The launch of the event followed the seminal Pathways: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship report, commissioned by the Scottish government and authored by entrepreneurs Ana Stewart and Mark Logan, in 2023.

It spotlighted and critiqued Scotland’s enterprise ecosystem for its lack of diversity and inclusion, and its failing when it comes to gender equality. 

The Pathways report did not mince its words, stating: “Our society has a degree of sexism embedded within it, and these prejudices are transferred from generation to generation.” 

But, it’s initiatives like the Female Founders Growth Summit, from business community Female Founders Rise and the newly-created Pathways Forward programme, which are working to both bring female founders together and help close today’s female entrepreneurial gap through community-oriented efforts.

The Summit aimed at women at every stage of their startup or scaleup journey, offered a series of engaging talks panels, and workshops, diving into the specific challenges female founders face regarding startups, funding, imposter syndrome, scaling up their business, and dealing with a male-centric business funding system. 

Growing Pains and Lessons Gained

Darina Garland, co-founder and CEO of Ooni, chaired a panel which went into the challenges and strengths women founders experienced in their startup cycle, elucidating their key insights on their growth journeys. 

Garland asked the panel members—Sasha Evans, founder and creative director of We the Creator; Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, founder of Genius Foods and chair of Scotland Food and Drink; and Margaret Rice-Jones, chair of the Scale Up Institute—what growth meant to them. 

For Bruce-Gardyne, growth meant effortlessness, rather than toil: “Growth more me is having a fantastic product where there’s huge demand, that just effortlessly moves into finding people to join your team, and finding people who want your products, because it’s something with a wow factor.”

For the founder of Genius, a food company that’s developed a new way to create gluten-free bread products for celiac sufferers, the wow factor of the product was key. 

“If you are struggling, it is important to ask what is the wow factor of your product.” The struggle may come from creating the product, but once it has been developed and prototyped, this is where the growth should come easy, she said.  

For Rice-Jones, who regularly works with companies on their scaling efforts, growth is a process that is not necessarily always mapped out. 

“When you take step one you don’t necessarily know step two or three or four, but when you get to step three, then you can figure out what your step four is,” Rice-Jones said.

For Evans, who went from creating a startup to helping others on their inclusivity journeys, growth took and does take many forms. 

“I think we have a kind of mindset as founders that we may be looking for backing, but that growth is dictated by other people,” Evans said. “Now, my growth is about me, my product, and my customers.” 

While the answers were varied on the definition of growth, they bare down into how growth works for startup companies, and how the women’s entrepreneurial movement has grown within this sphere. 

Starting out with solution-oriented products that can sell themselves is part of the essential for women entrepreneurs. Throughout the day, speakers highlighted how women-led startups were centred around solutions to often personal problems that are subsequently underrepresented and undervalued by male-dominated sectors and funding bodies. 

Growth is also the step-by-step perseverance through different funding stages and trial and error, until eventually, entrepreneurs gain the confidence and experience to determine growth in their own right. 

Defining Success

“I think a marker of success is sustainable growth,” said Bruce-Gardyne, tying in the two topics. 

For her, success is marked by an engaged and capable team, the ability to understand the consumer, and “a board and executive team that understands and is in tune with the company’s technical and scaling challenges.” 

“If they are not in tune with this, the goals the company sets will be unrealistic,” she warned. 

Being able to continually grow, and continually rise to challenges and changes, is therefore vital to success. 

Meanwhile, explainability is key for Evans. 

“We’re often solving complex problems – success criteria for me is when you get to the point when you can explain your business to your aunt or your mum, and they absolutely get it, and you can do that in two sentences.”

“It’s the time when you get to the point of explainability.” 

Another point of success Evans noted is when employers are sought after, rather than businesses scrambling to snap up the freshest talent. 

“When people say ‘I want to come work for you’ – that’s when you know success comes.” 

But Rice-Jones’s experience on helping scaleups also pointed to the challenges women-led businesses face. 

“Statistically, we know that it is harder to get funding than men still, startups are challenged by access to markets, both international and domestic, and the ability to get the right connections and find the right market is a struggle,” she said. 

Furthermore, new technologies are also bringing in a whole new tide of challenges. 

“Many businesses tell us AI will change everything,” Rice-Jones said, “but they don’t know how.”

The emergence of new technologies can be a problem in itself, noted Evans. 

“As entrepreneurs, we get excited about new, shiny things, but keeping that goal in mind, keeping that north star in mind, is so important,” she noted. 

Challenges and Resilience 

Evans has a complicated relationship with the word resilience, which many marginalised people can relate to. 

“I have a kind of funny relationship with resilience, maybe because I find it can be used to slightly undermine people, as if it’s saying ‘you aren’t capable,’ when often the barriers we come across are real. It’s our environment, not that we aren’t resilient enough,” she said. 

Using that as a framework to discuss the challenges facing women in the startup ecosystem is extremely important – rather than advice coming off as pedantic or condescending, advice on overcoming challenges is necessary because these challenges exist. 

