For Mickie Siebert, who opened a big door and expected us all to walk through
On January 27, 2000, Springboard Enterprises was officially launched into the venture capital community with our first forum at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood City, California. That day, the first twenty-six companies stepped onto the stage in the very first venture forum featuring women entrepreneurs who came to raise venture capital for their technology businesses. As I stood on stage to introduce Springboard presenters, a nervous energy rippled through the room.
Some there must have been wondering what we were thinking. Venture capitalists barely knew any women founders who could drive growth. Yes, there were some women leading large and growing corporations, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett Packard and Meg Whitman at eBay among them. But this was different. Our women were founders and determined to scale their businesses in technology, media, e-commerce and biotech. No one had even heard of these businesses and their women founders but all had rich expertise and certainly the ability to build successful businesses.
My partner Amy Millman and I had reached out through every university alumnae association, every women's business organization, every personal contact each of the cofounders of Springboard had access to and more. Every founder had been coached by a team handpicked to strengthen business models, management teams and, most important, had been schooled in giving presentations geared to investors. The women were great students of the process and this day was graduating day.
It was showtime-a chance for them to present in front of an audience of five hundred investors.
Krishna Subramanian, founder of Kovair, was first up. We had a lot of confidence in her. A software engineer at Sun Microsystems with five patents to her credit, Krishna had walked out on her stock options to launch Kovair with its patent-pending technology to build custom websites for enterprise businesses. I loved her quiet self-confidence, her presentation style and her ability to capture the audience. She had launched her company nine months earlier with $1.5 million and was there seeking $8 million to $10 million in growth capital. She was twenty-nine.
Krishna opened her presentation with a play on a familiar quote from Shakespeare: "To B2B, or not to B2B? That is the question." She explained why she chose to offer her service to enterprise companies instead of consumers. She clicked through her clear and concise B2B presentation without a hitch. The audience was attentive. You could see they were thinking that maybe, just maybe, these companies would stack up against the rigorous benchmarks set by the venture investors. They ultimately rewarded her with a $9 million investment, and Kovair took off.
Being a self-described futurist, I seldom reflect on my career, but compiling this book has brought me back to how this all began. I have the experience of founding and building a multibillion-dollar company, USA Networks, and I knew women could hold their own in a fully competitive world.
Springboard faced the challenge of finding women with the talent, drive, experience and vision to build these scalable companies. The year we began to mount our effort, 1999, over $100 billion in venture capital was invested, yet only 1.7 percent went to women.
There have been many experiences in my life that influenced me to think big, reach higher and achieve success. Something happened in 1999, though, that left a profound impression on me and on our ability to achieve for women entrepreneurs so much more than was ever expected.
In 1999, the national women's soccer team electrified the nation when it claimed the World Cup by defeating the team from China in a tense shoot-out. Over ninety thousand screaming fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on July 10 danced in the stands as Brandi Chastain scored the winning point beyond the reach of the Chinese goaltender. Over forty million watched the event on TV, at the time the largest audience for World Cup soccer, men's or women's.
The victory was sweet, but the story took place years earlier when the soccer federation decided it would have to start with fundamentals to build a team for ultimate success. Coach Bruce Arena scoured the nation for middle school and high school girls with great potential. Mia Hamm, at thirteen, was among the youngest. The players came from all different ethnic backgrounds and geographic locations, and they came to learn to play as a team.
Years of coaching went into bringing this team together, scouting talent, training, coaching and getting out onto the field to be challenged in national and international competition. Years of hard work by hundreds of people supporting these players came together to seize victory that day in July 1999.
What Springboard faced in 1999 putting our team together was nothing short of what women's soccer did to achieve success in that year. We had to start from the beginning, finding the talent, bringing them together, coaching them, giving them a place to play and in the end access to resources to achieve success. There were many doubters, but not among us.
This is what I want for entrepreneurs, especially for women: to believe in themselves, to dream bigger, reach higher, to achieve success beyond their wildest expectations. That's why Springboard was founded. That's why we've assembled our entrepreneurial experts and asked them to spill their stories, their lessons, their advice onto these pages.
Now fifteen years later the realization of this vision is proof that there is remarkable know-how within our network of human capital and in the thesis that investing in women is smart business. Over five hundred fifty women-led companies have been through the Springboard accelerator programs. More than 80 percent of these companies raise capital, and more than 80 percent are in business as of this writing, either in their original form or as a part of mergers or acquisition. Eleven companies completed IPOs. The women entrepreneurs who founded and lead these companies are highly educated and high-performing professionals and are no longer the best-kept secret.
Even entrepreneurs in the midlife of their companies can find sage advice on issues they never contemplated when they started out. Students who are filling courses on entrepreneurship at colleges and universities will find value in real-life advice from those who have truly "been there, run that." We hope you will find these articles, organized by theme, useful quick tips to guide you in your business decisions. Springboard offers these in hope that by peeling back the veil of mystery to raising capital and building scalable businesses, we are helping more women achieve economic parity.
I am grateful to all of the women and men whose articles are in this anthology, for their selfless contribution to the benefit of others. It is very much in keeping with the pledge of our entrepreneurs who have benefited from our human capital network to pay it forward to those who choose the same path.
Kay Koplovitz
New York City
September 2014
