Introducing Rebalance: Accelerating Diversity in Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital
Entrepreneurship is an economic opportunity for anyone who is solving a problem that others can benefit from. The rate at which we’re growing as economies are resulting in rapid technological advancement while changing our planet for both, good and bad. This presents us with multiple avenues to create solutions that can be revolutionary in shaping tomorrow. In fact, some of the most critical challenges we face as humankind today can be solved through entrepreneurship, if we work together.
Gender disparity in the startup ecosystem is a global bottleneck to sustainable, equitable and balanced economic growth.
Advancing women’s equality is not social charity but presents an economic opportunity worth $12 trillion globally ($770 billion in India alone), and a strong business case of better returns on investment.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Rebalance - a new early stage scale-up program dedicated to accelerating women in entrepreneurship and venture capital.
We believe in a world where everyone can contribute to building a part of the future.
The unbreakable men-trepreneur and VC bond that skews higher investment and faith towards male-led ventures is limiting the contribution women founders can make, today.
Scaling up is twice as hard for women, we want to change that.
We spoke to numerous female founders and investors to understand where the major roadblocks lie. We realized, there isn’t really a pipeline issue when it comes to exceptional female talent but lack of investor confidence, mentorship, and accessibility which hurts the chances of large-scale fundraising for women-led companies. We all like to invest our time, resources and money in places that are at some level either testified or familiar. In an industry that is 91% male, most women feel an implied need to constantly defend their commitment and capabilities during pitches.
Consequently, women tend to raise less funding. According to YourStory Startup Report for India, only 12% of women-led companies received funding and a meager 5.2% of overall funding ($9.14 billion) raised went to women-led companies in 2018. In fact, for every additional preventive question an entrepreneur is asked, he or she raises $3.8 million less in aggregate funding (globally).
Despite the disparity, women-led companies deliver higher returns on investment. According to a recent BCG report, teams with a woman co-founder performed 63% better — as measured by valuation — than all-male founded teams. This makes diverse leadership a better bet for investment rather than just a good to have.
Our mission is to accelerate the viability of women-led startups by creating an accessible and inclusive startup ecosystem.
How are we achieving that?
Rebalance is an 10-week scale-up program that helps early-stage startups with:
- at least one woman as founder/co-founder
- tech-enabled/technology/impact tech solutions
- minimum viable product/solution,
shape their ventures to a level where they can scale either through customer acquisition or raise Seed/Series A funding. We are sector agnostic and open to social impact startups as well.
Our inaugural batch for the accelerator will be hosted in Delhi NCR.
Our Approach
We’re equity-free for the first cohort
Founders should not be charged in their quest for growth - just for getting accepted in a program. For us, it’s important that founders maximize value first.
No founder should be denied access to growth
Founders should not be limited by our batch bandwidth or their startup stage when they reach out to us. We run Mentor Hours — an initiative that provides 1:1 need-based mentorship to high-potential startups who do not get shortlisted for the accelerator program. We help them get in shape to either access our main demo day or re-apply to our next batch.
Mentor Hours will be hosted in Bangalore for our first batch. We will be hosting Mentor Hours pan India and globally as we become a bigger community of diverse founders and funders.
We believe time spent nurturing founders and their idea is more important than filling up their bank
At Rebalance, we focus on helping founders build solid product/solution credibility and maintain growth focus. Strong growth focus begets scale, and returns on investment are attractive only if, what a founder is building is relevant to someone, somewhere. The second most important thing we do is help founders understand the importance of Investor Fit through dedicated sessions that emphasize on why investors should be viewed as long-term partners and not like banks.
We focus on giving women founders the resources, access and belief they need to take their startup to the next level.
Everything cannot and must not be learned in a structured arrangement
It’s important for founders to build relationships, connections and capitalize on informal learning through our community. We host Rebalance Hours thrice during the program which functions like a town-hall with mentors, investors, and experts followed by dinner. This allows founders the flexibility to reach out to mentors for any doubts that they might have outside of a session setting. This, also helps startups gain early access to our funding partners so they can find the right funding partner for their idea during the course of 8 weeks.
One size doesn’t fit all because every startup has its own challenges
When you’re a founder, time is limited because you’re multi-dimensionally occupied at all times. What might be relevant to one founder’s business might not be as applicable to another founder. At Rebalance, when we receive applications, we group startups basis their startup readiness stage and optimize each session for the founders. We also provide 1:1 mentoring for startups with our mentors, if needed.
What we build today, has no borders or limits on who can use it
Exposure to different perspectives helps us become better leaders, tomorrow. As a founder, it’s important to understand the ethical, social, global and economic implications of what we’re building. At Rebalance, we have a global community of mentors who are accessible to all founders for any help that they might need, through a simple introduction. Some of them are even taking sessions on video during the program!
Fundraising should not be so tense
Any founder looking to raise funds is simply finding a partner who believes in his/her vision and sees an opportunity in his/her idea. The whole fundraising process takes way too much time and unnecessarily creates pressure on founders which takes the focus away from what she/he is building. After speaking to numerous investors and founders, we realized traditional demo days are unnecessarily nerve-wracking for founders and inefficient for investors. At Rebalance, we host the Rebalance Pitch Week — where founders can opt to interact with selected funders deeply, through our community and/or participate in an informal mass pitch with investors outside of the Rebalance community on the last day of the week.
Rebalance Pitch Week doesn’t mark the end of our relationship but marks the beginning of our journey. Scaling up demands time and persistence — we work with founders, for as long as they choose to be founders.
Driving awareness amongst investors through the Diverse Investors League
Through our network of investors, we are building a Diverse Investors League — a community of funders on a mission to create an accessible and inclusive startup ecosystem. This gives founders access to a community of select investors who are consciously working to diversify their portfolio and looking to build meaningful relationships rather than just a demo day interaction.
Diversity in founders can significantly improve if there is diversity in decision makers at venture capital firms
A lot of what we did initially at Rebalance, was researching this space and meeting founders/investors. It was fairly easy to find data and opinion on women entrepreneurs in the wake of the diversity and inclusion movement worldwide.
What struck us was the absence of women in venture capital and how seldom it is addressed. 9 out of 10 decision makers at VC firms are male.
Globally, there is movement on this front but there is close to no data on women in venture capital in India and we cannot improve what we cannot measure.
Mind The Gap Project is our attempt on collecting data on women in venture capital in India to build a dashboard that helps us all track our progress on diversity in venture capital and generate awareness about the issue.
The times we live in, present endless possibilities to create solutions/build stuff that can shape the future. We cannot truly invest in the future if we involve only half the population in the process.
Getting here wasn’t easy for us
Looking back at where we started in 2017, it is overwhelming for us to announce Rebalance and all its initiatives, today. This is truly energizing. We’re only as strong as the belief and commitment of everyone involved in helping us make this happen and we need all the help we can get to make this truly impactful.
How you can get involved and amplify our mission:
- We are excited to grow our community of Mentors and Diverse Investors League.
- We are looking for partners and sponsors who believe in our mission, for any or all of our initiatives.
- We are looking to connect with women in venture capital who would like to mentor, participate as funders and help us co-create the Mind The Gap Project.
If you’re as excited about this, write to us at hello@therebalance.com.
To find out more, visit www.therebalance.com
