yeah, that's true. 

SCS:

Yeah. Tell us more. 

Stephanie Nenta: 

Yeah. It's funny enough because you know, when we talk about women entrepreneurs, it's almost like you have to always outperform like the norm, right? You always have to raise the bar so high compared to your counterpart, your male counterpart, which is very frustrating.

But anyway, here we are. So I come from an entrepreneurial background, in Cameroon, a country in Central Africa. So I was raised with ambition of at some point I will set up my own company. I didn't know when, but I knew it will come certainly at some point. And then I did a sort of a conventional route.

So I went to a business school in France and then I moved to the UK in investment banking. And at some point I got frustrated because I didn't see things progressing the way I wanted. There was the crisis as well. I don’t know if you, some people are familiar, but 2014, 2013, there was also European crisis. So all that sort of forced me to rethink about what I want to do next, and entrepreneurship was one of the things that I always wanted to do.

So I jumped. And the first thing that I had to tackle was raising money because, uh, I was very ambitious. I wanted to create a startup using AI to optimize the HR process. The problem is, that is capital intensive. So that means upfront you have to make huge investment as a female when you come to an investor, unfortunately is male dominated as people have already been echoing. 

It's almost like you have the imposter syndrome when you talk to investors because they always think that you're not capable of delivering those types of very high value type of products. So you always have a double challenge of not only convincing about your innovative tech, but on top of it, you also have to convince that you are the proper entrepreneur to take it, you know, to the next level.

So that came with a lot of hurdles. Thankfully, I had to obviously do a bit of compromise because I have to build also with another co-founder, which helps a lot I have to say. That took me a lot of more time that I would have wanted initially, fundraise the money, but I got it anyway. And right now, Xtramile has processed more than 7 million job offers across France, but also in Europe. 

(Crowd applauses) Thank you. Thank you. 

We work with a large company like the 3 branch of the French Army, with large company. At the moment we have about 25 people in the company. So the company was initially incorporated in France. I moved to London a couple of months ago to expand outside France.

My cents is as women, you have more, much more challenges than men. Not only on the fundraising, but to convince people to actually follow you. But when you get it done, people are actually amazed. 

SCS: 

Yeah. So getting it done, I mean, Liz, you come to this from the role of a corporate, and of course Dell has been a front runner in supporting a lot of these initiatives.

What are your thoughts here as you're listening to these movers and shakers talk about the challenges, opportunities, and yet still getting it done? 

Liz Matthews: 

Yeah. So many thoughts because I run the global brand of Dell and entrepreneurship is core to who we are as a company. We wouldn't exist as a company if it weren't for an entrepreneurial spirit.

What's interesting is, I was on the team many years ago that created the Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network, so part of that, that founding team, and I loved what you said, which is the data is so clear. And yet we need to continue to have the conversations about the importance of access to capital and changing the conversations, access to networking and access to the resources.

And while the data will show, we've made progress. That progress is slow, and so we need to continue to have these conversations because I know this to be true. Women are a powerful force, not only in the startup community, but also in corporations. I see it every day and even as a face of a corporation.

We have progress to make on the shape of how we show up as a company setting a goal By 2030 to have 50% of our company be female and female led. We're not there yet. We've got work to do, but it's still a really important goal. So I'm struck by the progress in the conversation, the data that shows how far we've come, and yet so many of the same themes that drove Dell Technologies to have this conversation in two.

Invest in startups because we know when women are behind companies, those companies give more back to the community. They're more successful and they drive more business around them. It's why we got into it because we saw that data and we recognized it, and we cannot stop the conversation and we cannot stop the progress.

SCS: 

And Fleur, I mean, part of your work at Le French Tech was this storytelling that we were, we were talking about, yes, we're frustrated, we need to get the action done and we need to get capital moving. But what are your thoughts here on where the narrative is today? I'd be curious to hear later from you, Tatiana as well.

You know, we work with over 120 funds today. Some markets have been extremely challenging where they've decided that they just didn't wanna be a female focused fund. They just were women doing great work. Many of the top entrepreneurs that they invested in happened to be women, and they, by just changing the name of their fund from ‘women fund something’ to just ‘fund’, LPs changed their texts. LPs were more open to looking at the deals. 

