Can you fundraise in Silicon Valley while pregnant?
My co-founder and I have a baby. Our company, Sourcery, is three and a half years old, and to nurture its growth we are raising our next round of funding.
My co-founder, Na’ama Moran, is our CEO. She has excelled as a fundraiser, raising over $6M to date.
This time she is fundraising while pregnant.
Na’ama is direct. She’s not the kind of person to pretend about anything. In the third trimester, her condition is nearly impossible to hide anyway. And yet surprisingly, most investors have scrupulously avoided discussing the fact.
The majority of investors — 96% of the venture capitalists — are men. It’s likely they suppress the question because they don’t want to come off as the insensitive brute who doubts a female founder’s commitment to her company by drawing attention to her pregnancy.
But just because they aren’t asking, it doesn’t mean the pregnancy isn’t foremost in their minds. It is almost worse left unaddressed. It lingers as a significant uncertainty and manifests itself in the form of an unconscious bias the investors themselves don’t realize. For all the science and metrics of success, the “pattern matching” that investors engage in, a lot of investment decisions come down to gut feeling about the founders’ ability to execute.
On a call last month, a male investor finally raised the issue of pregnancy and whether Na’ama should lead our fundraising. When Na’ama responded calmly, he expressed relief. “I was really worried about how you would react. But I needed to tell you that everyone you meet will wonder how your pregnancy will impact your ability to deliver the fundraising goals.”
Start-ups are notoriously complicated endeavors. Like everyone who has spent years in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen many companies experience challenges, including start-ups with male executives who were unprepared for the stress of children because they assumed their partners would be doing the work, and that it wouldn’t impact them. When male executives have families, it is invisible. When female executives have children, they don’t have the option of hiding it. They have to plan responsibly.
This double standard applies to many women in professional roles, but the life choices of a female CEO who is also fundraising are put under even more scrutiny.
I may be a male founder, but that doesn’t mean kids won’t play into my working life. My wife — a mechanical engineer, who recently accepted a new job — and I are also thinking about children. I’m watching with interest as ideas about children and work evolve in my life and in Silicon Valley.
I am in the privileged position to observe raw and sincere impressions of strong women who are dear to me, who are deliberate, fiercely intelligent, and brave enough to bring any issue to the fore.
As a co-founder, I am no less invested in the business than our future investors. Far from being coy, however, Na’ama and I have been talking about how pregnancy and children will fit into our company’s work patterns and practices for months. The more we’ve discussed it, the more I have come to realize how lucky I am that we can.
After the call with the investor who questioned whether her pregnancy would affect her ability to close the round, Na’ama was stirred. She told me that this is the first time she felt what it is like to be a woman, rather than a person, in her interactions with investors. This experience has inspired her to engage more with other women in the tech community.
Today Na’ama dedicates all of her waking hours to fundraising, and she encouraged me to write about this if I must. And I must. I couldn’t be silent about it, both as a business partner and as a friend. When I asked her about what this was like for her, Na’ama wrote me the following:
I actually find the baby energizing. I plan to take a few weeks off, and we’re lucky to have a spare room in our current Sourcery office, which I will convert into a nursery. I’m working on hiring a nanny, and am fortunate to be able to draw on the help of friends.
It is my responsibility to ensure the growth of the company. My pregnancy gives me yet another reminder of the importance of working closely with my team, to constantly transfer knowledge, to avoid information silos whether they are in my head or in anyone else’s. Reducing dependencies is a familiar concept to all startups, so we’re reducing my “bus factor,” or baby factor, so to speak.
As you know Peretz, the company isn’t just me. It’s a team. It is a multigenerational family. And it is all founders’ responsibility to remove themselves as a bottleneck in any process.
I grew up in a close-knit village, where everyone felt responsible to help each other. My father was a turkey farmer. My sister and I grew up close to the earth, and we are a resilient bunch. My daughter will be too.
Several women have spoken out about their experience fundraising while pregnant. In 2012, Talia Goldstein felt ashamed and hid her “pregnancy from investors, from family, even from my own business partner.” When Talia finally broke the news, her business partner left. In 2015, pregnant and fundraising again, she was more comfortable to lead with the issue.
A recent NYT article “What It’s Really Like to Risk It All in Silicon Valley” profiles a pregnant Ms. Miller as she is fundraising. Her mentor’s advice is to both raise the pregnancy but downplay the impact:
Wait until the second meeting to mention it, [her mentor] said. “Then say: ‘I’m pregnant. And I’m so well organized that my baby’s due on Christmas Day, which will be a slow time. I don’t expect it will faze me at all. I’m married to a man who will be a primary caregiver, and this is no different from investing in a man whose wife is pregnant.’”
I think it’s dangerous to downplay the impact of childbirth, as something that will be shrugged off in a few weeks. Having a child is a life changing experience. Things rarely go as expected. The baby will have a mind of its own.
The best advice for both investors and founders is learn from others who have been through the same situation (Rhea Drysdale) and be honest about plans and backup plans, addressing it as any other major life situation that could happen to a founder.
For Na’ama and me, this has been an opportunity. We’ve become more comfortable talking through the issues that many people in our company will one day face. We better understand each others’ human strengths and challenges. Her pregnancy has reaffirmed our commitment to creating a nurturing company where wonderful people of all stripes work.
It has also made us more prepared to deal with any adversity that might arise: we are sharing more, we are forecasting better, we are truly mapping out what the future of our company will look like.
We also see this as an opportunity to take a barometric reading on the world we live in. Na’ama’s choice to be honest about her pregnancy has brought many issues to the forefront.
How investors react is a good test. If pregnancy presents a major complication with an investor, we probably want to cut the cord with them anyway. Good investors are supportive through easy times and hard times.
We’re ready for this, and when other people in our company start families, we’ll be ready for that, too. Thanks to our peers, advisors, customers, and investors, friends and family, we’re still growing.
