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Women Startup Challenge 2020- NYC at Google

Applications are now open for the 10th Women Startup Challenge, co-hosted by Women who Tech and Google.

Be one of 10 women-led startups chosen to pitch a panel of top investors at Google this summer.

Prizes include;

Grand Prize winner will receive a $50,000 cash grant (equity free).
The W Fund is committing a $25,000 investment (after the fund completes its first close) and pending final due diligence on the chosen startup.
All finalists will also receive pro-bono services, and participate in our Investor Mentoring Day where founders will meet one-on-one with several different investors.

Women Who Tech is on a mission to help fund and empower women founders building products to solve the biggest issues facing this world.

Applications are open until March 29, 2020 at 11:59 pm PDT.

For more information on the criteria, and to apply visit- Women who tech

Desiree Vargas Wrigley to future CEOs: “Often you’re the one who’s holding yourself back”

After exiting the first company she founded, Desiree Vargas Wrigley—no relation to Chicago’s famous Wrigleys—found herself a stay-at-home-mom for the first time, caring for her two boys who were both under the age of five. Finding activities for her kids proved to be a huge challenge for Desiree, but one that inspired her to embark on a new phase in her career.

She tried using online parenting magazines and other traditional outlets, like signing up for basketball leagues, but found the process frustrating and time-consuming. She decided the online kids’ activity space needed an update, and envisioned a service similar to ClassPass to help parents spend time with their children.

“I realized there was no easy way to find kids’ activities, and I wondered, ‘How could [a platform for] this not exist?’ ” Desiree decided to create Pearachute in an effort to solve this problem. A website and app promoting family activities that are fun, easy, and educational, Pearachute operates similarly to ClassPass or OpenTable—users can search an area for activities and then register online to participate.

Discovering entrepreneurship

Originally from Costa Rica, Desiree grew up in Kansas City and attended Yale University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies. While at Yale, Desiree discovered a passion for corporate social responsibility (CSR)—a business practice grown from the belief that corporations should be accountable to their clients, communities, and themselves. In a 2019 interview with Forbes, Desiree credits studying CSR with the realization that she wanted to be an entrepreneur:

“Entrepreneurs were the foundation of corporate social responsibility in the ways they sought to maximize stakeholder value. My mind started to open to a different path, one that I had never previously thought would be open to a non-technical daughter of a single mom, scholarship/financial aid recipient, Latina from Kansas—starting my own business.”

Her passion to help build more socially responsible businesses led Desiree to accept her first post-college job at the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City nonprofit with a focus on fostering entrepreneurship within the city (they also work to address achievement gaps in education). More than ten years after her time at Kauffman, Desiree has created a similar ethos at Pearachute: in addition to making parents’ lives easier, the app strives to foster creativity and learning in children and to strengthen local entrepreneurship by advocating for small businesses and encouraging parents to plug into the kid-oriented services around them.

Co-founding her first startup

But long before Pearachute came to be, Desiree co-founded her first company, GiveForward, with Ethan Austin in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That large-scale tragedy made it clear to Desiree that there was a lack of viable ways for individuals to donate directly to people who needed help with medical expenses. GiveForward was founded in 2008, when online crowdfunding wasn’t yet a popular concept—websites such as GoFundMe and Kickstarter didn’t even exist.

Seven years after its inception, GiveForward was doing well. In 2015, it earned $5 million in revenue and took in more than $200 million in donations, per Desiree. In order to continue that growth, Desiree decided to step down as CEO, saying that she didn’t have the necessary experience to run the company.

Now, she says, “I made a pretty big mistake and hired a CEO, thinking that I didn’t have what it took to bring the company to the next level,” Desiree says. Her choice to hand over the company led to GoFundMe’s eventual acquisition of GiveForward. She says she’s since learned that it’s important for a CEO to assess their own self-confidence on a regular basis. “Overcoming self-doubt is probably the most important thing you can do to get to the next level,” she says, “because often you’re the one that’s holding yourself back.”

