Kauffman Foundation announces $600,000 renewed investment in Astia

Kauffman Foundation Extends Grant to Astia to Accelerate the Growth of Women-led Firms

$600,000 grant to drive innovation to market through the scaling of women-led high-growth companies

(SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. and KANSAS CITY, Mo.) June 12, 2012 – While the number of women-led firms continues to grow, the size of those firms does not. Yet those who are successful at accessing networks and capital perform on par with their male counterparts. In an ongoing commitment to women high-growth entrepreneurs, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced a two-year extension of its previous grant to Astia, an organization dedicated to the success of women-led high-growth startups.

“Kauffman’s previous grant substantially impacted Astia’s programs and ability to continue its exceptional success rate for its companies, so we are doubling down on our commitment to the organization and its methodology,” said Lesa Mitchell, Kauffman’s vice president of advancing innovation. “Research shows that women are under-represented in networks that provide external equity financing and strategic business relationships. Our collaboration with Astia ensures that women gain access to the rich networks that deliver expertise, customers, capital and new markets.”

According to Kauffman data in A Rising Tide, a recently published book on financing of women-led companies, men raised about 80 percent more capital in their companies’ first year of operation than women did. Women rely more on internal financing to start their firms and subsequently lead smaller firms overall. The book reveals “that although women-owned firms have begun to make an impact in terms of numbers, they are still in the early stages of making an economic impact on a larger scale.” The authors conclude that for these firms to achieve their full potential, the women founders need access to networks.

Since the first Kauffman grant was awarded in 2010, Astia has provided access to high-growth expertise and networks to 198 companies, 168 of which used the network to increase their access to outside capital. The Astia community is comprised of more than 1,500 men and women, including more than 300 investors and more than 300 current and former CEOs, dedicated to propelling women-led businesses into high-growth.

“Research shows that successful high-growth companies hit an inflection point that results in hyper growth. The Astia community is a unique and invaluable resource that ensures that the Astia companies successfully navigate to this hyper growth,” said Sharon Vosmek, CEO, Astia. “Astia is profoundly appreciative of this renewed endorsement and strategic commitment from Kauffman to help extend the impact of the community that is the rocket fuel behind the growth of these tech and life science companies. True to Ewing Marion Kauffman’s original vision for the Foundation, the funding will drive innovation to market.”

The Astia program offers peer-to-peer, industry and investor connections. Funding from the extended grant will be used to implement the following enhanced offerings. Annual growth metrics will measure the impact to the companies.

Astia Access – For startups that aspire to high growth and whose founders seek expert-level feedback. Access members receive timely, targeted and unfiltered feedback as well as access to online tools and the Astia community.

Astia Global Entrepreneur Program – For entrepreneurs leading emerging companies who are poised to take advantage of Astia's global community. Chosen by the community via in-person screening, companies participate in the Astia Global Entrepreneur Program that includes a week-long boot camp followed by three months with a team of Astia Advisors. Advisor teams drive to mission-critical business milestones and are comprised of an investor, a c-level entrepreneur and two additional industry leaders.

Astia Portfolio – Launching the second half of this year, this program is for breakout companies on the fast track to success. By invitation-only, these companies from around the world will present to and be selected by industry leaders.

About the Kauffman Foundation
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation that works to harness the power of entrepreneurship and innovation to grow economies and improve human welfare. Through its research and other initiatives, the Kauffman Foundation aims to open young people's eyes to the possibility of entrepreneurship, promote entrepreneurship education, raise awareness of entrepreneurship-friendly policies, and find alternative pathways for the commercialization of new knowledge and technologies. In addition, the Foundation focuses on initiatives in the Kansas City region to advance students’ math and science skills, and improve the educational achievement of urban students, including the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a college preparatory charter school for middle and high school students. Founded by late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman, the Foundation is based in Kansas City, Mo. and has approximately $2 billion in assets. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org, and follow the Foundation on www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.

About Astia
Astia is a global not-for-profit organization with a distinct focus and mission – to propel women’s full participation as entrepreneurs and leaders in high-growth businesses, fueling innovation and driving economic growth. Guided by a proven philosophy that gender diversity is an essential element of innovation, Astia works with startups around the world as they access capital, grow their businesses, and hone the leadership skills of their founding teams.

The Astia model of engaging a community of experts to the benefit of the select startups it serves has resulted in an exceptional success rate: since 2003, over 60 percent of companies that have participated in the Astia Investor Forums have secured funding or achieved an exit within one year of presenting, totalling more than $1 billion raised and 25 exits, including two IPOs. Headquartered in San Francisco, Astia delivers programs for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, New York, London and India.

