Training Programs Could Help Women Entrepreneurs Navigate Investor Q&A and Access Venture Capital
3 min read · Feb 2025
Farrell (2022)
“Founders who were able to respond to negative questions with positive answers were able to win millions more in funding over the life of the venture.”
Summary
This report addresses the challenges women entrepreneurs face in securing venture capital (VC) with a focus on the gender bias that manifests in the form of tougher, more negative questioning directed at women founders compared to men. The report analyzes Investoready, a program designed to equip women with the skills to navigate these questions through instruction, workshops, and coaching. A key component of the program is The Console, an online simulation tool where participants practice responding to investor questions and receive immediate, unbiased feedback on their answers. While the training program helps women reframe negative questions into aspirational answers, it shifts the responsibility onto women to navigate biases rather than address the systemic issues within the VC industry. Moving forward, efforts should focus on both empowering women and transforming discriminatory practices in the VC ecosystem.
Method
This qualitative research used workshops, small group meetups, and an online tool, The Console, to collect over ten weeks involving 47 women entrepreneurs across Canada. The focus was on observing participants' responses to investor questions and providing immediate feedback through The Console to improve their pitching skills and ability to navigate VC conversations.
Key Findings
Women founders gain value from targeted support on venture start-up processes.
Many women entrepreneurs expressed uncertainty about how to apply key concepts, in a way that aligns with their specific business and effectively engages VC investors.
Women need to assert control over the direction of Q&A sessions.
Women entrepreneurs are often asked obstacle or preventative questions, which leads them to provide defensive responses that negatively impact their ventures when engaging with investors. Successful founders should steer Q&A sessions toward aspirational topics to counter negative bias and frame responses more strategically.
Women entrepreneurs seek guidance on typical investor questions and effective responses.
The uncertainty of Q&A sessions creates significant anxiety for women entrepreneurs.
Providing typical questions and strong responses helps build confidence and enhance performance.
The Investoready Console offers a private, online platform where women entrepreneurs can practice converting investor questions from obstacle-focused to aspiration-driven responses, with detailed feedback on language, timing, and conversion effectiveness.
Takeaways
The Investoready program aims to equip women entrepreneurs with essential skills to navigate venture capital (VC) Q&A sessions more effectively. While this training is valuable, improving women’s access to VC funding requires both training women to anticipate gender biases, and helping investors recognize and address these biases.
The Investoready program provides valuable support for women entrepreneurs and it presents some challenges. The program's emphasis on converting "obstacle" questions into "aspiration" answers can be difficult to implement, especially in high-stress, real-world situations. Though role-playing exercises and automated feedback could solve some problems, they may not sufficiently replicate the complexities of live investor interactions. Moreover, the focus on aspirational narratives could inadvertently pressure women to adopt a specific type of response, potentially limiting their authentic communication and unique perspectives.
While training women to navigate biased questioning is useful, it is also important to challenge the biases within the VC ecosystem. Incorporating unconscious bias training for investors, diversifying perspectives in investment decisions, and promoting transparency in funding criteria are crucial steps forward. By focusing on both empowering women and transforming the systemic barriers, a more equitable and supportive environment for women entrepreneurs is possible.
References
Farrell, Ellen. 2022. “The Venture Capital Conundrum: Creating Investoready’s Console.” Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. https://wekh.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-Venture-Capital-Conundrum.pdf.
About WIN-VC Canada:
New Power Labs is the research lead of the Women and Nonbinary (W) Impact (I) Network (N) for Venture Capital (VC), a national collaborative of organizations working to provide services, programming, events, and dedicated resources to women and non-binary entrepreneurs and gender lens investors across Canada who are working towards becoming investment ready and increasing the pool of investors driven to invest in these ventures.
This research is part of WIN-VC Canada, supported by the Government of Canada. WIN-VC acknowledges the support of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED). ISED has awarded funding for WIN-VC that will make the venture capital environment more inclusive for women by transforming traditional investment processes, processes and knowledge into respectful and meaningful approaches that value equity and impact with a focus on diverse women and non-binary entrepreneurs and SMEs including Black communities, Indigenous peoples, racialized populations, persons with a disability, 2SLGBTQ2+ and new Canadians.
