Katrina Lake, founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, discusses systemic power imbalances and gender disparity in the venture capital industry.
Insight
Lake: Informal VC settings like Tahoe hot tubs structurally exclude female founders
“I live up in Tahoe, and like, you know, entrepreneurs, they come to me, and like, they come and hang out with me in Tahoe, and they like, drink beers in my hot tub, and like, I get to know them and their businesses, and like, you know, there's part of that tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lake: 94% of VCs are men who lack passion for women's apparel
“94% of venture investors are men, and probably the majority of men don't feel passionate about dressing women.”
Opinion
Lake: Curated apparel delivery beats spending evenings with 30 browser tabs
“If you could, instead of going to a mall all day, or instead of spending, you know, your entire evening with 30 browser tabs open to try to compare and contrast different jeans you want to buy, if you could get a box sent to you that had Two pairs of jeans, or…”
Insight
Lake: Venture capitalists want portfolio companies to be a zero or a billion
“Like they want billion dollar businesses and they would either rather, they want you to be a zero or a billion and everything in the middle is not that attractive.”
Insight
Stanford's stereotypical founder culture deterred Katrina Lake from pursuing entrepreneurship
“The people who are the entrepreneur types at Stanford were very different than kind of how I saw myself, and so it took a really long time, I think, for me to realize that entrepreneurship would be a good path And I think there's a lot of other people out ther…”
Assertion Supported
Stitch Fix raised under $50M to build a billion-dollar business
“We raised less than fifty million dollars. The business is now over a billion dollars, and so you know, I think our, the amount of capital that we raised was actually very modest relative to you know, where, where we'd end up, but in the early days, yes, we di…”