What are your thoughts here on the storytelling, the narratives in France? 

Fleur Pellerin: 

You know, Tatiana was talking about the sister pledge. I signed the sister pledge as a GP company. I've not been very efficient in executing this pledge because when I look at my portfolio today, I have to admit, and I'm not proud of it, but you know, we're doing late stage tech deals, pan-European and also bit in Korea. 

In the actual portfolio, I think I have like two maximum out of no more than 20 companies, that are female founded or co-founded. And in the deal flow I see very few companies founded by females. So we are talking about a female founded GP, right? 

So I would love to do more. I think in the sector, in the tech space, it's very complicated. I think this study is also the fund that is also doing tech, right? But maybe more early stage. And I think it's the problem of this sector. Because now we are diversifying, as I was explaining a bit earlier, and I have a great new female partner who is in the room and the deal flow that we have because we invest in consumer brands.

In that case, we have a much more balanced deal flow than we have seen tech. So it's probably it has something to do with the profile of the founders in the tech sector. When I was working on the French tech and trying to track capital and build the VC ecosystem and the startup ecosystem, we were not having this gender approach, right?

We just wanted the sector to be more vibrant and to create the right environment for founders, whether they be male or female, to be able to fund their company and fund their journey. But now when I look at the difficulty that is still there. Even after all these pledges, even after all these good speeches, analysis, and diagnosis, I don't think we've made much progress in the past five years, honestly.

SCS: 

So what does it take? I mean…

Tatiana Jama: 

Thanks for the good news. 

Fleur Pellerin: 

No but one has been successful in France and we were discussing that just earlier, is the policy, the public policy that we've put in place to. Create more gender balance in the board board positions. Almost 15 years ago, at the time, there were probably less than 5% women in all the CAC 40 board positions.

Now, today we are at 40% because there was a law that was passed that made it mandatory to comply, but that gave like a 10 year period to comply. It was very long period. And then there was not really a direct sanction, but they said, and it was very smart, the lawmakers, they said, okay. We don't give you a sanction if you don't comply, but please know that all the boards that will not comply will not be able to serve board compensation.

So then the people say, oh my God, because there was always a good excuse, oh, there's not enough of a pool of women, female talent, et cetera. But at some point when we say, okay, we will remove your board director packages. Suddenly there were some women to be found. 

And so this kind of thing was a very strong incentive to find solutions, but I'm not sure there could be an equivalent to solve the funding gap without this kind of, you know, very strong incentives. With a carrot and a stick or both. It's very difficult to change situations because just people, you know, keep doing as they've always done. 

SCS: 

Yeah. So, two threads I wanna go down that you brought up very nicely, Fleur. One is, what does it actually take to change the landscape? What are the incentives that we need to rethink?

I mean, you know the example of the board compensation. At the end of the day, money talks.That's why we at Beyond The Billion. We fully only focus on capital. Yes, acceleration, building the pipeline of talent, all of that is important, but nothing's gonna change unless the landscape for capital changes.

And what we've been doing is actually working more with LPs of which you all are the beneficiaries, to say, hey, we wanna see more women in your portfolio as a condition of your capital. And we'll tell you wherever we go, whether that's Helsinki and Finland to Asia, Singapore. The moment the LPs say they want to invest in funds looking for women, the narrative changes.

So I like how you're bringing that up here. And I wanna challenge, I guess maybe Tatiana, you've been at this, you've cracked your head. I know the frustration as a SISTA to you. What do you think is the opportunity here? Like how can we be creative? In this ecosystem to make things different. 

Tatiana Jama: 

A hundred percent. I mean, aligned with what Fleur said, we launched in 2019 a pledge. Everybody was very excited. Everybody said that. Again, there was a before and an after SISTA because the numbers were out there before we used to. It was okay. To have, you know, an all men's picture and now it's not okay. Before it was okay to have that kind of statistics.

Now it's not okay, but people kind of hide them. I don't know how they figure it out, but they still do. And at one point, it depends on the ecosystem, of course, but in France we have a very particular ecosystem where BPI has an amazing role. Again, in the US you know, the pension funds, I mean, every ecosystem is very different, but in our case, we firmly believe that quotas are the solution.

