3 Reasons To Always Have A Woman At The Table
Venture capital is, at its heart, a business based on trust, collaboration and partnership. When meeting new entrepreneurs, driving funding and even when having a collaborative day in the office, it’s crucial to have people by your side who can be a sounding board and counterbalance.
At Fuel Venture Capital, I’m vastly fortunate to work alongside a great team, especially our leadership team—half of which here in our Miami headquarters are female. Leading that charge is my managing partner and our chief investment officer, Maggie Vo. Her talent for guiding our portfolio companies through the complicated waters of navigating a new business through the startup process is simply unmatched. She is the personification of professionalism with an uncanny knack for knowing just what our portfolio companies need to elevate to the next level.
We drive each other to find the next amazing startup, find the necessary funding and get that founder up and running. At Fuel, that’s what we do, every day, and we do it surrounded by and led by women.
Maggie brings a unique international perspective, growing up in Vietnam in a tremendously different culture and then choosing to lay her path in America in such a way that she would always be visible. That boldness is one of the reasons we work so well together. Neither of us is afraid to speak our minds, while seeing things from different angles. But it’s not always that you enter a boardroom with a female voice. It’s something I and Fuel Venture Capital not only provide, but rely on. If you had another “me” at the table, it just wouldn’t work.
The way we complement each other has allowed us to grow Fuel over the last five years from zero in startup capital to a continuously burgeoning firm with $400 million in assets spread across three funds, with deployments to over 34 portfolio companies. I certainly can’t predict what Fuel would look like if Maggie hadn’t joined me, but I’m not sure we’d be where we are right now. Here are three reasons why it’s important that your company has female leadership at the top:
- A Different Voice
- A Different Perspective
- A Chance For Mentorship