Let’s Talk About Women Founders roundtable discussion, 9 Mar 2022
The 'Let's Talk' series are FREE roundtable discussions on topical issues. On 9th March 2022 at a 'Let's Talk About Women Founders' online roundtable, Diversity UK Chair Lopa Patel MBE will host an open discussion with a number of female founders on the challenges faced by women founders and co-founders. She will be chatting with Priyanka Gill, Co-Founder of the MyGlamm Group; Siddhi Mittal, Co-Founder of Yhangry, a female-run start-up delivering affordable private chefs to homes; Vaishali Shah, Founder & Creative Director of Creative ID and Ananya Cards, devising luxury wedding and event stationery and Sushma Shankar, Co-Founder & CEO of Deep Planet, which addresses environmental risk using satellite imagery.
Jointly they will be addressing questions such as, why is it so hard for women to attract funding? Where do women founders go to get help? What type of help is needed? How do women founders manage the work/life balance? Can women founders ever close the gender funding gap?
About the Rose Review
In 2019, The Treasury commissioned Alison Rose, CEO of the NatWest Group, to lead an independent review of female entrepreneurship. The review has shed renewed light on the barriers faced by women starting and growing businesses and identified ways of unlocking this untapped talent. Key findings of the Rose Review:
- Only 13% of senior people on UK investment teams are women, and almost half (48%) of investment teams have no women at all.
- The UK is the start-up capital of Europe, attracting more venture capital than any other European country, yet only 5.6% of UK women run their own companies.
- Female entrepreneurs were underrepresented in high-value sectors such as manufacturing, IT and communications, and financial services.
- Access to funding, risk awareness, primary care responsibilities and perception of skills were among the barriers
- Boosting female entrepreneurship could add £250bn to the economy.
In response to the Rose Review, the government announced an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030, equivalent to nearly 600,000 additional female entrepreneurs.
In April 2021, Alison Rose gave an update on The Rose Review stating “The pandemic has compounded the difficulties and expanded the obstacles faced by many women in starting, continuing and scaling their business. Recent research by NatWest says that nearly three quarters (77%) of female business owners found managing their business in the pandemic stressful, compared to 55% of male entrepreneurs. Women are also 17% more likely than men to struggle balancing business demands with family life.”
According to the latest Atomico report on the State of European Tech 2021, the large gender funding gap is still a stark reality in the European tech sector. Since 2017, female entrepreneurs have raised the smallest share of total venture capital funding, falling from 2.4% in 2020 to 1.1% in 2021, with 49% of female founders believing that being a woman hampered their ability to get funding.
Diversity UK is keen to explore what women founders think so grab a drink, join in and let us know what you think. Click here to reserve your place.
Break-out Rooms
To facilitate a more nuanced and intimate discussion style, the event will have 3 break-out rooms, moderated by a Diversity UK representative, that will discuss one of 3 questions. The break-out rooms will last for 20 minutes and will follow a brief introduction (name, venture, industry sector) by each participant, then in-depth discussion as indicated below. On re-convening to the main Zoom room, each moderator will give a brief summary of break-out room discussions before the whole group continues the discussion.
Break-out Room 1: Moderated by Vimla Appadoo
Setting-up your venture
Break-out Room 2: Moderated by Gurpreet Manku
Funding your venture
Break-out Room 3: Moderated by Lopa Patel MBE
Scaling-up and exiting your venture
Please note that this event is open to ALL, subject to availability. Maximum 50 places (1 ticket per guest).
Biographies (Speakers)
Priyanka Gill
Co-Founder - MyGlamm
Priyanka Gill describes herself as an “accidental” digital media entrepreneur. Her blog grew into the company, while she was living in London. As its audience was primarily in India, in 2015, she moved to Delhi for the startup and launched POPxo, a content-led digital community for women in India. Today, POPxo has 50 million monthly active users across platforms. In 2018, she launched Plixxo, an influencer management platform which has now onboarded 150,000 influencers in India. In 2020, POPxo-Plixxo merged with MyGlamm, a large beauty conglomerate and Priyanka joined their board as Co-founder & President. In September 2021, the company consolidated its strategy and announced the formation of The Good Glamm Group and she became the Co-founder. Since 2021, The Good Glamm Group has been on an acquisition spree becoming an Indian ‘unicorn’ in the process.
Siddhi Mittal
Co-Founder - YHangry
Siddhi Mittal is the Co-Founder of YHANGRY, a female-run London start-up delivering affordable private chefs to homes. The company was launched in 2019 by Heinin Zhang and Siddhi Mittal who met working in finance and spotted a gap in the market for dinner parties with ease for busy millennials. YHANGRY has raised a total of $1.5M in funding over 1 round. This was a Seed round raised on Apr 8, 2021 with 10 investors including Alexander Fitzgerald, Adnan Ebrahim, Deepali Nangia and Eileen Burbidge, among others. Siddhi graduated from Columbia University where she completed her degree in Computer Science before deciding to pursue a career on the trading floor at Barclays for six years, during which she managed half a billion in risk assets before leaving to co- found YHANGRY and complete the Google for start-ups residency programme with Heinin in 2020. In 2022, YHangry was accepted onto the Y-Combinator acceleration programme.