Finding opportunity in an unexpected moment

Although exiting GiveForward landed Desiree at home for the first time in her career, she credits that moment with sparking the inspiration for Pearachute. The company launched nationally in 2019 and now has over 150 employees, who are mostly women and moms, according to Desiree. The site partners with 6,000 activity providers—with whom parents and caregivers can register in advance—and offers a diverse range of activities for families. To date, Pearachute has generated around $3 million in revenue for the small businesses that use the platform, which is Desiree’s proudest accomplishment as CEO.

Pearachute is designed to make it easy and simple for parents to find activities, connect with their children, and meet other families in the same stage of life. Addressing one of Desiree’s personal priorities, the activities themselves are usually low-commitment (i.e. parents only need to sign up for one class at a time), which allows for more flexibility when it comes to scheduling.

Outside-the-box fundraising

Desiree says her established relationships with investors helped her secure her initial funding, and she raised $1.2 million before starting the company. Having that money allowed Desiree to build a team that would support her vision. At this point (February 2020), Pearachute has raised $4 million both through seed and VC funding.

Building a tech start-up in Chicago is no easy task, in large part due to a lack of VC funding within the city. VCs play a huge financial role in the industry, with Fortune magazine reporting that VC funding totaled $400 billion from 2009 to 2017. Within that time period, Latinx women only received .4 percent (or $16 million) of that $400 billion.

Desiree has appeared on several lists of the highest-funded Latinx women in the country, having raised $11 million in her career. While she’s proud of that accomplishment, she also notes that $11 million isn’t a lot when compared to fundraising by other companies—especially in Silicon Valley. She adds that her high ranking shows how much work still needs to be done for Latinx founders.

“We don’t [see] enough big checks being written for diverse founders early on,” she says. “It’s very hard for our companies to show product-market fit [and then] we only have one swing at-bat before we run out of money.”

Re-framing her perspective as a strength

Desiree believes that one of the main reasons underrepresented founders have a hard time getting funding is that their ideas aren’t seen as relatable to investors—who, for the most part, are white men. While selling an idea that doesn’t connect with a white, male audience can make finding investors difficult, Desiree adds that her outsider’s perspective is exactly what allowed her to her identify the need for Pearachute—and she encourages potential founders to reframe their perspective as a strength.

“I think [underrepresented founders] are uniquely positioned to see opportunities, especially in consumer-space, that people from different cultural backgrounds just can’t see yet,” she reflects.

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photos courtesy of Pearachute

Ashlee Ammons of Mixtroz on conquering the fear of starting over

In 2014, Ashlee Ammons was living a comfortable life in New York City, producing celebrity driven events and working in brand marketing. She’s close with her mom, Kerry Shrader, and one day Ashlee called to vent about an awkward experience she’d had at a conference mixer. The two women realized that, despite having strong networks in their respective fields and feeling confident in their social skills, they’d both found it difficult to strike up conversation in a professional setting—especially in the digital age. After four hours on the phone, the duo hatched an idea. They saw themselves as natural connectors, able to bring people together from all walks of life, and wondered, “How do we do this with software?”

Their answer? Mixtroz. A mashup of “Mixer” and “intros,” Mixtroz is an app designed to help event attendees connect, breaking the ice and building engagement while collecting real-time data for event organizers. In 2018, Kerry and Ashlee became the 37th and 38th black women to have raised $1 million in funding, and their clients include TEDX, Alabama Power, and universities that use the app to help incoming freshmen meet new people. So how did this mother/daughter team get from a phone conversation to co-founding their own company? Read on.

