THE NEW FACE OF FUNDING
ALL GREAT REVOLUTIONS begin with alcohol. That seems to be the consensus at 9 in the morning on a sunny Friday in August, when 100 women board Dandeana, a three-level, 110-foot yacht about to set sail from Los Angeles’s Marina del Rey. Muffins and fruit are mostly ignored as a bartender pours mimosas for the boat’s guests, a diverse collection of women that includes attorneys, business coaches, a nurse, a documentary filmmaker, and a grandmother-granddaughter team. In sunglasses and mostly low heels (this is a boat, after all), these women will spend the next three hours plotting to overthrow the boys’ club that rules the Silicon Valley venture capital scene.
This particular coup is being hosted by Vicki Saunders, a ridiculously energetic five-time entrepreneur with a blond bob and oversize black glasses, who is also the founder of SheEO. SheEO is a startup that wants to use low-interest debt to fund the growth of women-led companies. Saunders’s premise is that masses of women could become the major source of funding for the next generation of female entrepreneurs. Her math works like this: If 1,000 women in a city each invest $1,000, that’s $1 million available for lending to 10 female-run companies. Ideally, she’ll recruit women from 1,000 cities, participants will re-up every year, and they’ll put the money back in as the loans are repaid. Saunders’s big-picture calculation: a billion dollars going to 10,000 female entrepreneurs every year, in perpetuity.
The mimosa-sipping guests are intrigued. Chelsea Galicia,
