Female Founder Office Hours — Behind the Scenes

Last month, Elise and I at Playfair Capital hosted Female Founder Office Hours Edition V alongside Tech Nation and Google for Startups. In this blog, we go behind the scenes on how the event went, the feedback we received and what’s happening next.

We’re on a mission to help redress the problem of a lack of funding and support for women founders in tech and barriers to accessing investors, particularly outside of London.

On Thursday 6th May 2021, Playfair Capital and 90 of the world’s leading venture capital funds, including Atomico, Creandum, Dawn, Balderton, EQT, Notion, LocalGlobe, Partech and Sequoia spent 270 collective hours meeting and advising women founders.

By dispensing with the need for warm introductions and breaking down the barriers to investment, each founder had the opportunity to meet four investors during one hour of remote office hours to discuss their tech business idea, ask for advice, pitch for investment or find a mentor.

And the outcome?

🤝 990 office hour meetings
👸 140 female founders
👫 90 VC investors from Europe’s leading funds

The feedback

We’ve had some great feedback from the founders themselves on how well they thought the event went:

Live feedback during the event saw 91% of meetings being given a 👍 from investors and founders. This means a) they will be following up, b) the meeting was relevant and/or c) it was a strong pitch.

As always, we teamed up with our friends at Landscape, the Glassdoor for VCs and founders, to allow founders to provide fully transparent and anonymous feedback which was overwhelmingly positive!

👉 Quality of Conversation: 4.6/5
👉 Professionalism: 4.7/5
👉 Engagement: 4.7/5

And some amazing feedback for our participating investors…

What happens next?

This time round, we grew from 60 to 90 investors, used an AI-matchmaking tool to optimise founder-investor matches, welcomed Google for Startups to the #ffohfamily and went Europe-wide. Phew 😅

We’ll be opening the doors for Edition VI in November 2021.

In the meantime, we’re proud to announce Playfair Capital Female Founders: Workshops edition in September where we will be hosting weekly hour-long workshops for women founders to hear about Hiring, Fundraising, Legals and PR from experts in our network and ask any questions they may have.

All workshops are free to attend — sign up below today!

8th September: Legals with Hayley Cross, Taylor Vinters — register here

15th September: PR with Nick Braund, Words + Pixels — register here

22nd September: Fundraising with Amelia Armour, Amadeus Capital Partners — register here

29th September: Hiring with Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital — register here