Video Of The Week: The Gotham Gal on TWIST
Last summer, The Gotham Gal went on Jason Calacanis’ show, This Week In Startups. I had never watched it until this morning. It’s fun to see two people who know each other well (they worked together in the late 90s) do a conversation. It’s an hour long but there is some good stuff in here.
Comments (Archived):
At 5:40, like it already. How do you decide whether to invest? GG “First of all you got to like the business.” How do you know whether to invest on a first time entrepreneur “You got to trust your Gut.”What’s so insightful about these two statements is the sequence of the two statements. You can only really trust your gut when your gut likes the business in which you are investing.Awesome GG.
Seems kind of anodyne, actually.
Liking the business would inherently be tied to the founder or team though. How people present anything is a mirroring of themselves.If a founder or team is good at mirroring themselves and what they see, then you’ll be able to gauge that and trust it. I imagine one reason that’s why Fred and USV don’t invest in people with a great product but who outsourced its development – because you just don’t get to experience the team or how they feel and perceive the world. Like attracts like, so the more your patterns (of perception or otherwise) match up with others, then the more likely you’ll be drawn, the stronger the attraction.Money-focused investors will more likely invest in people who present and structure their offerings with a money-focus. Product-focused investors will more likely invest in people who have a strong focus on product first.
I think you missed the point. Liking the business, such as Startup Food, and the Team are not at all commensurate in scope.Don’t really buy your line on money focus vs product focused either.Lastly, the “must be built by founding team” is a correlation to not a causation of investment.
i cycled through Gotham today.i think i’ve seen this interview before.I recommend his chat with Paul Eremenko.
Good watch.
“you have to have a lot of patience” “You have to be supportive in a positive way not a negative way” Angel investing is far different than VC investing. For sure.
Thanks for sharing. Joanne is super inspiring to entrepreneurs and working moms everywhere.
Joanne has such a great personality – straight forward, clear thinking, and humorous (love her laugh).Appreciated the scope of history (tech in schools, tech for girls, NY, etc) from her perspective. Lots of useful tips – my favorite was: “give me a yes or no,” and the value of the quick “no” to everyone involved.
In my experience, (1) commonly women have a lot of advantages to bring to business but (2) in our culture there is so little history of women in business that there are a lot of ‘cultural’ obstacles for women in business.For some of the advantages:(1) Women are much, much better interacting with people.(2) Women are much better working cooperatively in groups.(3) Women are significantly better with language including spelling, reading and reading comprehension, and writing.(4) Women have much better clerical accuracy.(5) Women are much better understanding and handling ambiguous social situations.(6) Women do have more ‘intuition’, and in some areas that is an advantage.(7) Generally women have more endurance than men, e.g., can do with less sleep.(8) As in word processing, accounting, and bookkeeping, women are better at ‘detail’ work.(9) Women have better manual dexterity.(10) Women have better color vision and color sense.(11) In grades 8-12, in college, and in some graduate and professional schools, the ability of some women to focus, work hard, and do well in the course of study is astounding beyond belief.Some of the cultural obstacles I have seen include (actually not a joke):(1) As is traditional in nursing and K-12 teaching, a woman is supposed to be dedicated to helping others and not nearly out for her own financial progress.(2) If a woman has an activity outside the house, then it is supposed to be charity, helping people, etc.(3) If a woman is successful financially, then there is an assumption that she was selfish or otherwise did something unethical.(4) If a woman is a really good person, then she does not need her own financial resources and, instead, will be cared for by her father, brother, husband, or a community grateful for her lifetime efforts to help others. Indeed, if a woman is active in business, she can look unworthy of such help.(5) A woman does not need to think, analyze, or understand and, instead, has four ways to make decisions: (A) Ask her father, brother, or husband. (B) Notice what the norms are for a woman in her position in life. (C) Ask an expert. (D) Pray.(6) Any error is regarded as a severe black mark on her basic character as a good, moral, and ethical woman.(7) Women have too little in examples and role models. In particular, relatively few daughters have mothers who were successful in business.(8) Women are more susceptible to too much anxiety.(9) It is more difficult for a woman to concentrate just on business.(10) Common behaviors in business can conflict with what a woman has learned and used with terrific results for all her life from the crib on: Commonly by age 3, a girl can have wrapped their father around their little finger so effectively that he can never say “No” to her. She does this heavily by being sweet, meek, pretty, darling, adorable, precious, a little princess to be cared for. The technique can work very well. Later she learns to be gentle, softly spoken, courteous, empathetic, sympathetic, considerate of the feelings of others, dedicated to the needs of others, altruistic, not aggressive, self-effacing, shy, passive, etc. So, a lot that is common in business conflicts strongly with a lot that served her well for, say, her first 22 years.
Loved this! Favorite piece of advice for companies, post-funding: “You got to where you got because you were scrappy. Still be scrappy.”
Saw this when it came out. Also, off topic, just saw Veronica Mars movie. Pretty good. Really happy they made it. Something my now wife and I used to watch together.
Funny you never saw it, I watched it a few weeks ago!
I remember watching it last year. I like the diversification of Joanne’s investments: Food, bricks and mortar, Tech. And some are at the intersection of the 3.
I’m a female, first time founder of a bootstrapped startup, and a SV and NYC outsider. I cold emailed GG last year and probably did everything wrong in the email, including writing a tome. She was gracious enough to 1) read it, and 2) respond with some advice and feedback, which is already more than many in my local startup community have done. When I had the chance to attend WEF in January and was able to meet her in person, she remembered who I was and what I was working on. Incredible. Genuine. Inspirational.