Vaishali Shah
Founder & Creative Director - Creative ID and Ananya Cards
Vaishali Shah is branding, design and marketing expert; a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) and Creative Director of Creative ID. She hails from a long line of entrepreneurs; started by her late grandfather Mr Meghji Pethraj Shah in 1922, the Meghraj Group is an international financial services and consulting organisation operating in 5 countries whose business interests have been continued by her father, uncle and brother. 2022 represents the centenary of the family business and Vaishali says that “it has been an honour for me to have worked in the family business for over a decade and continue supporting the philanthropic activities.”
Vaishali also runs award-winning Ananya Cards creating sophisticated wedding and event stationery for celebrations rich in personality and culture. She is an advisor and trustee for several charities worldwide and gives 10% of profits back to worthwhile causes. Her philanthropy efforts are an integral part of making a difference in the world. Through purposeful design and in her role as an expert speaker, Vaishali conveys her passion on the importance of creating culturally inclusive businesses.
Sushma Shankar
Co-Founder & CEO of Deep Planet
Sushma Shankar is the Co-Founder & CEO of Deep Planet, which addresses environmental risk using satellite imagery. Deep Planet's aim is to help agricultural businesses, supply chain companies and growers to gain new and unbiased insights from satellite data while supporting sustainability in their operations. Sushma's background is in Research & Development and Business in the telecoms industry launching 4G to millions of users, leading business planning and large scale transformation at BT, Hitachi and Nortel Networks. She has 15 years of experience in innovation and technology and holds an MBA from Oxford University and a Masters in Computer Engineering from Illinois Tech, USA.
Biographies (Moderators)
Lopa Patel MBE (Moderator - Break-out Room 3)
Chair - Diversity UK
Lopa Patel MBE is a Digital Entrepreneur, Non-Executive Chair, NED and Trustee with strengths in governance and risk oversight. She is the founder of two ventures in online media and a data-driven marketing consultancy; the Chair of equality and inclusion charity, Diversity UK; a Trustee of The Science Museum Group (SMG); a Non-Executive Director of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and a Council Member of The Open University (OU). With a lifelong love of science and technology, she is an evangelist for STEM, innovation and bridging the skills gap in business.
Vimla Appadoo (Moderator - Break-out Room 1)
Co-Founder & Director of Culture Design - Honey Badger
Vimla Appadoo is the Co-Founder and Director of Culture Design at Honey Badger, alongside a role as Head of Experience at Culture-Shift. She is passionate about embedding fearless change across organisations, to design safe workplaces where everyone can thrive.
Vimla is a design thinker, international speaker and advocate for changing the way businesses think: using technology, design and culture to align profit and purpose. She works across large scale organisations, small businesses and scaling startups, bridging the gap between the public and private sector. At 21 she founded her first business with clients including the NHS and has since gone on to lead Northern Collective: Women in Public Space, and SheSaysMCR.
She travels the world representing the UK on tech missions and has been featured in The Times on Sunday, BBC Breakfast and Sky News. Vim is a multiple award winner, with a spot on the Northern Power Women Awards Future List, Digital Leaders Young Leader of the Year, WeAreTheCity Rising Star and on the Top 100 Asians in UK Tech list. In her spare time you can find Vimla powerlifting, writing her new book on Culture Design, rapping along to 90’s hip hop and drinking all the tea.
Gurpreet Manku (Moderator - Breakout Room 2)
Deputy Director General & Director of Policy - BVCA
Gurpreet Manku is the BVCA's Deputy Director General and Director of Policy, and a BVCA board member. She is responsible for leading the BVCA's response to a wide range of policy challenges facing the industry from a legal, tax, reporting and regulatory perspective, both in the UK and Europe. Gurpreet is a member of the board of the Cost Transparency Initiative and is a member of the coalition that developed the Wates corporate governance principles for large private companies. She is also the executive liaison to the Private Equity Reporting Group, the body responsible for monitoring the industry's compliance with the Walker Guidelines on Transparency and Disclosure.
Gurpreet is passionate about improving diversity and inclusion within the venture capital and private equity industry and leads the BVCA's efforts to support firms. Before joining the BVCA, she worked at Deloitte LLP and specialised in auditing and advising private equity funds and their managers. Gurpreet studied at the London School of Economics and is a Chartered Accountant and a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales.
Click here to reserve your place at the Diversity UK: Let's Talk About Women Founders roundtable discussion.