Go “all in”

After they came up with the idea for Mixtroz and decided to forge ahead, Kerry put in long hours in Nashville while Ashlee moonlighted from New York, holding down her full-time job. Ashlee liked predictability and order, and she enjoyed her big-city lifestyle—entrepreneurship was a total departure from who she was at the time. But in October 2015, Kerry was diagnosed with breast cancer. Within a month, she went through surgery and radiation and still never once lost focus on Mixtroz. Kerry’s determination in the face of hardship inspired Ashlee to dive fully into their journey together. Ashlee packed her bags and moved into her family’s home in Nashville, surrendering her professional identity to start from scratch with her mother. It was a humbling refresh when she had already risen to the top of her career. “Entrepreneurship made me do it again,” she says.

Take care of yourself

During that first summer in Nashville, Ashlee suffered from FOMO, watching from the sidelines as her friends explored extraordinary things. As a 28-year-old living at home, she saw life passing her by and started experiencing signs of depression. “Entrepreneurship is hard. If people don’t take care of themselves mentally and physically, it’s a recipe for disaster,” she says. Ashlee sought treatment to address her depression, and eventually got back on track. Still, founding Mixtroz—like almost every startup—meant pushing through a slow start accompanied by rejection. “There’s a huge misconception that entrepreneurship is a sprint when it’s actually a marathon,” says Ashlee. Blocking out the noise of naysayers, Ashlee and Kerry persisted: refining and iterating on their product, listening to feedback from early adopters, and continuing to push their product forward.

Do your homework

The two founders pursued every opportunity to meet with investors and began entering pitch competitions. “If I hear anybody saying anything contrary to me, my mom, my business, my team, I am ferocious. I don’t have a soft spoken bone in my body,” Ashlee said. This served her well, especially when competition was tight. At the Rise of the Rest competition in May 2018, Ashlee pitched Mixtroz to Steve Case, former CEO of AOL. “We may not have had the best product,” Ashlee recalls, “But I was the most prepared and I came ready to win.” Case commended Ashlee after she finished her pitch, the last slide of which included an African proverb that Case wrote about in his book, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” In an effort to tailor the presentation to her audience, Ashlee did some homework beforehand that ultimately helped her win the competition. She walked away with $100,000, and she and her mom decided to relocate from Nashville to Birmingham, Alabama, where the competition had taken place.

Find the right geographic fit

Ashlee and Kerry had already spent time in Birmingham, where they participated in Innovation Depot’s Velocity Accelerator. When asked what Mixtroz brings to the city today, Ashlee says, “We are literally reshaping what people think of entrepreneurship. We are making it more colorblind, more inclusive, more age agnostic, more gender agnostic—that is a great thing.” Birmingham itself is a city that implements coding programs into core curriculums and provides proper resources so that young adults don’t feel the need to move away from Alabama to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. The city has redefined entrepreneurship so that it’snot just “a sport for the elite,” as Ashlee says. She adds, “I want their journey to be a bit easier than mine was.”

“I am as much of an entrepreneur as a guy who puts a lawnmower in the back of his truck and realizes that he can offer something that the competition can’t,” Ashlee continues. She credits Birmingham’s environment with helping Mixtroz to thrive, even positing that she and Kerry wouldn’t have been able to pursue their business anywhere else. “Birmingham listened and didn’t assume. We’ve had such an ugly history here. It’s not lost on me that my grandma is 90 and she lived in Alabama during [the fight for] civil rights, yet my mom and I raised a million dollars here.”

Change the narrative

Although Ashlee and Kerry had a limited knowledge of entrepreneurship before embarking on their Mixtroz journey, the thing that mattered most was that they cared about solving the problem they had unearthed: how to connect individuals at networking events and gather data in the digital age. Their early promise and dedication was seen by family and friends, who raised $200,000 to fund Mixtroz at its outset. This was at a time where African American females, on average, were raising $36,000—an upsetting number when compared to white males who, at the same stage, were raising an average total of $1.3 million. From the earliest part of her startup journey, Ashlee learned an indelible takeaway: “Don’t let the fear of not knowing something stop you from starting.”

