Venturing Women – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Nadine Mezher was eager to spearhead change in habits and attitudes to handling money in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa). She wanted to democratise access to investing and make it available to not only the ultra rich. Nadine co-founded Sarwa, a platform for investment and personal finance. In 2022, Forbes recognised Nadine among 20 women behind Middle Eastern tech brands. A fashion professional and owner of her own design house in the past, Nadine unpacks the concept of growth mindset in business and private life.

Topics we discuss:

• Anticipating shifts in consumer behaviour early and being ahead of the curve
• Converting setbacks and struggles into fuel for growth
• The art and science of branding and performance marketing: what really makes customers love your product
• Team management: Pivoting the career trajectory of your people to unlock their potential
• Adaptability that comes from facing hardships like political instability or war

About Nadine Mezher (guest):

Nadine co-founded Sarwa, a one-stop platform for investment and personal finance, after years of consultancy and executive roles in growth strategies for government entities as well as multi-national corporates. She comes from a multi-disciplinary background with over 18 years of experience in growth strategies across industries and geographies. Nadine is an award-winning regular speaker on global platforms on topics of business ownership and hacking growth, Fintech, and women in the workforce. Nadine is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

About Darya Kamkalova (host):

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:
https://www.venturingwomen.org/

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Disclaimer:
No information in this podcast episode should be considered as an investment advice.

How do you launch an innovative business in uncharted territories? Alina Bassi realised she could apply principles of coffee waste management to recycle textiles into… plastics. A chemical engineer, she launched Kleiderly in a foreign country, with no language skills, and out of network. She masterfully addresses challenges of two industries simultaneously: textile waste management and plastics manufacturing.

Main topics:

• Is it a good idea to donate used clothes?
• Think like an engineer: use materials in an unconventional sense
• The most beneficial thing to do for an out-of-natural-habitat founder
• From a fear of failure to ‘Wow, I could do that. So what else can I do?’
• What if you’re pitching and your potential investor is yawning?

About Alina Bassi (guest):

Alina Bassi is a chemical engineer turned impact entrepreneur, with a passion for creating a more sustainable and equitable future. After 7 years in the biofuels and waste recycling space, she co-founded Kleiderly, a textile recycling startup. She is an impact investor and the co-founder of Founderland - a non-profit that supports women of colour to raise investment. She was on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2020, and has been featured in Vogue, Wired, and Germany’s Shark Tank. She is an Obama Leader, TEDx speaker and advisor to over 50+ women-led startups.

About Darya Kamkalova (host):

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:
https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:
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Imagine you are invited to give a talk at Stanford about your work as an investor. Excited, you board a plane to cross the Atlantic. And a conversation with a seat neighbour on that flight changes your whole life trajectory. You are now adamant about building your own business.

That’s exactly what happened to Penny Schiffer, CEO & Co-Founder of Raized.ai. After 10 years in venture capital, Penny decided to launch a startup to make this industry more intelligent. A psychology major, she had to ‘go back to the roots’ and re-discover her technical background.

Topics we cover:

• What if your employees tell you, ‘You’ll never understand how it works, don’t even try?’
• If you’re a founder, what should you know about how investors and algorithms assess your startup?
• What should you do or avoid doing to increase your chances for a successful fundraising round?
• Will machines replace humans in the investing process?
• And finally, how algorithms can increase chances for underrepresented founders?

About Penny Schiffer:

Penny is on a mission to transform startup investment with artificial intelligence, to make it more efficient and fair, and generate higher returns. Before Penny launched Raized.ai, she worked in corporate innovation and as a strategy consultant at Accenture. Penny got into programming at the age of ten but only made the step into the tech industry later. She was awarded “Seed 10 - the Best of Europe's Female Early-Stage Investors” by Business Insider in 2022. Penny is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

If you launch your own business, just forget about having a life. It’s only work, no play. And your friends and family will need to accept it. This notion is particularly popular in the startup world but how much truth is in it?

We asked Jenny Holmström, CEO and Co-Founder of Coupleness, an app helping couples to develop healthy habits for happy relationships.

Jenny and Darya examine

• why maintaining healthy relationships is a key success factor for entrepreneurs,
• how couples can navigate the challenges of early-stage venture building: what can go wrong and how to prevent such pitfalls,
• and Jenny’s own story of prioritising work to the detriment of her family life which brought her to building Coupleness.

About Jenny Holmström:

Jenny has worked for the United Nations as well as large corporations, and co-founded a child rights organization. She is an award-winning communicator, always striving to make a positive social impact. Coupleness is an app for couples with a mission to make it easy and mainstream to invest in your relationship.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:
https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:
Instagram - LinkedIn

Her first job was as a saxophone player. Later, she worked on producing Star Wars and Fast & Furious in the Abu Dhabi desert - and absolutely hated it. Now an established IT professional, Karen Burns is the CEO & Co-Founder at Fyma, a computer vision company enabling data-driven urban planning.

Karen knows best what change is, on personal and professional levels. She and her co-founder launched Fyma right before the pandemic hit, only to see cities deserted.

We discuss how change starts deep inside us, why it is important to embrace and steer it and how to make decisions based on limited information. Finally, we examine how data and data-powered software will change urban space and our lives as urban dwellers.

If you liked this episode, share it with at least one friend!

About Karen K. Burns:

Karen is the Co-Founder and CEO at Fyma, a computer vision SaaS platform that turns cameras into predictive sensors.