Astia is generously supported by the following sponsors: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, The Three Guineas Fund, Fenwick & West, SNR Denton, Silicon Valley Bank, Moss Adams, Microsoft, SAP, Lowenstein Sandler, Cisco, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, AOL, Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon Wealth Management, The Althea Foundation, Gust, SalesForce, Citrin Cooperman, ideaSpace, Prolog Ventures, Golden Seeds, Illuminate Ventures, Alloy Ventures, Opus Capital, AOL Ventures, SAP Ventures, Asset Management, StarVest Partners as well as the generous support of individual donors. For more information, visit www.astia.org and follow the organization on LinkedIn and Facebook and follow us on twitter: @astiaglobal

# # #
Media Contacts:
Rose Levy, rose@goldinsolutions.com, Goldin Solutions
Barbara Pruitt, Kauffman Foundation, 816-932-1288, bpruitt@kauffman.org
Sharon Vosmek, Astia, 415-421-5500 x6, sharon@astia.org

Carl Schramm OpEd: The Importance of Women Entrepreneurs

This is a translated OpEd by Carl Schramm, CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation published in the Turkish, Radikal, October 20, 2011


The Tenacity and Networking It Takes


The former Canadian foreign minister Pierre Pettigrew was possibly the first to state that the era of globalization would count women among its winners. And indeed, women have made great strides, virtually all over the world, as far as their labor force participation and their level of education are concerned.

According to the World Bank, women accounted for 40.1% of the global labor force in 2009. Women now account for the majority of university students in countries including Malaysia, Libya, Venezuela and Iran.

And yet, for all these successes, there is one arena where the progress of women is still very insufficient, on the crucial front of entrepreneurship. Contrary to what many would readily and rightfully assume, especially given women's impressive range of multitasking skills, the ranks of entrepreneurs globally are still rather devoid of women.

That means that, at a time when the world economy, all the way from the United States to Egypt and Bangladesh, is nervously seeking future sources of growth and jobs, the entrepreneurial potential of, roughly speaking, 50% of humanity has not been brought to bear.

If we wanted to launch one initiative across cultures to stimulate economic growth, increasing the ranks of women entrepreneurs would probably the one that yields the most potential.

But in order to get it right, and achieve more than a mere feel-good exercise, it is important to understand the real sources of constraint that seem to keep women from realizing their full potential in this domain.

It is also very important to go after the right target. For all the attention given to micro lending promoting the ranks of women entrepreneurs, what is at least as critical in a global context is to broaden the ranks of women entrepreneurs leading high-growth companies.

When our foundation looked into what's holding women back in the entrepreneurship arena, we did look at education, especially in the sciences, since that is the springboard for a lot of start-up companies with significant innovation and job growth potential.

In the case of the United States, significant progress can be reported: For the past four years, women accounted for more graduates in all fields of the natural sciences than men, except for in engineering. And even there the tide may be turning, as evidenced by the fact that two years ago for the first time ever, more than 50% of the incoming engineering students at MIT were women.

Our research also showed that women scientists, in their subsequent careers, were funded as much as their male colleagues and published just as much as they, so that neither of these two factors can account for women’s underperformance.

Where women did fall far short, however, was at the most crucial nexus -- the switch from research to commercialization. Women, in fact, launch very few start-ups and account for a vastly disproportionate share of intellectual property generated out of university research.

The root cause of this shortfall, according to studies undertaken at Harvard and MIT, is that women, quite strangely compared to what one would expect, have very weak networks in the commercial marketplace. And that, of course, is where the rubber always meets the road.

This is why the case of Olivia Lum, the CEO of Hyflux, is such an inspiration and point of departure. In early June 2011, the Singapore-based Ms. Lum was awarded the title of World Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, making her the first woman ever to win the award.

Her life story underscores the potentially transformative power of entrepreneurship. Adopted at birth and growing up in neighboring Malaysia, she got a science degree and joined GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical firm, as a chemist.

Then, in 1989, she quit her job in order to focus on polluted industrial water, a problem she had first become aware of in her corporate work at Glaxo. From that moment on, she was determined to seize on what has turned out to be a tremendous growth market, the desalination industry.

Olivia Lum credits hunger and poverty, as well as her experience of selling goods on the street when she was a girl -- a task she had to take on in order to earn the money that allowed her to stay in school -- as helping her develop the tenacity it would take to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Two decades on, her firm now employs 2,300 people in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and it was recently selected by Singapore's national water agency as the preferred bidder for the country's second, and largest, desalination project. Singapore, for its part, is among the world leaders in water management.