So before, there's always been an excuse, and since there's quotas, they find women. They don't find excuses anymore, they'll find women. And the only way for things to change, you know, dramatically is just to make it mandatory. Nothing's gonna change at one point that everybody gets the exact same amount of money, whoever and whatever they fund.

What happened in 10 years? Around the climate conscious is huge. And it makes a point where you realize that it's possible when you have legislation, when you have everybody that gets around the table and are obliged to do things, they do it because they don't have another way. 

So I think that if we could, and that's a little bit what's happening with the European Fund, they're creating gender mandates saying that whenever the fund that has a 30% of women, they get a little bit more funding.

And that's a huge way of course of attracting more LPs, but also more funders typically. In my case, again, I think that we were benchmarked on exactly the same track records, the same metrics than the other teams, which is absurd when you still have an ambition where there's impact. The impact is to say, if you have €100 million that goes to women, you have more access to funding and you accelerate equality by reinforcing economical power. 

And it's just that, it's very long and we're very happy that, you know, we were the first one. I mean, of course, I'm proud of being the largest European fund on the subject, and at the same time I find it really weird.

SCS: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Tatiana Jama: 

Because there's tons of women VC that have been in the industry for 20 years, and they can, of course, launch funds if they have the opportunity to go to very particular VC Europeans or others, institutional, that will give them a little more funding because they have the special attention. That would of course drastically change things. 

SCS: 

And so I wanna take this, pulling the thread on the second point, which is pattern of success. And bring this to you, Stephanie. You look at bias in HR and I wanna take it to, you know, this issue. Challenge you to take it to this issue a little bit.

Fleur started with no track record, right? And one of the challenges that a lot of female GPs face is that, look, women and people of color do not come from the same position of privilege where we were able to call dad to say, hey, wire me $250,000, or give me my first million to get started. 

So we come from a different starting point and one of the things we at Beyond The Billion have realized is working with LPs like BPI France and I know they're in the audience here today, Ann and Adeline, but it is reevaluating the pattern of success that you cannot be using a system that did not serve all of us around the room here today.

What are your thoughts here, taking your creative mindset as an entrepreneur working on bias into this issue? 

Stephanie Nenta: 

I mean. In our case, for example at Xtramile, we tried to, and this was not done by design, it was actually what we came up with, but it turns out that we have 50% of our talent pool, which were female.

What I mean by female, we have like developer, data scientist. Because I think we gave the chance to everybody. We did at some point, we had to upskill some people in the team in order for them to get to a point where they will be comfortable, for example, that scientist role, even if it is to say, I will provide objectives to that person in the long run.

Not necessarily short term, because we know that usually, and this is a statistic: women who actually succeed in the role tend to be more loyal to a company than male. That is a reality, I'm telling you. 

So this is something that we did internally, but if we sort of try to push the envelope, and try to see how does that fit in the bigger picture, I think as a startup or entrepreneur, as the same thing as the GP and the LP did for the pledge. 

I think as a founder, we need to give women more chances because right now when you recruit an engineer, three out of four people will be men. And you have to think about, okay, how do I play the long term game as opposed to just short term? And if you give a chance to a woman, even if she doesn't have the right skill yet, and you build that in the long term, I think you open the door for more women getting into the sort of the STEM program, if you call it that way. And actually believing themself to later on start a company.

SCS: 

And I just wanna add that this is data back. So with Beyond The Billion, when we did our first fill in report, we were in the past quoting like Mass Challenge, BCG, McKinsey, women outperform all these things. But years later, because we've been doing this for a while, we asked our funds to report back and reevaluate their own performance.

And I think Shelly mentioned Gobi Partners earlier in Asia, which, by the way some of you know, is still a lot more to be desired for women in leadership. But this male dominated GP re-looked at the data because they took our pledge and saw that the staff retention rates for women led companies were outperforming absolutely a lot higher. Revenues were higher. Likelihood of a high valuation was a lot higher as one profitability, so on and so forth. 