Facebook for disasters: meet Meena Palaniappan’s Atma Connect app

Somewhere between the desire to help disaster-prone communities navigate preparedness to revolutionizing the way marginalized people use social media, Meena Palaniappan gave rise to an app most easily described as “facebook for disasters.”

Atma Connect is a tech non-profit that runs the AtmaGo app, a local social network with 4.5 million users in Indonesia. Launched in 2015, the app was pioneered to spread disaster alerts, share safe routes and locations of government shelters, and even alert locals to signs of waterborne disease in children.

Then, when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2018, thousands turned to AtmaGo to alert and support friends and family. In the wake of 1,700 deaths and the displacement of over 70,000 people, locals used the app to host humanitarian workers and direct those affected to resources such as food, water, and healthcare.

Today, Meena envisions AtmaGo becoming the largest pro-social network in the world. Her passion to build resilience and social connectedness for billions of people living in low-income communities—while on the forefront of climate change—is clear. Communities with developed and successful social networks have been proven to have fewer deaths and the unique ability to bounce back quicker from disasters.

The Backstory

For the past two decades, Meena has been implementing community-based technology-related projects in Africa and Asia. Before AtmaGo, Meena was the principal investigator for a USAID project to improve water service for low-income communities in Indonesia.

While working on climate-related issues in India, Meena met a woman with a brilliant water conservation solution but no easy means of sharing this information with those in her community who could benefit. At the time, most (if not all) mobile networking platforms were geared towards collecting information from poor people to serve larger institutions.

Meena jumped at the opportunity to amplify the power of people through peer communication, highlight their ingenuity, and release trapped knowledge with the goal of building a grassroots movement for change.

“Why hasn’t a social tech project reached the scale of Facebook?” Meena asked herself. “I firmly believe we need to move beyond traditional development strategies which see poor people as objects and work to build the agency of people to direct and lead their own change.”

Building from the ground up

The first app launched by Atma Connect in 2014 was a neighborhood water price sharing platform. Making evident the importance of focusing on the needs and opportunities of people living in low-income communities, users immediately requested that Atma Connect expand their services.

At a scale and reach of just 10% of the population of Jakarta, AtmaGo could add 6,980 years of healthy life, save $106 million in avoided damages, and save $4.7 million in healthcare costs. (Check out this evaluation report for a detailed account of all the ways in which AtmaGo can improve disaster preparedness and response in Indonesia.)

In order to build their team and engage users, Meena used a variety of key tactics like human-centered design interviews and in-person marketing. Ambassadors, power users and friends of Atma promoted the platform. Atma reached out to local journalists and other organizations to share information and promote Atma sponsored events like garbage clean-ups and tree-planting.

Unlike other social-centered networks (e.g., Instagram and Twitter), AtmaGo is a trusted source because it is organized locally to allow users immediate insight into neighborhood happenings. The app is available on low-cost phones as well as a mobile website, designed specifically for intermittent internet environments and low bandwidth.

According to Meena, “Atma combines digital tools with citizen journalism and on-the-ground reporting as well as partnerships to ensure that local users see real-life community improvements.” She wanted to have the ability to “take a lean startup approach and truly follow the needs of people on the ground and not be beholden to larger institutions and interests.”

Atma is just the beginning of protecting vulnerable communities through a fundamentally different approach. AtmaGo allows users to read, write, and comment on posts in four categories: Reporting problems, discussing solutions, finding jobs, and sharing events.

So what?

The success of Atma thus far has inspired Meena and only made her more humble—a trait she hopes to use to amplify all that is good about humanity. The challenges along the way have inevitably shaped her perspective, and she admits that “The hardest part is probably raising the funding to keep this going and developing earned income that is mission-aligned.” Put another way, Meena will not allow Atma to contribute to surveillance capitalism or erode the social fabric by monetizing people’s attention.

