Extra Crunch Live: Join Anu Duggal for a live Q&A on August 20 at 11am PT/2pm ET

Published August 14, 2020

Rent the Runway and Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies.

Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing.

Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur launched her first fund to invest in female-led startups. It took her 700 meetings over two years to make that first close, she said. Years later, venture capital has slightly taken note. But the Female Founders Fund, or “F Cubed,” has tracked female-led wins and bet big on the underestimated asset class.

Her early focus on female founders hasn’t evolved, but the landscape has. And in an unprecedented world of remote deals and democratization of venture capital, we’re even more excited to have Duggal join us on Extra Crunch Live this upcoming Thursday at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. EST/6 p.m. GMT

Those tuning in and taking notes are encouraged to ask questions, but you have to be an Extra Crunch member to access the chat. If you still haven’t signed up, now’s your chance! With the subscription, you’ll also be able to check out all of our stellar previous guests on-demand (watch those episodes here).

Female Founders Fund has provided seed institutional capital to entrepreneurs with over $3 billion in enterprise value. The firm has cut checks into women-led companies such as Rent the Runway, Billie, Tala, Peanut, Thrive Global and Zola. The fund has also attracted limited partners like Melinda Gates and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.

Duggal herself has a fascinating trajectory into technology investing. At 25, she started a wine bar in Bombay called The Tasting Room. She went on to get an MBA from London Business School, and co-founded Exclusively.in, an e-commerce company that got acquired by Indian fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2011.

Hear from Duggal on August 20 about how the investment landscape has changed for female founders, what she thinks of as a success story and if 2020 feels different than 2014. And Extra Crunch fam, make sure to bring your thoughtful questions for me to ask her live on air.

You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.

Get your pitchdeck analyzed by top investors and experts at Disrupt SF next week

Published September 27, 2019

…And see other pitchdecks get the teardown treatment from top early-stage investors Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund) and Russ Heddleston (CEO of DocSend). If you’re attending Disrupt, you’ll get an email with instructions on how you can submit your deck and if you are selected, you can get feedback directly from them in a workshop setting.

If we use your deck, we’ll also provide you a free ticket to any TechCrunch event of your choosing next year.

This is part of a new project to make Disrupt even more focused on founders. We’re already offering the Extra Crunch stage, where you’ll get lots of time to ask questions yourselves in addition to hearing their interviews. For this additional project, we’re setting up workshops with experts on our Q&A stage where they’ll be going over the actual founder problems.

These folks have seen everything, so they will have a gut sense for how generalized advice can be applied to your specific team and market — the nuance that can compellingly explain your strengths and weaknesses. Hudson and Duggal have written some of the first checks for some of the most interesting startups today. The Athletic, Clearbanc, Incredible Health, Sudo and Pico are names you may recognize from the Precursor portfolio; Tala, BentoBox, Thrive Global and WayUp are a few of the many on Female Founder Fund’s list.

Pitching your product will kill your fundraising

Heddleston, meanwhile, is a repeat founder who now has some of the best insight into trends in funding through his current company, DocSend . As you may have read on TechCrunch already, the company provides document management for a large portion of startup founders out there, allowing them to share anonymized data with DocSend about how investors are reading their pitch decks. He’ll provide a data-driven founder perspective.

Data says there are only two seasons for fundraising and one secret window

Attendees will be notified via email on how to submit their pitch deck. If you want to submit your deck for review, get your pass to the event here and we’ll send out an email with instructions on how to submit your deck.

Please note: The workshop is open to conference attendees and is officially on the record. Other investors and members of the media may be in the workshop and see what you have in your deck, so plan accordingly.