She has 16+ years prior experience in IT and business development roles and she has lived and worked in the UK, South Africa and the Middle East, both in private and public sector organisations in management positions. Karen is based in Estonia.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:

https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:

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9 out of 10 startups die, and the first years of any startup existence are the most challenging to navigate. This is where business angels can offer invaluable support to founders along with so much needed capital.

Rita Vilas-Boas is a marketing professional, entrepreneur and angel investor focusing on consumer-centric startups. She is particularly interested in impact and women-led startups.  In the last 20 years, she held top-tier roles at major global brands like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola as well as family businesses. Rita shares a moving story of fear, flight and growth that brought her to work and live in 7 countries across 3 continents. 

Topics that we cover in this episode:

• Who are angel investors? Which role do they play?
• How do you find an angel?
• How can founders and business angels build a mutually beneficial relationship? Which pitfalls should they avoid?

Related episodes:
Angel investment
#3: Debunking the elitist image of startup investment – Svenja Lassen
Venture Capital
#17: Who should or should not raise venture capital? And how? - Gesa Miczaika

More about Rita Vilas-Boas:

Rita is Limited Partner founder at Shilling - community-driven venture capital fund. She is also the founding member of the first Classic Liberal Party In Portugal. Born and raised in Porto, Portugal, Rita holds a bachelor degree in biotechnology and a post-graduation degree in bioethics. Rita is based in Lisbon, Portugal.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:
https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:
Instagram - LinkedIn

What do you do if after 10 years of a successful corporate career, you feel the need for a big change? Can you make a career pivot, start in a new area and still be credible? Your track record may have helped you to get that new job or a promotion. And the same track record may hold you back from making a leap of faith into building your own business or starting anything new.

Vanessa Westphal is COO and Co-Founder of Choosy, a personalised meal planning and grocery shopping assistant that makes forming healthy and sustainable eating habits effortless.

After 10 years at Siemens, Vanessa decided to dedicate herself to her true passion: nutrition. We talk about how new habits and tools can support the transition from an employee to a founder and how important it is to tame your brain. Vanessa also shares her views on how technology will change the way we eat.

About Vanessa Westphal:

Vanessa joined Siemens 10 years ago as an electrical engineer to then switch to management consulting and lead a corporate incubator. She got excited about building something new from scratch and then seeing other people use it and benefit from it. With Choosy, Vanessa tackles one of our biggest and yet most underestimated challenges we face as humans: How we decide what we eat.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:

https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:

Instagram - LinkedIn

How do you build an indoor farming company to produce delicious salads at scale and make the food system more sustainable? You may need to start with a greenhouse on top of a shipping container as an MVP. Then raise >100mln of euros of external funding. But most importantly, you’ll need to create a company culture based on values that aren't just some words on your website.

Kate Hofman is Founder and Brand Director of GrowUp Farms, an indoor farming company helping to build a more sustainable food system in the UK.

Kate and I talk about being a leader worth working for, hiring and building teams, and walking away from the initial company identity. She also shares her experiences of pitching to investors while pregnant and building a business while raising a child.

More about Kate Hofman:
GrowUp Farms was founded in 2013. Kate is passionate about making delicious and sustainable food more affordable and about business as a force for social and environmental change. She's a fellow of Barclays Unreasonable Impact and sits on the WWF Farming Advisory Board. She lives in London, UK with her family, their dog and 11 stick insects.

About Darya Kamkalova (host):

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is committed to narrowing the gender investment gap for female founders and diverse teams. Darya is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:

https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:

Instagram - LinkedIn

Less than 0.5% of venture capital goes to women of colour founders. Is it a pipeline problem rooted in a lack of such founders? Perhaps, women of colour simply do not dare to build high-growth businesses?

Stephanie von Behr, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Founderland, debunks these myths. She is focused on increasing visibility, creating community, and getting more women of colour founders funded.

We talk about what allyship truly means and why it matters, how disadvantages can become opportunities and what it takes to create a robust and flourishing community. Stephanie tells the story of building Founderland with simple tools like surveys and match-making keeping founders’ needs at the heart of every step and decision.

About Stephanie von Behr:

Stephanie has been working with startups for over a decade building community, as a 3x founder, operator, consultant, and mentor. As the Managing Director of Founderland, she is on a mission to disrupt the status quo and challenge systems of power across the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Founderland is an NGO that supports women founders based in Europe who’ve faced obstacles tied to their ethnicity/race in their business journeys. Founderland brings founders, allies and investors together to get more diverse, sustainable and scalable businesses funded.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:

https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:

Instagram - LinkedIn

Founders and investors alike should be excellent signal processors. But what if you are navigating an environment that your ‘sensors’ are not attuned to? You can adjust those sensors and blaze a trail. You can transform your drawbacks into unfair competitive advantages.

A woman, a foreigner, and an engineer, Maria Dramalioti-Taylor shares her story of breaking into the venture capital industry. Maria is the founding partner of Beacon Capital, a London venture capital firm.

About Maria Dramalioti-Taylor:

Maria has led numerous investment rounds syndicating with angels, micro funds and large VCs across Europe and the US creating $900m+ in enterprise value. As an investor, she works with founders to build global, category-defining businesses. She is on the board of several portfolio companies and serves on the Chairs in Emerging Technologies Committee and the Enterprise Committee of The Royal Academy of Engineering.

About Darya Kamkalova (host):

Darya is a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker. She is based in Berlin, Germany.

Venturing Women website:

https://www.venturingwomen.org/

Follow us on social media:

Instagram - LinkedIn