MergeLane Offers Exciting Opportunity for Women-Led Companies

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending an event hosted by kbs+ focused on the topic of women and entrepreneurship.

The featured speaker of the evening was the CEO and Co-founder of MergeLane, Sue Heilbronner. MergeLane discovers, accelerates and invests in exceptional women and the companies they run. The 12-week accelerator program matches startups that have at least one woman in leadership with industry-leading mentors and CEO coaches. The goal is to dramatically accelerate a company's growth trajectory. 

With Forbes reporting that companies with at least one female founder performed 63% better than companies with all male teams, the public dialog is shifting to where and how to find the proper talent.

Knowing other women entrepreneurs plays an important role in inspiring women to start their own businesses. As more women start high-growth companies, they will inspire more women to do the same. 

According to TechCrunch, In 2009, 9.5% startups had at least one woman founder, but by 2014 that rate had almost doubled to 18%. Even still, less than 20% overall isn’t exactly groundbreaking numbers.  “If women were as economically engaged as gentlemen in the economy, our GDP would be 7 to 9 point larger,” said Sallie Krawcheck, a former investment analyst and chair of Ellevate, a global professional women’s network, on Bloomberg TV.

The event focused on some of the challenges that women founders face more than men including: hesitancy to lead, being less likely to ask for help, and the data that women are less likely to apply if they only meet 9 out of 10 criteria.

One of the biggest points of all is that women are much less likely to put anything out there until it’s completely “ready” (and ready means perfect.) This can be a major blocker since sometimes getting your product or service out there is how you gain traction and receive actionable feedback.

Being aware of some of these roadblocks can help with remedying them. There’s no shame and no blame, and their understanding is useful (even for male CEO’s) to get the most out of the women on any given team.  Through personal coaching, these intrinsic issues can be seen and encouraged to go about it a different way.

The coaches in the program meet you right where you are and invite you to think about these things differently. The inaugural MergeLane cohort was 8 companies and nearly all have either gotten or are in the process of getting funded now.

So whether you are an amazing female founder or know of someone awesome tell them to apply to an adventure that could change both their life and business!

Applications for the MergeLane program open on September 1st, close November 23rd, and the program begins February 1, 2016. Participating companies receive $20,000 in guaranteed funding and the opportunity to garner an additional investment of up to $100,000.

Women are generally much less likely to apply to accelerator programs so break out of the mold and just do it!