So this was not data we were giving them that we were quoting from consultants, uh, that sometimes we love. But it was real data. They were counting themselves. Like you said, when you go and count and calculate yourself, you hold yourself accountable. Things change. 

And I wanna open this up to be an interactive conversation, but I wanna end with one question. We can't end the conversation. Without touching on AI. What do you think the opportunity is here to solve this issue? How is Dell thinking about the use of AI and how will that impact the work moving forward? 

Liz Matthews: 

So I would begin by saying every company is a technology company these days. When you're starting, no matter what your product or service or output is, and the opportunity to embrace and use AI from the beginning, I think is paramount.

We talk at Dell a lot about this idea of a growth mindset. We ourselves, as a large multinational corporation, going through an evolution of modernizing how we work, how we use our technology, and so AI is part of the future. It is another tool. You will be ubiquitous. It is everywhere. It is disrupting how we work and so I would say absolutely Dell is embracing it. Our technology is being designed to create for all of you, especially as we think about our small businesses and our medium businesses, and my message would be embrace it from the beginning. Those who have that growth mindset and are not afraid of it in using it from the onset.

Whether it is core to the output of your business or you're using it to run and start your company, it is an exciting future. It is one that we say sometimes it's cloudy, but you can see the light, and it is literally every part of how we're operating and how we're developing technology for our customers.

SCS: 

Thank you. And on that note, I wanna open up for questions and answers. So this is a session where you get to ask these amazing ladies your questions. I see a question in the back. 

Audience: 

We are speaking about tech companies and the lack of funding for female led tech companies. But with my co-founder here, we are building a sportswear company.

We struggle to raise funds because we are not a tech company. So funding tech founder is hard because you have less female founders in your deal flow. So why not funding more not tech-centered companies.

Fleur Pellerin: 

When I said that, I just added that we are launching right now, a new strategy to invest in consumer brands. So consumer including fashion, sportswear, accessories, beauty, et cetera. It is true that the deal is still totally different from what it is in the tech space. And I can really compare the two because we have the two activities. So we have fundraising now, so we're not. We could start to deploy, but we're more focusing on the fundraising.

But I can see already that in the consumer space, we will absolutely not have this problem. I don't have the exact statistics in mind, but I think that at least 50% of the companies, maybe probably more of the companies that we see are female founded or female co-funded. So there's a very specific problem in the tech sector, and it's true that in the consumer space it's totally different. And there are some consumer specialists. But it's true that it's not the same pattern at all. 

SCS: 

But just to answer your question there as well, we had a similar conversation recently in Sydney and one of the founders that exited her company created the equivalent of Thinx, if, you know, Thinkx the period underwear for incontinence.

And she sold her company for $140 million, of which she retained a majority of her share. And her fundraising journey was terrible. She had two herniated this, she took $250,000 on credit cards because no VC fund would fund it in Australia because the preconception built upon the American model, of which I come from, is that it's tech that makes the money.

And so what I would give some hope is that even on that panel, the investors, the next generation are rethinking what kind of returns can we promise? Because remember, again, when you're getting money from a VC. These GPs are pressured to give 3X the returns within a short period of time. Usually it's 10 years, right?

So if you can promise that without the use of tech, there's a conversation to be had. But again, it's understanding that in two ways, I think for capital allocators, how do we need to reshift our model? Does venture work in every single market in this way? Perhaps not. 

Tatiana Jama: 

Everybody asks us, if you're an investor, founder, whatever background, you have to be much more ambitious, much more fund.

And that's why I decided to launch a fund focus on female founders who is by design they're much more resilient. Because if you're here, that means that you have to overcome so much adversity. I prefer working with you that nobody else in the room. So resilience by design is what women entrepreneurs building on, and who they are.

And that's also why it's an incredible asset and that's why you want to hire them because they're just better. 

SCS: 

I feel like that's a tweet or an X: female founders are resilient by design. Let's hear it. So remember to tag us Beyond The Billion and DWEN, hashtag Dell Technologies. I have a next question. 

