Venture Capital is a predominantly male sector of business, which makes it even more important for women to break the mold and level the playing field. For this installment of PWIB: Podcasts for Women in Business, I decided to take a listen to a podcast called “Women in Venture Capital” which was created by Rashveena Rajaram and Anvita Dekhane, two MBA students at Harvard. Their motive for creating this podcast was to increase the amount of female decision-makers in the VC space, as well as encourage other women to go into venture capital.
The podcast is structured by conversations- each episode is a different conversation with a featured guest, all of which are females who have made a name for themselves in the finance world. I decided to listen to thor most recent episode titled, “A Conversation with Ashley Aydin | Brand Foundry Ventures | Founders Factory New York | VamosVentures | DRF | Estee Lauder | Saks Fifth Avenue | MS |MBA ‘21 @MIT Sloan” When I first saw this title, and many of the other titles for the podcast, my immediate thought was that Aydin and the other powerful women featured on the show have had lots of accomplishments! Aydin began her interest in the consumer space as an undergraduate student at Brown University, as she realized how goods and services provide a powerful impact on the consumer, by providing happiness, efficiency, and relief. Aydin currently works in consumer venture investing, because it marries her love for entrepreneurship, start-ups, and consumer investments. Impact investing is where she’s looking towards next, as there is a lot of room for growth in this area. Aydin states, “It’s still the case today that the majority of venture dollars go to founders who are white, amle, and university-educated.” She then continues to mention a study done by Morgan Stanley, surveying almost 200 United States-based VC firms, and it found that diversity is only a priority for about 40% of those surveyed firms, which is why she feels so passionately about her word in encouraging more women, especially Lantinx women like her, to join the venture capital space. So how does she recommend women to break into VC? Her biggest piece of advice is to build relationships with founders early on, to be proactive and hustle. She hopes to continue to lower the age that women are exposed to the industry as well, and get young girls excited about learning about finance, as well as equipping them with the skills they need to do so.
Overall, this podcast is really educational. For me, someone who has very little interest in the VC industry, but still wants to encourage other women to break the mold and explore the field, this podcast was definitely inspirational. To see other women who have faced many hardships succeed in such a competitive environment is the starting point for other women to feel that they can be successful too, and this podcast shows that. I think its platform of being a podcast “for students, by students” is also a great platform, because it adds to their goals of exposing young females to capital management early on. The complaints I have about this podcast are trivial, such as different audio volume levels and the fact that it’s just the girls speaking, and does not feature any interesting segments.
Rating: 8 ears out of 10!
article by Sarah Guo ‘22
design by Shami Kasireddy ‘23