When Julia Hartz cofounded ticketing giant Eventbrite, she wasn't prepared for how lonely or stressful it could be along the way. Looking back, she realizes she is lucky that the company's early days were spent inside a windowless warehouse in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, working alongside a dozen other startup founders that built companies like Zynga and Trulia.
"Those early days were really magical. We'd be this refugee camp for people who wanted to start a company," she says.
The lack of windows and tight quarters didn't matter. She says the key was that she had a network of support to fall back on. She and the other startup founders could run their funding pitches past each other or lean on each other for support. But that network is not something every founder has, and something that Hartz now wants to play a role in creating for others.
The Eventbrite CEO is one of nearly 120 startup founders and executives who signed up to coach the next generation of female founders through All Raise's Female Founder Office Hours. Last week, Forbes exclusively revealed the efforts of All Raise, a group of over 30 women in the venture industry, to double the number of female partners and increase the percentage of funding going to female founders in the next few years. Female Founder Office Hours is one of All Raise's initiatives to directly increase the amount of capital flowing to female founders by giving them one-on-one advice and mentoring sessions.
For more on All Raise, read Forbes' exclusive cover story "Venture Catalysts: The 36 Women Secretly Breaking Up Silicon Valley's Old Boys' Club".
All Raise already saw more than 1,600 women sign up for the one-on-one mentoring sessions, which had been held in person with female venture capitalists in a few cities. The new version of the office hours program will add CEOs like Hartz to the list of available mentors and take some of the sessions virtual, so female founders anywhere can have access to the advice.
"Surrounding women with an army of advisers will just move the needle even more," says Jess Lee, a partner at Sequoia Capital and one of the founding members of All Raise.
Lee had been one of the driving forces inside All Raise to launch the venture capital mentoring sessions in the fall of 2017. The series of mentoring meetings already resulted in one funding deal being closed, and others still in talks. But, it was a lot of planning and work for the venture capitalists involved in each of the events. By March, Lee told the women of All Raise she had found a solution to help scale the office hours so the 1,600 women involved could actually receive advice outside of the 100-person events.
Lee had met Felicia Curcuru, the cofounder and CEO of Binti. Curcuru already had her own female founder advice network that she had set up with a group of CEOs. The pair realized it would be better to combine resources and elevate women across the industry.
The pair ended up recruiting over 120 women, representing a combined $4 billion in capital raise, to sign on to be mentors in the group and commit to doing a 45-minute, one-on-one session every other month with a founder. The founders involved range from Cloudflare's Michelle Zatlyn to Glossier's Emily Weiss to Stitch Fix's Katrina Lake.
"Something when I was starting out when I was starting out with my company, was I just didn’t see a lot of female founders being public about their success," says Curcuru. Now, the next generation of female founders will have more than a roster of powerful women to look up to as paragons of success. They will have the women as mentors and allies.
