Victoria Pettibone
Venture consistently invests less than 2 percent of capital into women-led companies. To expect different results when it comes to driving capital toward women-led and underrepresented founders, one must do venture differently. Our sourcing and screening process, the Astia Expert Sift, is how we flip standard, accepted venture practice on its head. We are a different kind of VC doing venture in a different kind of way.
The first ‘non-traditional’ aspect of our process is that we do not hold a pitch meeting with the founder anywhere near the top of our funnel. That first meeting is where so much gut decision-making and bias occurs. Instead, companies go through our data-driven assessment process and only once they are through do we meet with the entrepreneur.
On the most basic level, one can think of the Astia Expert Sift™ as crowd-sourced decision-making, but a highly expert, highly curated crowd that spans geographies and backgrounds and is made up of half men and half women. This curated crowd is the Astia Advisors: individuals who, at one point or another over our twenty-four-year history, have opted into our community. They are industry experts, operators, academics and investors, and they volunteer their time because of deep alignment with our mission; they, too, want to see the investment landscape made more level for women founders of all backgrounds.
"Because we take a different approach, Astia has become the global pioneer investing in innovative companies led by women"
Every company that applies is reviewed and mechanisms are put into place along the way to mitigate bias- for example, we purposefully do not have the deck reviewed initially but instead base the first screening on a written summary of the business. Decks introduce bias in a number of ways, while a two-page document focuses the reviewer on the specifics of the business itself. As another example, our reviewers are asked to respond to the same questions, regardless of company, reducing question bias (as reported in the 2017 Harvard Business Review). By focusing our assessment on the nuts and bolts of the business and not gut, FOMO, or pattern recognition, the highest-performing companies rise to the top. At each stage, we algorithmically determine if the company has passed based on the aggregated responses from the advisors. The company receives all the feedback verbatim, providing them with rare and valuable insight into the decision-making process.
The entire process is automated, enabling us to easily review over a thousand applications each year, representing more than $2Bn worth of women-led investment opportunities a year. Clearly, there is no pipeline problem when it comes to women-led companies!
Our results speak for themselves. From the earliest days, when we were showcasing the companies at the end of the funnel to the venture community, through to today as a Venture Fund investor ourselves, the Sift has consistently brought high performing companies to the fore.
Because we take a different approach, Astia has become the global pioneer investing in innovative companies led by women. And while the venture landscape continues to invest deplorably small amounts of capital into women led companies, our rigorous, bias-mitigating, mathematical process ensures we are investing 100 percent of our capital into top performing, women-led companies. We look forward to the market following suit!
