Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Rep. Karen Bass is in the mix for VP, Rhode Island drops the rest of its name, and we check in on how female founders are faring amid the pandemic. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Surveying startups. Given the multitude of ways the pandemic has hit women especially hard, I was particularly interested to check out this new survey from Female Founders Fund, which digs into the COVID-19 impact on women-led companies.
As you might expect, most female founders say their startups are feeling the effects—falling revenue, struggles to land new funding, and an acute pressure to cut costs.
But when Emma, who wrote about the survey here, attempted to get a sense of how the impact on these women-led ventures compares to venture-backed startups as a whole, a slightly different picture emerged. According to F3’s survey of female founders, 20% of respondents say they’ve actually increased revenue projections for the next year. Meanwhile, an April survey by Startup Genome of about 1,000 global startups found that 12% of respondents were experiencing that same kind of growth. Forty-six percent of the female founder survey respondents cut headcount costs through layoffs, furloughs, or salary reductions. Compare that to the Startup Genome survey respondents, 74% of whom said they had terminated workers.
To be sure, these surveys are nowhere near apples-to-apples comparisons. But it’s interesting—and refreshing!—to consider the ways in which women-led startups might actually be better positioned to withstand the pandemic than many of their male-led counterparts.
For more on the current state of female founders’ businesses, you can read Emma’s full story here.
Kristen Bellstrom
[email protected]
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