As a woman of color, Meena possesses a unique drive that makes her a more empathetic leader. She is adamant about ensuring that everyone within her organization has their voice heard. Focused and passionate, Meena works to uplift everyone around her and outline their collective contribution to AtmaGo. Meena’s devotion is also evident in the stories of Atma’s users, who embody the profound change that is possible when amplifying the brilliance and ingenuity of every single person—especially of those who have historically not been heard. This video illustrates AtmaGo’s particular ability to do just that.

What’s next?

In a Medium article written by Meena herself, she admits that there are major problems with social media but also mentions the huge benefits communities can reap from an approach that centers helping people—radically and widely.

In 2020, Atma hopes to build a revenue engine by monetizing the economic loss prevention and mortality impact of AtmaGo through partnering with insurance companies. Atma also plans on expanding the tech non-profit’s value by increasing online and offline engagement, integrating more disaster services and including more voices directly from users. Possibly the most exciting next move is scaling Atma’s impact from Indonesia to Puerto Rico and Colombia.

In conclusion, Meena leaves us with a few tips for women entrepreneurs hoping to create the next big thing:

Don’t give up.

Remember why you are doing this.

Take care of yourself—body, mind, and spirit.

Always be celebrating, all the little successes.

Amanda DoAmaral closes a $615K seed round—and opens up about her roller coaster year as a founder

Amanda DoAmaral is the founder and CEO of Fiveable, an edtech livestream platform with a growing user base of teachers and students from every state in the US. She has described Fiveable as Twitch for education: “If kids can get help with video games, they should be able to get help with homework, too.”

Fiveable focuses on preparing students for AP exams, and—as of November 2019—the platform has hosted livestreams for close to 30,000 unique users. For the 2018-19 school year, Fiveable students reported a 92% pass rate across the seven subjects offered, while the national average was 55%. (Full disclosure: Beta Boom was one of Fiveable’s earliest backers. Amanda earned $20K in capital and a spot in our Salt Lake program in June 2018.)

News hits for Fiveable suggest a near-meteoric rise: after Beta Boom’s early vote of confidence, Amanda posted a viral YouTube video advocating for students in an exchange with a College Board exec, then she and her tiny team earned a spot at gener8tor, a Wisconsin-based accelerator which promises $100K in investment, and in June 2019 she impressed celebrity entrepreneur Marcus Lemonis enough to garner $10K of his personal capital on top of taking second place at the 5 Lakes Pitch competition.

What’s more, the company announced it closed on a $615K seed round just after the new year. But rather than let that money tell her story, Amanda took to the company’s website to speak frankly about how Fiveable almost didn’t make it through 2019. We’ve pulled together some of her notes on the struggles faced and lessons learned on her startup journey so far.

Follow your passion—which sometimes means taking a detour

Amanda joined Teach for America right out of college, moving from Boston to Oakland to teach AP World History and Geography to public high school students. At first she wasn’t sure she was qualified to teach AP courses, but it turned out she loved it. After five years, however, she had to confront the fact that teaching wasn’t financially sustainable for her. “I was paying more for my student loans than my rent,” and Bay Area rental prices weren’t cheap. What she didn’t realize was that staring down her own financial precarity would be the spark for a much-needed startup.

Learn to see yourself as an entrepreneur

Amanda left her teaching job, traveled a bit, then moved back to the East Coast. Her next job involved making fundraising calls to potential campaign donors, and many of the people who gave money were startup founders. At that point, she had only an abstract idea of what startups and entrepreneurship looked like. But she started researching how to build a business, and realized, “I could have an idea, try it, and pitch it to people.” This was 2017, she was living with other young campaigners and looking for a way to use what she’d learned as a teacher. “It was the students who lit the way,” she explains. Kids from the school where she’d taught were asking for support, so Amanda started livestreaming AP history lessons for them. “It didn’t start out as ‘I’m gonna build a startup’—it started out as ‘I’m gonna help people [in the way] I know I can help them.’”