Along the way, Ms. Lum did exactly what our foundation’s research had pointed to — that it is a matter not just of vision and talent, but of relentless collaboration and systematic networking that helps entrepreneurs, women or not, to transform ideas into real businesses that can be scaled up.

Contrast her success story with the little known story of Sandra Lerner, one of the co-founders of Cisco, one of today’s iconic IT companies. Equipped with a Master’s in statistics and computer science from Stanford, she launched the company in 1988 while working as Director of Computer Facilities at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

While it is pure conjecture whether her staying on at the company would have changed the dynamics for women entrepreneurship in the United States, and she did become wealthy, one thing is certain: The IT industry, as impressive as it has been over the past several decades, is not rife with stories about women entrepreneurs, which makes Ms. Lerner’s involuntary departure in August 1990 all the more regrettable. At least we all know what difference a single individual, Mia Hamm, made in the development of women’s soccer in the United States, long considered a male domain.

As Americans, we can take great credit for having done right by -- and been open to -- the emergence of U.S.-trained foreign scientists as top U.S.-based entrepreneurs, especially in and around Silicon Valley and the IT field.

It seems that we as a nation, indeed as a global population, and going far beyond the confines of the IT sector, have not done anywhere near as well at getting women launched as entrepreneurs in high-growth businesses. Given the tremendous challenges the world economy faces, and especially the needs for growth, innovation and jobs, why not focus on this challenge and make the 2010s the Decade of the Woman Entrepreneur?

[This is translated from an original OpEd in the Turkish paper Radikal. Read the original here: http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalHaberDetayV3&ArticleID=1066892&Date=25.10.2011&CategoryID=99]

Dive right in! The water is fine!

If last year’s We Own It Summit in New York was a dip of the toe in to the water to see if it was warm enough, then this year’s Summit in London was a dive in to the deep-end followed by a forceful free-style firmly charging to the finish line in 2020.

The Decade of the Woman Entrepreneur is upon us and the collaboration has firmly embraced the opportunity and the challenge this presents. The Summit participants have validated that the moment is now to propel women in to the high-growth, innovation economy – as entrepreneurs, investors, and ultimately beneficiaries of the wealth and influence created.

Our next steps have been identified in the goals below. It is now the responsibility of we, the collaborating organizations, to maintain the momentum and deliver on these shared commitments:

In 2011-12, we will:

Create and implement collaboration processes for research and training.
• The annual research agenda will work to address 1-3 questions annually. This work is critical as the current dearth of data pertaining to women high-growth entrepreneurs is pronounced and does not allow us to measure our progress.
• The training objectives ensure that women gain exposure to the opportunity of high-growth entrepreneurship, investment, and board participation. The goal this year is to create a shared curriculum - via the many that already exists within the collaboration - that provides access to networks and access to maps to success.

Communicate to the market the stories of successful women entrepreneurs and investors as well as clearly articulate the problem, issues and opportunities. This year, we will complete and publish:
• 12 profiles each of female investors & entrepreneurs.
• A statement of why women’s participation matters for key constituents (LPs, VCs, government, etc.)

Take action that we believe will create real and measurable change in the market.
• A group, led by successful VCs, angels and LPs, has been created to raise an Astia Innovation Fund to invest in women-founded, women-led, high-growth start-ups.
• Borrowing from the model used by the Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley a decade ago, we will work to get women to invest in women (as well as the men who love women entrepreneurs), thereby owning the solution for ourselves.
• Where we have influence as industry leaders, LPs, Fund of Funds, family offices, VC firms, government funding agencies, etc. we will work to get women in to decision-making bodies.

The nearly 200 thought-leaders who participated in this year’s Summit have identified the above goals for the coming year as the deliverables that will lead us to the success in 2020.

And for those new to this race, the finish line has been mapped. Through this Summit and this collaboration – and any other means available to us - we will:

• Increase number of women investors.
• Increase number of women high growth entrepreneurs.
• Increase likelihood of success of these businesses.
• Get more women on public and private boards.

Come on – dive right in. The water is lovely!

Cheers,
Sharon Vosmek, CEO

Astia as Philosophy - Addressing the Entrepreneur's Paradox

This month, I have been thinking about what I have termed, the entrepreneur's paradox. Most simply stated, it is the importance of discomfort, juxtaposed with the need for comfort zones - both of which I believe, are fundamental to the success of the entrepreneur.