Audience (2): 

Hi, I am Lizy. I'm the co-founder of two AI tech company and one of my dreams is to use generative AI to build something with women, with ethical and responsible. And today all the VCs want to develop SaaS, Software as a service. And it's not possible if you want to build something that represents all the kind of people that are in the room.

So what is the good argument to explain that AI is not a gadget. It's a very good game changer, but it's need to be built with people and built ethically and responsibly.

Stephanie Nenta: 

Well, coming from a fundraising that we are doing at the moment. I think one of the things that we have to tackle when we talk about how we need to incorporate biases, is the fact that I put myself in the shoes of a VC. They want to hear that your product is scalable, right? 

The question about SaaS, how do you deploy that? Because this is the common business model that they are more comfortable with and they're used to actually deploy. And for them SaaS meaning equal scalability.

But on the other spectrum, we also have to think about AI as a way to make sure everybody's represented, like you said. And we need to have a more specific approach. For me, when I talk about AI for example, in HR, I try to always convince investors that we are building something that is scalable, but at the same time, we also need to think about how to make sure everybody, there's no biases or there's limited biases. 

So it's a discussion that you need to have is a negotiation that you need to have with your investor. There are some who will tell you this is not necessarily something that they want to pursue, and it's fine. You know, sometimes you have a hundred rejection, but you just need one yes. And is that one Yes. That you, you know, you are looking for? 

And this is the last thing that I will say on this subject. For me, an investor is like a partner for life. I mean, not for life, but, a long time. For a very long time. It's better to find the person who actually believes in what you want, the vision that you have, as opposed to taking money from anybody.

And then they will put some hurdle that you will not necessarily can actually address. So it's better to be patient. 

Audience (3): 

Hi there, my name is Millie Elvis. I'm building a Ry tech company here in Paris. Tried before in London, New York as well. And I was wondering if you have any stats on how many female founders who are not first time founders, but not successfully exist the company? 

SCS: 

I would encourage one of our partner funds as Endeavor. Endeavor came out with a report on what an unicorn looks like and where they come from globally and the misconception is that they look like Mark Zuckerberg, right? That hoodie wearing 20 something. But the reality is that a lot of successful founders are repeat founders.

This is not your first rodeo, so I hope you will continue to build and, and that is the inspiration for you to continue to build. But the data is in the positive that, you know, it takes a typical founder that is successful as a unicorn, I wanna say, was like 35 to 45, because you had enough experience, you know how to do this because as was said here, I think frankly it is a game, right?

You need to hit certain numbers to tell your investors that you need to invest in this idea to get to a certain outcome by a certain time and return that capital. So if you built with that in mind, I think you'll continue to succeed. And the data is in the positive, including for women.

AndEndeavor they have a lot of women led unicorns. One of the recent one, I think, Insider, led by a Turkish lady. 

Stephanie Nenta: 

And I just want to add a quick comment on, and this is the misconception about startups. We have this fantasy of all the startups that look like Mark Zuckerberg or the Uber, and we have all this Netflix show, whatever.

And most of the people don't look like that. And the journey is not like five years, you get a billion. To be honest, this was what I believed when I started and I thought, okay, in five years I will be out of here, I will be in my yacht somewhere. But it's not that, I mean, it's not an entrepreneur and this is something I learned along the way.

You have to enjoy the process. The process can be long, can be tiresome, and you have to enjoy the process, and it can be a long-term process, but you have to be passionate about that process. 

SCS: 

If I may add as well, Tatiana, you might have thoughts here, but what we've learned from just our global tour with a lot of founders that have had exited, I mean, I'm, I'm thinking about Modibodi specifically, Kristy Chong, $140 million. 

She held onto her equity for a longer time because she couldn't raise funding. It took her 10 years at least to get to that point. But that is generational wealth. And that's why we care about this, why we invite you into this conversation because we believe for women and people of color.

Once you get that exit right, hopefully all of you here, you know, let's count this years later, but this will change the face for your families and our future. 

Tatiana Jama: 

The fact that of course you have the VC, but you also have the business angel, uh, in France and in Europe it's a huge community and it's getting larger and larger.