As Rice-Jones pointed out, women-led businesses are not receiving as much funding, despite being statistically better performing than men. 

In a panel later in the day covering funding, quandary was questioned. 

The proportion of women-led startups is so small, is it fair to take an accurate sample to mark success? 

Is it simply just a fact that only the truly exceptional women-led startups are going to make it past the first round of funding, whereas less-than-stellar male-led startups will power through? 

Danae Shell, founder and CEO of Valla, touched on exactly this: “There is no room for mediocrity for female founders in the ecosystem, which is not fair. It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

It is important to recognise that the funding and startup ecosystem is unfair towards marginalised genders–the startup ecosystem does not exist in a vacuum, after all. 

Provided that the women who found startups were raised in a sexist society, as were the men making up the male-dominated VC sphere, being able to translate yourself to “bro code” was noted as a vital point by the panel discussing funding rounds. 

Being able to understand where passion and problem-solving is not commercially viable is also a hard lesson to learn. 

“We often solve the problems we face ourselves,” Evans said. “Just because a problem exists, doesn’t mean people will pay to solve it. We can be embroiled in the injustice of something, but that doesn’t mean that there is a commercially viable solution to it.”

Equally, making the argument to a male board of investors can be difficult if they have never experienced the problem before, and are unable to envisage a viable market for the product solution. 

“It’s the reason why femtech has been underlooked, as well as people of colour; why so many underrepresented communities do not have products that work for them,” Evans noted. “The people in charge do not relate.”

Learning to speak to investors, to make these arguments, and understand your VC audience rather than just your customer base, is duly important. Being able to flex your positions, ability, and to even switch your mannerisms to match the environment, are skills that can be developed with practice. 

“It took me 20 years to change my body language,” Bruce-Gardyne reminisced, speaking about how she had to practise speaking to a board of men to convince them of her product. 

It is frustrating hearing that these issues which affected women 20, 30, and 40 years ago are still affecting women trying to break into entrepreneurialism now. 

How we have to learn to speak the language of men—bu, again, we do this anyway. The business funding environment is no different than a school, than a bar, than a dark alleyway—except the stakes are indeed different. You play the part you need to for survival. 

“As a founder you will do anything to ensure your business succeeds, if you have to flex your behaviours to advocate, to relate, you will do that,” Bruce-Gardyne said. 

Rice-Jones boils it down to a superpower – “people able to relate and get the best out of people, that is a superpower we need to use,” she said. 

“One colleague said after a meeting once: ‘You manipulated them all!’” Rice-Jones remembered. “I prefer to think of it as influenced.”

Using these traits to one’s advantage can help build resilience, but resiliency is also a practice within itself. 

“Resilience is so much easier the second time round,” added Rice-Jones. 

“It comes with experience,” noted Bruce-Gardyne, “when you go through ups and downs. It was my passion that got me through the challenges.”

“Everything was uncertain,” Bruce-Gardyne explained about her startup journey, detailing the “serious trial and error, serious waste, serious amount of time lost.”

“The only thing that got me through was my passion and calling.” 

But still, internal passion can benefit from a boost of external experience.

“If you find people around you who have been through a challenge, even if you haven’t, you can borrow resilience, giving you confidence that you can survive, and that you can take the next step,” said Rice-Jones.

“Resilience is learned, but also borrowed.”

Being comfortable in uncertainty is also key to resilience, Evans noted. 

The panel then ended with a whirlwind of advice for women founders at any stage of their journey. 

Evans advocated for finding teams and people who are interested and will understand the product as well as the technical and scaling challenges;people who are curious and hands on. 

Further, understanding that “as a founder, where you add value – you can’t be good at everything,” she said, as well as figuring out where you need help, and finding the right people to help, are key. 

Evans also noted the need to stay focused on your main goal, your ‘north star’ as she liked to describe it, but to be flexible on your journey to achieve it. 

“Recruiting people who are your users, and keeping so close to your customers that they are a part of your team, and are co-designing your product, is really important,” she said. 

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Being adaptable, and knowing when and where to cut, is essential, according to Rice-Jones. 

“What got you here has got you here,” she said, “And you’ll need some of it to get you to the next stage, but you will not need all of it. A huge mistake is not being willing to change enough.” 

Progress to Be Made

The afternoon keynote from Sam Smith, co-founder of SuperScalers and founder and chief executive of the corporate advisor and brokerage firm FinnCap, was certainly an inspiring way to round out the day. 

Smith, who gave advice on superscaling, made an important point after she realised little had changed in the VC ecosystem. 

“The system is just not set up for us, we’re not in the room, we’re just not in the room,” she said. 

Initiatives are currently being set up and scaled to get more women and marginalised genders and people into those rooms, to help them secure deserved funding, and to ensure that women can make mistakes and still succeed. 

The Pathways report, the creation and launch of Pathways Forward, the Female Founders Growth Summit, are just some of the initiatives that aim to serve as an antidote to the myriad issues at play. But to ensure success, we all need to be part of the solution—though it’s surely a long road ahead.