Turn your struggles into an asset

The fact that Amanda hadn’t ever considered founding a tech business is one indication of her “outsider” status in the startup world. But reflecting further on how that’s helped her (and her business) succeed, she notes, “I’ve always felt like I’ve had to work ten times harder to get to do whatever I have to do. Whether it was as a kid or in college, I knew I had to go faster and that’s how I’ve approached founding this company. I think that’s part of the advantage—knowing that people are going to overlook me and so I have to shoot higher than they’re gonna expect so that I can come out on top. I’m pretty sure that all female founders and founders of color operate in that way, and that’s probably what propels these businesses forward.”

Sometimes you need to go a little “nuts”

From her first unofficial livestream to the day she completed Beta Boom’s startup program in 2018, not even three months had passed. Amanda returned from Salt Lake City with a clearer view of herself as a founder, then promptly moved back in with her mom and got to work on what she’s called the craziest thing she’s done on her startup journey: The Fiveable House. “I knew I needed a team, [but] I didn’t know any marketers or developers. I didn’t know anybody outside of my universe of teachers. The only way I could think to move this idea forward was to rent a house in Philly and convince people to come live and work with me—for basically nothing. It was nuts!” But it worked. The Fiveable house drew in Amanda’s first two employees and has since moved to Madison, then Milwaukee—where Amanda still lives and works with teammates Tan Ho and Aaron Levin.

Let your users be your guide

As Fiveable expands its course offerings and experiments with new formats, Amanda stays attuned to what students and teachers are asking for, “because they seem to know what I should do next more than anybody.” What’s more, she’s also thinking about generational trends outside her immediate platform, observing, “This generation of teenagers is very connected. We’re seeing this with [activism]—teenagers are running massive movements because they’re connected to each other. But we’re not seeing that with education. When you think about a teenager right now, they’re on their phone, they’re hopping around on YouTube, they’re watching videos on Twitch, they’re on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—but where is the learning happening? I think what we’re trying to do is just connect to where kids are right now.”

Don’t be afraid to operate outside of a tech hub

Since starting Fiveable in Maine, Amanda and her team have worked in Philadelphia, Madison, and Milwaukee. Beta Boom seeks out startups that may be overlooked due to geography, and Amanda explains how being based somewhere “small” can be an asset: “These startup ecosystems are so much smaller than Silicon Valley’s. Even just pitching in a competition [like Milwaukee’s 5 Lakes Pitch] and getting to the final round,” is a unique experience. “I’m not competing against 20 other edtech [startups]. One of the judges [at 5 Lakes] called us the most exciting startup in Milwaukee right now, and there’s no way we’d get that title in the Bay Area, in New York, even in Chicago. It’s worth it for us to be in a smaller place so that we can stand out and all of these different people can help us.”

Find a way to connect with other founders

As she found her footing as a leader and Fiveable continued to grow, Amanda and her team moved to Madison to take part in gener8tor, a “concierge accelerator” that provides three months of business development programming on top of significant capital. However, she’s said that one of her key takeaways from the experience was meeting other founders. “It’s hard when your team doesn’t understand all the pieces you’re dealing with, and neither does anybody else. My family has no idea!” Because she lives and works with her team, Amanda admits it can be hard to expand her social network: “I have to be able to know other people who ‘get it’ in order to feel less lonely. [And through gener8tor] I’ve made friends who are starting their own companies and going through the exact same things but in their own way.”

Be prepared to weather the unknown

On top of the energy that infused her early successes, Amanda remembers a lot of uncertainty—and that hasn’t disappeared even today. This rollercoaster of emotions is one of the first things she likes to mention to would-be founders: “I honestly never knew how high the highs could be and how low the lows could be. Going from on the floor crying, calling my mom, to a total swing the next week—getting opportunities where people would see my vision with me. Just knowing that when you’re starting out, and that it will keep happening, is a big part.”