You have today a lot of like special folk groups that invest only between females and only focus on females. And I think you should also, you know, check that out on a round table. Now we have dedicated SPVs that are also focused on women founders with SISTA, the NGO. The idea is that, we have a program where we help women raise funds and balance teams.

And over the past three years, we helped raise $342 million just to say that. Also, the VC kind of roadshow is a game and being kind of trained to the game is also very important. There's a different aspect to fundraising, but again, if you think that an accelerator could be some kind of a help, I really like encourage you to go because it's also a way to get community, learn between peers.

I was a lawyer and I learned everything between, you know, entrepreneurs. So I really believe the fact that we have to help out and there's a lot of energy and sorority in that kind of community. So go check them out. 

Audience (4): 

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for the insights you shared. And also thank you to everybody who flew to Paris to make this happen.

I founded a startup. So it's a SaaS for well-being at work. My question is really on the practical side. At which point, like what are the numbers we should look at before we start reaching to VCs or maybe to NGOs that can help us go for roadshows, et cetera? 

Tatiana Jama: 

First of all, I think that the idea is to be able to meet and to have conversations with a certain number of VCs because each fund is very different.

As a pre-seed, typically you're going to look mostly around the team and the mission, and we're spending a lot of time with our team trying to understand the founding teams, why are they working together? Is this team going to make a better return than another team? 

So I think that the first thing is try to get in conversations with VCs to try to understand what they're looking for. On the other hand, the idea is also to try to get help in the fundraising process, if you don't have that kind of network. 

So either you find a founder that already raised that can help you out or give you an intro. It's proven that you have 13 times more chances to raise funds when you have an intro by email versus a cold email. That's why network is key. Just by sending out emails. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But if you have an introduction, it changes everything. And after, it's like the basic, I guess, year to year growth on your members, on your NPS, on your core value that you're building.

SCS: 

If I may, I mean, this is why we have a cocktail networking session later to talk about exact strategies. What are the financing options? I mean a lot of big founders, I see Stacy Boyd in the audience as well from the amazing Olivela, a lot of big founders here in the audience, talk to them about their financing choices.

What we've learned from our founders is when they make different choices with funding, things change, right? And that's important to think about your future. There's always gonna be pressure on numbers because you have to return certain things to, as mentioned, using the VC model, it literally is tenures deliver three x of returns.

So a portfolio model means that from the X amount of startups, there needs to be one home run. And you are being pressured to be that home run. Is this something that works for you? Maybe, maybe not. But ultimately it is, you know, the goal here is how do we get you to succeed and use a venture as a tool?

I think there's always a misconception that it is also an end goal, right? We see TechCrunch, oh, this guy has raised like $500 million valuation is this, but look what happened in the last couple of years. Empty valuations. So many companies, I mean, Ms Skittlez is shaking her head because her counterparts who had the same exact business model have literally crashed, but she didn't have the funding, had to get customers and return the numbers. And I see, uh, Sandrine from Orange, who is anxious to make a comment. Sandrine. Thank you. 

Audience (5): 

I have two things, one announcement because I'm recruiting 100 women in tech to join incubator based in Old France regions, so we're based in Paris and Mont Pelier as well everywhere.

One thing that is really important before raising funds is your market fits your go-to market. I. If you don't have any revenues for your company, would be very hard for you to raise funds. So we are focusing on women that master the technology or not because you're totally open to women in tech, but in tech for good as well.

We are always focusing on helping you to accelerate your growth and accelerating your growth is really important for you to make healthy companies and the companies that would be happy to be able to be funded. So the first step is revenue. So this is our main focus to make the companies attractive for commercial traction.

And this one is really important if you want to do business and to make your company grow really quicker. The second one is, we make this one program that the program lasts one year, but after this year of incubation, you are part of a big network of 600 women already funded and already supported by Orange.

So we have amazing success this year because we went to Vitech. We have 40 women with us at Vitech, and we earned two prizes. One in artificial intelligence, and the second one in cybersecurity. So everything is possible if we would just bring our forces all together to make the difference.

