Planting the ‘Golden Seeds’ of investment and entrepreneurship
In 2004, Stephanie Newby – the Australian-born investor, venture capitalist and Greenwich resident – founded Golden Seeds to mobilize a group of investors to fund women entrepreneurs at scale, the first such network to do so.
At that time, early-stage companies led by women were just 3% of funded start-ups. Today, “more than a third of angel-funded start-ups are led by women,” said Susan M. King, a Westchester County and New York City resident who is one of Golden Seeds’ managing directors, as its roughly 300 active members worldwide are sometimes called.
But it’s not just women’s entrepreneurship that has grown, she added. So has female investment. Twenty years ago, just 5% of angel investors were women. Today, women are 47% of the angel investors in the United States.
At a time when women entrepreneurs are still nonetheless struggling, — see also story on Page 13 — this speaks not only to how far women have come in business but to the role that Golden Seeds, the largest angel network devoted solely to women-led enterprises, has played in their advancement. The organization has invested more than $180 million in 250-plus companies, which have gone on to raise an additional $2 billion. One of those, EliseAI, has crossed the $1 billion valuation mark. “That’s huge,” King said.
In celebrating its 20th anniversary, Golden Seeds is taking a kind of victory lap that shows it is by no means resting on its laurels – hosting events at its eight chapters around the country. They include New Jersey, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Silicon Valley. With New York as the flagship, it made sense to have an event in our area, as Golden Seeds did Sept. 10 in Larchmont, drawing 35 people from Westchester and Fairfield counties. (The New York chapter has 34 members from Westchester and southern Connecticut.)
Among the participants were Golden Seeds co-CEOs Jo Ann Corkran and Loretta McCarthy, who introduced the event; Ulya Khan, founder of the Arizona chapter and panel moderator; and panelists Alison J. Molloy, managing director of investments at New Haven-based Connecticut Innovations and founder of Design2Launch – the first successful exit in Golden Seeds’ portfolio in 2008; and Stephanie Downs, co-founder and CEO of Uncaged Innovations, a biomaterials start-up creating alternatives to bovine and exotic leather and a more recent Golden Seeds investment.
Other attendees included Deborah Novick, director of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Westchester County Office of Economic Development, as well as King, who knows all about the importance of such events in planting the seeds of networking and financial growth. A cum laude graduate of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, she spent most of her career on Wall Street – 13 years as an investment banker and more than 25 as an asset manager. As an active investor in early-stage companies directly and with Golden Seeds, she has invested in more than a dozen biotech, health-care and wellness businesses in the United States and Canada. To her, Golden Seeds is about building success in two ways. It champions gender diversity, with gender-diverse management yielding the best results, according to studies by BlackRock, the Boston Consulting Group, Calvert Impact Capital, the Center for Venture Research, the Impact Group and McKinsey & Co., King said. But it is also a way for women — who control more than half of the personal wealth in the United States (an estimated $22 trillion), and are expected to control two-thirds of it through earnings and inheritance by 2030 – to increase that wealth through angel investment.
That said, 15% of Golden Seeds’ members are men.
Golden Seeds will have an invitation-only event Nov. 13 in New York City. If you are an investor or an entrepreneur interested in working with Golden Seeds, you can find more information by clicking here.
