A group of female venture capitalists are launching a series of office hours for female founders. The idea is to host free, quarterly events that explore topics across the range of company stages — from early to hyper-growth.
The first event, on November 30 in San Francisco, will be geared toward helping seed-stage female founders finesse their pitches. It will kick off with a talk, by Jess Lee of Sequoia Capital and Jenny Lefcourt of Freestyle, on how to fundraise at the seed level. After that, ten partners will host one-on-one, thirty-minute office hours with 40 female founders.
“This started from this dinner that Aileen Lee put together for some women in VC,” Sequoia’s Jess Lee told TechCrunch. “This is our little community to help each other out. Over the past few months, we’ve been talking about how we can help women in tech. We felt like one thing that could move the needle the most was just helping more women build world-changing companies. It’s been done before and it can be done again, so how do we accelerate that?”
That’s where the idea for office hours came from. The goal of the office hours is to build and grow a community of female founders who can help each other succeed. The best way to do that, the group determined, was to band together.
“Even though VC can be kind of competitive sometimes,” Lee said, “we could have a broader impact if we brought together a collection of female partners to have a greater impact on helping female founders.”
Here are the ten who will be at the first event:
- Aileen Lee, Cowboy
- Eurie Kim, Forerunner
- Jenny Lefcourt, Freestyle
- Jennifer Carolan, Reach
- Jess Lee, Sequoia
- Kirsten Green, Forerunner
- Maha Ibrahim, Canaan
- Renata Quintini, Lux
- Sarah Tavel, Benchmark
- Shauntel Poulson, Reach
In February, the group will host an office hours event for Series A founders and one for growth-stage startups in March. Those interested in partaking in the office hours can apply here. In terms of what they’re looking for, Lee says it comes down to what kind of help the founders need and “how good we feel about how well we can help them.”