How Designer Rebecca Minkoff And A Former Girlboss Exec Are Helping Future Female Leaders Thrive

Designer Rebecca Minkoff built her fashion empire atop the launch of her first handbag (the Morning After Bag, or M.A.B) in 2005. In 2009, she expanded into ready-to-wear clothing, followed by jewelry, fragrance, and home goods.

Today, Minkoff runs a large, successful business, but she’s not content to rest on her laurels. She wants many more like hers.

That’s why in 2018, Minkoff launched The Female Founder Collective, and she quickly brought on a cofounder—startup advisor, angel investor, and former Girlboss executive Alison Wyatt. Together, they have built a valuable and continually evolving resource for female founders, who run more successful businesses than their male counterparts, but somehow get less that 2% of venture capital funding.

Minkoff and Wyatt want to combat that and so many other disparities by helping women entrepreneurs build a network and support system. With everything they do, the duo wants to provide women with tools to fuel their own success as well as the broader economy’s (research shows that women with at least one female founder perform 63% better than those with male founders).

To that end, they also launched The North, a one-on-one mentoring program, and The 10th House, a paid membership program, both under FFC. Most recently, they hosted Female Founder’s Day in Los Angeles, an annual community event timed to Women’s History Month that took place on March 23.

I connected with Minkoff and Wyatt to hear more about the event, the future of the collective, and how helping women founders succeed can make the future better for everyone.

What inspired you to create the Female Founder Collective?

Rebecca Minkoff: “We met many years ago on a panel and saw each other at different events. We reconnected through HeyMama when Ali reached out a few months after I started FFC. I had wanted to start a community and get founders the tools and learnings they so badly needed. Ali knew immediately how to bring this to life and how to turn it into a real thing and joined as my co-founder shortly thereafter.”

Alison Wyatt: “I had been at Girlboss and a slew of other start-ups. At Girlboss especially, I had found that the biggest proportion of our audience was women starting businesses either because they had reached the glass ceiling and knew their potential, or they wanted to solve female-specific problems to change the future for women everywhere. Simultaneously, I was investing in and advising female-founded companies. I had seen that their problems were all similar and felt if they would only connect with one another, they could, akin to Waze, help each other more easily navigate roadblocks. I reached out to Rebecca when she launched FFC, and away we went.”

How was the event? Did you achieve what you had hoped to? What were some highlights?

AW: “Female Founder’s Day is the culmination of all that we do on a day-to-day basis, in our private community as well as publicly. We know that founders have VERY limited time, so we wanted to create a day packed with ROI. The day included inspirational advice from founders who have been through the journey and done it all in the form of panels, but the bulk of the day is made up of hands-on workshops, teaching relevant skills that founders can implement into their business the moment they come back to their desks.

This year was also special in that we had mini sessions with our roster of NORTH advisors, where founders can ask for real-time help. And finally, there was always a lot of networking with fellow founders. It’s amazing to watch attendees become part of this extraordinary community so that they no longer have to be lonely in their process!”

How can founders join the collective, and how do they benefit from membership?

AW: “The 10th House is our private membership community where we super-serve paid members with resources to grow their businesses. From access to weekly expert programming for skill-building, up to 10 meet-ups IRL per month in different markets, a digital platform to ask questions for real-time advice or resource needs, as well as a robust resource directory and member directory, the goal here is to tap into collective knowledge to help founders looking to grow. Our Spring Cohort applications are now open! There are a limited number of spots left, you can fill out your application here.”

What effect did the Girlboss era have on female founders?

RM: “I think that the Girlboss era allowed for the first time, a very public conversation to take place about the inequity in the workplace and pay gap, but it then went sour as the media chose to focus on the failures of women in leadership and has since become a bad name. In a way it has sadly made it harder to navigate being a female founder in recent times.”

AW: “This is, at its core, very personal to me. As someone who helped to build Girlboss alongside Sophia (Amoruso), I knew the intention behind it: to empower women to choose their own version of success, no matter what that looked like. And while the term was taken very literally and took on a life of its own, the root of it I think started a very important dialogue that continues today.

So while I think the bad part is that you now have these founders that are put in the spotlight, and in a very real and very big way for their failures as Rebecca mentioned, you also have women who are saying no to the confines of the corporate world, and stepping into their passion, and their power by starting their own businesses and creating their own rules around how they work and live. And that is the very process that FFC wants to enable, and I believe that that is the next step on the ‘Girlboss’ journey. We are here to equip these women with everything that they need to win in that new and evolving paradigm.”

The amount of VC funding for women has decreased. What’s the best way to get things going in the opposite direction?

AW: “This is a very layered topic, so it’s also a complex solution. It’s the exact problem we are looking to solve. The challenge is, VCs, given the macro environment, are focusing on their current portfolios and later stage investments in order to help ‘keep them alive.’

Because these are pre-existing investments, a lot of them are later stage and businesses being started by women are stuck at the start line. But what is not as prevalent in the data that investors need to realize is that investing in women is not ESG (environmental, social, and governance)-it’s actually good business.

The reality is that the trend that caused us to start the FFC was amplified by the pandemic. Since 2020, women have become the leading drivers of business creation in the U.S. In 2020 and 2021, women accounted for 49 percent of new business launches, according to a study by Gusto, compared to 42 percent for men in 2021. But it’s not only important to illustrate volume and market size, but performance, too.

Research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) that found startups led by women were the better bet, returning 78 cents for every dollar invested versus 31 cents for those founded by men. First Round surveyed their companies founded by men and women and found that their companies that had at least one female founder did on average 63% better than those with a male founder.

So the way that we reverse this trend is:

1. Get more women to invest and be in positions of decisions for funds.
2. Help female founders broaden their network of both investors and FOUNDERS.
3. Educate women on the language of VC, benchmarks VCs are seeking, positioning and pitch anatomy.
4. Educate investors about the real stats and the fact that it’s actually more risky NOT to invest in women-led businesses.”

Research has found that after being funded by a female only VC firm, it’s harder for women entrepreneurs to land a second round. What’s the best way to combat that effect?

AW: “I think there are multiple things. Studies on this suggest that this is a ‘gender bias’ effect at work. So I think if you only have female investors on your cap table (first off, bravo!) but you need to diversify your network as with anything else. So as a founder I would suggest working from a position of strength and networking. Just post your raise with all different types of investors and continuously communicate any wins or milestones but with a growing database of potential investors for your next round.

And then, fair or unfair, communicate in their language. Lead with numbers, be bold and confident, and lead with what you’re going to achieve in the long term. So often what ends up happening is that female founders are incredibly realistic with their numbers, to the point that they often under-sell their abilities. While I don’t recommend inflating your numbers, there is plenty of room to dream big for founders where they tend to hold back. And remember, this is something that investors should feel lucky to be a part of, and it’s important to bring that energy into the conversation.”

What’s next for the collective? Any future events our plans you’d like to shout out?

RM: “We want to ensure that every female founder who often starts their business with a passion has the tools and opportunities to succeed. This is done through relationships, education and access to capital. We want to grow FFC internationally and continue to ensure that FFC reaches these goals.”

AW: “There will be new funding vehicles created, more female funders entering the mix (you’re seeing this already!), and more transactional relationships created to help one another grow. We want to get into the funding and/or fintech space, and we plan to expand our NORTH marketplace to provide access to expert advice in a really meaningful way.”