Get uncomfortable - it will make you grow.

I do my best thinking, listening, and learning when I am outside of my comfort zone. It seems true for most of us, that in strange places with new people we are better able to listen to the conversation before we put forward what we know - or what we think we know.

Get a community - the individual cannot do it alone.

And yet, I thrive when surrounded by an engaged community that lends thoughtful support, constructive input, validating energy, and positive reinforcement. A group of people provide an important source of strength and comfort for the isolated start-up.

I believe to succeed as entrepreneurs - we need both. And I believe that Astia - for the entrepreneur - can be both.

We need ample opportunity to feel challenged and stretched beyond what we thought we were capable of. I am reminded of the numerous Astia founders who had exceptional technical expertise, and who found Astia most challenging for them when they were confronted with owning the business elements like the financials, the go to market strategy, or the fundraising conversations. This stretch ensured they grew as leaders and as founders.

We also need ample moments when we are bolstered by those who align with us. I say it often, "The individual does not scale. High-growth entrepreneurship cannot be done alone." To be successful, the entrepreneur must be able to attract others to their vision. They must be able to inspire others to follow them to the "great unknown" of the entrepreneur's vision, idea, and purpose. And they need this cohort in order to succeed.

Astia is the space where the 'entrepreneur's paradox' can be resolved.

Astia is at the same time the platform for critical thinking - and - the community at the ready. I believe this is one of our greatest differentiators. We are a community that can both challenge and bolster the entrepreneur.

For the savvy entrepreneur, Astia maintains the space for both critical thinking leading to growth - and - supportive community aligned with your success. Food for thought for those of you wondering if Astia is right for you. We welcome the conversation - and accept applications year-round. Give us a call. Together, we may just change your world - as you always envisioned you would!

Wondering if Astia is right for you or an entrepreneur you know. give us a call or drop us an email to info@astia.org.

NYC vs Boston

What follows is a guest post by Astia NYC Vice President, Rob Delman. Welcome to the team, Rob!

Have you been following the story about whether NYC or Boston has more VC seeds deals? It is like debating who is better, the Yankees or the Red Sox (although we all know the answer to that question!)

According to a study by CB insights, when it comes to seed investments by venture capitalists, data suggests NY’s seed venture capital investments are gaining momentum at a faster rate than Massachusetts. Q1 and Q2 2010 saw an increase in seed venture capital investments in both Massachusetts and New York but the growth rate and the absolute number of deals was greater in NY in both quarters as detailed below.


Venture accelerators like Astia are enthusiastic about the data as we love to see an increase of quality deal flow regardless of the geography. This is more validation that small business and entrepreneurship continue to be the catalyst for growth in our country. The recent announcement by the White House and creation of Startup America reinforces our belief that entrepreneurship and small business are the main drivers of job growth and wealth creation.

Astia and Golden Seeds (www.goldenseeds.com) recently shared a booth at the Funding Post NYC Venture Capital and Angel Showcase in NYC where over 30 VC firms and several hundred entrepreneurs met to see if there was a match of interests. The entire scene was spectacular – clean tech, life science, consumer goods, technology and media sectors were all represented. Some of the ideas sounded futuristic but regardless, the energy was overwhelming. One could not help but feel that the economic recovery was going to happen at that very moment in that very room.

So does it really matter if NYC or Boston has more deals or invested capital? Of course not – what really matters is Astia and other great organizations participate in the entrepreneurial revolution that is again sweeping our nation.

Guest conversation from Astia VP Europe, Simone Brummelhuis

Astia is a community of experts, building women leaders and accelerating the funding and growth of high potential, high growth women-led start-ups.

I have read and heard this many times, it's on the Astia website, the reason of its existence, it became for me almost a mantra.

And as of this week I know, I have seen that the mantra is true.

I have never seen a group of experts more committed, more experienced, more qualified than this week. And I have never seen a group of women entrepreneurs who are so eager to be leaders and to accelerate their high potential startups. I am overwhelmed, and I am not the only one, the entrepreneurs are overwhelmed, both by the experts as well as their peers.

Last week I arrived in San Francisco -after a 22 year absence- much too long. And the occasion to visit San Francisco is the 2010 Astia Doing it Right Silicon Valley Program.

A full 43 companies and 58 entrepreneurs made it through the rigorous screening of joining this week’s program. Most are North American companies, 2 companies from Europe, 1 company from India and 1 company from New Zealand in industries of clean tech, life-science, enterprise software, medical devices, leisure and retail products.

