The Truth about Entrepreneurship

Every few months, a new report comes out reminding us that women receive somewhere between 1-2% of all venture capital funding, and the response is always the same: outrage, think pieces, panels at conferences, and then… absolutely nothing changes. It’s led to less women wanting investors to back their brand, and leaning into bootstrapping their future.

The statistic is real and the frustration is valid, but calling it out hasn’t done much to change the bias baked into the ecosystem. But there is a version of this conversation that nobody seems to be having, which is that for a growing number of women building businesses right now, the funding gap is starting to feel less like a closed door and more like a door they never care to walk through in the first place.

Many women are choosing to bootstrap over raise.

Women-owned businesses grew at nearly twice the rate of their male counterparts between 2019 and 2023 (credit), and from 2019 to 2024, women-owned business revenue grew by 53.8% (credit). Those numbers are surprisingly not being driven by venture-backed product companies and SaaS startups.   They’re driven by service providers, digital creators, and agency owners who built something of their own without giving a single percent of it away. 

The new wave of women’s entrepreneurship doesn’t involve a pitch deck, a cap table, a board of advisors. It looks like controlling your own fully booked calendar, creating a platform to own, and a client roster of people you work with because you want to.

Some fields require using outside capital and investments to get off the ground at all like biotech, SAAS, manufacturing, anything with a physical product that needs patience to build. In those spaces, the funding gap is a real crisis that deserves every bit of the attention it gets. But the rise of women in entrepreneurship over the last five years has not been in those fields. That distinction matters enormously when we talk about what women actually need to build something that works.

Personal brands transformed into community brands.

59% of female founders are solo entrepreneurs building brand authority and creatively using social media, branding, and storytelling to create a platform to power their ideas. (credit). The categories exploding with women-owned businesses are those of thought leadership, agencies, service-based businesses. They’re ones where your expertise is the product, your reputation is the marketing, and your startup costs can be $0. You do not need a Series A to start a podcast, build a community, run an agency, or sell a paid newsletter.

The question is not just whether women can access funding. The question lies in whether the funding model actually makes sense for the business they want to build. 

When a founder takes on a $2 million check, they’re not just taking money. They’re taking on a relationship with someone whose entire job is to make sure that money comes back to them, on a timeline that works for their fund, with a say on how to do it. Founders are accountable to their quarterly expectations, their vision for scale, their definition of what success looks like. The autonomy that made entrepreneurship appealing in the first place is eliminated the second you bring on capital, and thus, a new boss. The number one reason women start businesses is flexibility, owned income and the desire to be in charge (credit). So why is the go-to advice for ambitious women that they should throw away their ownership, control, and freedom?

A tale of two roads

Take Bekah (name changed) for instance, a member of The Do-ers who runs a boutique PR agency. Within her first 6 months, she had 7 clients bringing in a total of $35k per month, with an assistant she paid $1,500 for. She loves her clients, sets her own schedule, and can go on vacation without asking for permission.

On the flipside, I have a friend (let’s call her Maria) who is a SAAS founder. She has raised $1.2M, pays herself $72k in the most expensive city in the country, payroll that keeps her up at night, and a board she reports to with her decisions. 

The argument for Maria is that in taking the investment capital, she also has a stronger position for a life-changing exit.  She’s bought into the idea that you suffer now and cash out later, and that the payout at the end makes all of it worth it. And sometimes it does. 

Both Bekah and Maria would call themselves successful, and I would agree both of them have their own version of success and they each have something the other desires. One of them is comfortable today. The other has the dream of a very comfortable tomorrow.

Funding isn’t evil. It’s simply less attractive now.

The point is not that funding is bad or that ambition is overrated, quite the contrary. It’s that there are now more paths to a genuinely good business outcome than the venture playbook of decades past. Thepath that gives women the most ownership, autonomy, and sanity is increasingly the one women are choosing. Even if the payoff isn’t a $1B exit. 

The 2% statistic deserves to be fixed, and we need to keep fighting for great women’s businesses to get the funding they deserve. The bias in VC needs to continue to be called out. But the more interesting story is the one happening outside of Silicon Valley and New York City, where women are building six-figure and seven-figure businesses on their own terms. Where they have something of their own, without oversight, without a cap table, and without having to explain their vision to a room of men deciding if their idea is worthy. That is not the fallback plan. For a lot of women right now, that is the whole point.