SCS: 

Thank you, Sandrine, and I mean it's inspirational despite the bad news. I think what we've realized is France is actually one of the leading ecosystems where female GPs have raised in Europe, you know, UK, Netherlands, and in France. It's one of the top ecosystems and a lot of that as well. I know Anne from BPI has made this commentary, but your government has been serving you in many different ways. They invest a billion dollars every year right into the ecosystem in tech and VC. 

But I wanna end, you know, we've heard so many things from the role of corporates, the role of family offices. We have some families who flew in as well across Europe to be here to hear from you.

What would be your key takeaways as we walk away here? Let's start with you, Tatiana. 

Tatiana Jama: 

Oh my God. What a pressure. One question. Do you know why ambitious women have flatheads? Because we've been tapped on, you know, consistently a lot in our whole life, but it doesn't change anything. What we have in common, in that we all have very flat heads, you always need a person that believes in their dream to make the dream go through.

So my dream was to be a founder. I became a founder. I exited again, and it was an amazing opportunity. At one point, I decided that I wanted to try to find a maximum money to found amazing women, not to help them, but because I believe they overperform. Again, we have a philanthropic arm, but the fund is a hundred performance, and I really believe that we're going to prove that women outperform. That's what we're doing. 

We're raising a hundred today. We're almost there. The idea is to raise more funds. I hope that you guys are going to raise more funds and only to fund amazing women. And if I could be of any help, trying to talk about my journey and how I raised this particular fund, I'll be happy to do so.

SCS: 

Love it. So invest in women because it's good business. Stephanie? 

Stephanie Nenta: 

My takeaway will be, as women, we learn to be resilient. I think one of the tricks that helped me a lot is to do more with less. So you learn that along the way, so you need to be. Very resilient, very creative with what you can raise, you know, alternative source of funding. We talk about revenue. Think about, you know, taking the most out of your clients because indeed clients can finance a fundraising or can be complimentary to fundraising. 

Always have to think creatively because unfortunately we are not there yet in terms of filling the gap in funding. So you have to be resilient, and think outside the box.

SCS: 

Think outside the box. Female founders are resilient by design. And take us home, Liz Matthews. 

Liz Matthews: 

Oh, that's so much pressure. So I love the idea of resilience and also sometimes this resilience is doing the same thing over and over. So I want us to think about resilience and an open mindset or a growth mindset because you have to be creative and we cannot stop.

And so as you're on your journey for those who are investors in the room. Keep investing for those who are founding companies, keep founding. For anyone who's part of Dell Technologies, we will never give up investing in small and medium businesses. 

SCS: 

Wonderful. And Fleur is just back in time. What is your key takeaway?

One piece of advice to the founders and founders in the room? 

Fleur Pellerin: 

I think collectively, it's not a takeaway, but I was thinking, you know, when Liz was saying, I think we need some push. We need some policy push.

Tatiana Jama: 

Policy push!

Fleur Pellerin: 

In the same kind of spirit as this, you know, this law we were mentioning the Copé-Zimmermann Law.

Maybe it's an incentive that institutional LPs could commit, you know, to either to impose a minimum, maybe 25% was too ambitious. Maybe 10 or 15%, but at least it's something. And then they would say that, okay, they will give an incentive, maybe it's a less GP commitment or it's more carried interest. Something like an incentive not to discriminate those who don't want to commit, but to give a carrot to those who will make the commitment. 

So maybe it's something that has to do like this because we need, in France, we are attached to the law. You know, we cannot treat differently people who are in the same situation. So we cannot do positive discrimination. 

 But there are some smart ways, as they did with Copé-Zimmermann Law to maybe, you know, give this policy push. Because I think without this push, which can be a sting, you know, sometimes if it need, I don't think we'll achieve any of the billion goals that we want to have. Thank you.

SCS: 

Thank you, Fleur. Yes, and what I'll just say is this is exactly what we do at Beyond The Billion where we work with LPs who see positively gps that make a dollar commitment to invest more into women founded companies. So it's not a percentage, but it's a dollar amount.

And if there are more LPs that, we work with Bank of America, a lot of pension funds, endowments in the US and globally, and we're starting to do a lot more with family offices, a lot in the audience who are wielding the power of their check because women are using that influence for transformative ways, and this is where we make the difference.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, please give a round of applause for our panel.