Many of these female entrepreneurs have built a business before, some in a corporate environment, some have successfully exited their previous businesses. Some of the startups already raised their angel money, and are connecting with Astia for the institutional rounds of funding. Some of them are serial entrepreneurs or -as one woman calls herself- Startup Junkies. But what has been clear from the outset is that the class of 2010 is quite special.

I came to watch, to learn, to support the European companies, and, above all, to get ready for our European Astia program which will take place March 14-18, 2011.

From the first day of the program with a panel of impressive alumni Astia entrepreneurs - who where in the 60% success rate of Astia companies getting funding - to the last day of the program: it has been a roller coaster of panels, workshops and round tables with impressive investors, entrepreneurs, corporate heads and service providers with bios that each read as novels.

The entrepreneurs have -inter alia- stood up to present their ideas, listened to seasoned entrepreneurs who have uncovered their go-to-market strategy, calculated their financial projections together with financial wizzards, shaken hands with illustre giants of the tech industry, given out business cards to gatekeepers of venture capital firms, and established relationships with the global corporate giants.

The week was packed from morning to evening, there was no escape but go for it; a steep learning curve for all the women-led companies as never before. Also, never before were so many men and women of outstanding caliber together to support women-led companies. Tom Kosnik of Stanford, Dan'l Lewin of Microsoft, Bashkar Gorti of Oracle, Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures and Bill Campbell, Chairman of Intuit. And who says that there are no women in global high positions? With Shellye Archambeau of Metric Stream, Eileen Gittens of Blurb, Andrea Zurek of XG Ventures and Renee Knee of Hewlett Packard, Astia brought forward outstanding rolemodels.

And on top of it, there was Female Internet Hero, Susan Wojcicki of Google who presented her case to give her support to the Astia female entrepreneurs.

As one of the first employees from 1999 at Google (she let her garage to Sergey and Larry), now a top 10 leader in Google and responsible for 97% of Google's turnover, while being a mom of 4 children, she puts in practice her own advice: Have a mission and you and other people can work harder for you, collect the best insights and make them your own, continue innovation and not perfection and believe in the impossible and it can become true, and KEEP GOING!

The great things is, that it's all applicable to the Astia class of 2010.

We want this in Europe too!

Simone Brummelhuis joined Astia in 2008 as a member of the Astia European Advisory Board. A former attorney, today she runs Astia Europe as the Vice President of that market. Simone lives in Amsterdam with her husband and three daughters.

Improve Digital publishes first ‘market map’ of European online display advertising industry

Publishers struggling to tell their ad networks from their ad exchanges and their DSPs from their agency trading desks have a new tool to help them keep pace with the sub-sectors of the online advertising world. In response to frequent customer requests, Improve Digital (the largest European sell side platform, or yield optimiser) has gathered information from its offices and partners in the UK and Europe and mapped the current European online display advertising ecosystem¹.

'2010 – Display Advertising Market Map Europe', which includes definitions of the various industry sub-sectors, is available to download for free from: http://www.improvedigital.com/market-map-2010

Digital advertising continues to benefit from sophisticated technology that enables increasing effectiveness. As a result, more and more players have entered the market, while others have been taken over by the larger players. A specialist in the sector, Improve Digital is regularly asked to clarify the roles played and the relationships between companies in the industry. With a map already available on the US market (courtesy of GCA Savian), Improve Digital believed an equivalent of the European landscape was required.

This decision was reinforced by the findings of a survey carried out by Improve Digital earlier this year. This revealed that 90 percent of publishers believe that if digital marketing is to reach its potential, the sector must ensure that it provides comprehensive information that is easily understood by people outside the industry. Even those within the sector feel that information is not always forthcoming – nearly a quarter for example said that the difference between an ad exchange and an ad network is not clear.

“The online display advertising market has changed beyond all recognition over the past few years,” explains Joëlle Frijters, CEO of Improve Digital. “This is good news because it encourages all-important innovation, but it can make it difficult to understand the complexities, even for people working in the industry. The US market map has proved popular and useful, and we wanted to make it equally easy to have an 'at a glance' view of the European ecosystem. At the same time, the dynamic nature of the sector means that the positioning of the different players changes fast and on a continuous basis, so this is very much a ‘snapshot’ of the current situation, as perceived by various partners and premium publishers in the market.”

Note 1: The current version of ‘2010 – Display Advertising Market Map Europe’ has been prepared gathering information and knowledge from Improve Digital’s largest publishers and demand partners in the UK and Europe. Special thanks to Elevage Media, Sembassy and Market Edge.