Hi, everyone. I'm Karen Con I'm the founder and CEO of I Fund Women.That's a great question. So, as I just explained, the massive systemic problem that we are solving in that the funding gap for women entrepreneurs is enormous. And the reason I got here with my two co founders is we are our own customers, and this is our second start up. Our first start up was a failure, and I love talking about failure of a startup because most successful entrepreneurs have had many fails along the way that have taught them how to improve and get it right. So I'm one of those people where my two co founders and I were running a startup before this, and we struggle to raise capital. We experience singlehandedly ourselves how hard it is for women entrepreneurs to raise capital. And there are lots of reasons for that, right? It's not that venture capitalists are bad people there, absolutely not. And it's not that they're not funding us because we're women. That's absolutely not happening. But what's happening is V C firms have a thesis have an investment thesis, so that investment thesis is either around you know, whether it's robotic or cyber or crypto or ai or whatever the you know buzz Word is of the year. I t whatever it is, um, if you don't have that on your deck, if that's not the business you're doing, that fund is not going to be focused on you. And most fun have very specific investment thesis. On top of that, there is unconscious bias that goes on and again. VCs are not bad people. But the VC business is the business of making money. And that's okay, right? So And if I was a VC, I would be the same day in the sense that when you there are, there are there is pattern matching technology that actually exists algorithms that have been written that understand what makes up a successful founder. And that data is one historical data. Right? When you look at who has had a massive exit, who has worked at who has worked in engineering or in product at Unicorn Companies. Um, who was coming out of Stanford or M. I. T. C s department, right? Those all those things all factor into what we were getting funded. And unfortunately, the historical data has shown that those people are named, you know, Mark Steve, Sundar Larry, you know Ellen, they're not really wearing necessarily. So not only are we fighting against the fact that women aren't starting businesses in the Pacific deep tech sectors as fast as men are that be Cesaire funding. But in addition to that, there's this layer of unconscious bias or founder pedigree, as it's now called in the Valley, that is an absolute disadvantage to women founders. So it's really tough and then forgetting the VCs on the banking angle. You know, when you think about the banks, the banks, when you're ready for a loan, when your business has enough revenue profit traction for a bank loan. A bank loan is actually a great way to fund your business because you're not giving up equity. You're not deluding your cap table, which for lots of founders is important because eventually you wanna have an exit and you wanna own your company that you're selling right. So if you raise venture capital, that means you are selling equity or ownership in your company. And if you're one of the 1% who could do that successfully, great. But for the rest of us, we have thio, bootstrap it and really rely on customers as our funding and revenue as our funding, which, by the way, is the best way to get funding. And then when we're ready ah, small business loan from a great option. Money is so cheap right now, rates are low and but But the problem there is, you have to have a profitable, sustainable business, and then you're also putting up your house is collateral. So you know there's disadvantages and advantages to each part of the funding landscape. But I think just to wrap up and answer your question, I'm so knowledgeable about this because I rented myself and my first start up and it was excruciating. And so my co founders and I looked at each other. We said, There have There has to be a better way than this. There has to be a better way where we're giving women are entrepreneurs the opportunity to raise debt free capital Thio, build the prototypes, launched their new products, start their businesses without going into debt, and test the market to prove demand before they invest in supply. And that is the genius of what we're doing, frankly, that no one's thought about or that really no one is talking about is this idea of proving demand before you invest in supply. And so we've built financial services products on day technologies into our marketplace that allow entrepreneurs to do that.

For those of you who don't know, I find women. We are the go to funding marketplace for women entrepreneurs and all of the people who want to support them were two sided fintech marketplace. On one side of the market place you've got all the women owns SMB s small medium sized businesses in the world. There's 13 million here in the U. S and about 163 million globally. And on the other side of the market place, you've got all of the people who want to find them. So that's individual funders, enterprise level funders, family offices, VCs, etcetera and where the fintech in the middle that makes those transactions happen. Onda. We operate in 120 countries on De So to answer your question, the problem that we're working on life on women since the beginning, where a four year old company is that there's a complete lack of funding options for early stage women entrepreneurs. So only 1% of companies, regardless of the gender of the founder, will ever raise venture capital. So think about that Onley. 1% of companies will raise venture capital. So what are the other 99% of companies due to start up, whether they're men or women, cos they max out their credit cards or they take out loans and they go into debt funding businesses that may not work, funding their proof of concept. And we really believe that I fund women that nobody should go into debt funding their MVP or their prototype stage of their startup. And for eso if you get back. Thio sort of the V C pie. Last year in the United States, at least, women founders received less than 3% of all of the VC capital dollars allocated and women of color female founders of color received less than a percentage point. So we're solving a massive, systemic problem. And for women, I think that the problem goes just beyond lack of access, which is going to be a common theme. You're going to hear me talk about with this access. It's not just about lack of access to the capital itself. It's about the lack of access to coaches and mentors who can literally show you how to do it. Onda have been there and done it before, not fluffy advice. Not like Oh, this is so glamorous. And I woke up like that because that's not how it is entrepreneur page terribly, and it's very gritty, and you have to really be so passionate about what you're building.So for women, the lack of access is not just about the lack of access to capital. It's about the lack of access to coaches and mentors to literally show you how to do it and the lack of access to connections to follow on Capitol to collaborators to November. So that's the problem we're solving. And we built a holistic solution to solve it, which encompasses capital coaching and connections, because all of those things will drive exponentially more something and that our business outcomes for women owned SMB s, which is really what we're all about. We want to create and help support women who are starting sustainable, profitable long term businesses.

first few weeks. Okay, so we were sunsetting, which is a very nice word way of saying we were shutting down our first start up because it failed. And at the same time that we were shutting down, um, we we did a crowdfunding campaign as a Hail Mary to make payroll and save the company. So it was in this, like, it's actually interesting you ask. So this this month, time period of my first startup failing and trying to make payroll to save it, we did a crowdfunding campaign. We raised $30,000 in cash in a month. And in that moment I said to myself, Wait a second. Why isn't everybody telling entrepreneurs to do this as their first stop on their funding journey again to prove demand before they invest in supply? So when we raise that cash, I thought, Well, I could put this money I could throw good money after bad, which would be silly, or Aiken Sunset, the 1st 1st company literally better down and take that cash and build a really scrappy M V p of a crowdfunding platform for women because one did not exist, and a lot of people asked like why the women need their own crowdfunding platform? Why couldn't they just go to Kickstarter? There's lots of reasons for it, and here they are eso at the time when we built our M V P crowdfunding platform, which is only warm product we have in our funding marketplace. Out of many, um, there was Kickstarter and Indiegogo for businesses essentially and patryan. For YouTube creators, 94% of the highest grossing crowdfunding campaigns are by mail creators in gaming, consumer tech and film. There was absolutely no space for women. Sat Women run SAS companies. Business services Take me to be a technique to see, for that matter, farm to table restaurants. I mean, we so and there was no space to find women to fund, right? If you can't find it, you can't fund it. So I would go to these other platforms and look for woman entrepreneur, female founder, and we just couldn't search based on gender. So there was literally no place to go. So we built it on, and that was our first month was we literally bought our u. R L from Go Daddy from $2.99 which was both thrilling and horrifying, that I find women dot com was available for $2.99 but we bought it. We built an M V P, and it's been a rocket ship since then.