Amplifying your voice as a female founder

Becoming the face and voice of a startup is one of the most crucial skills a founder must master. For early-stage startups, the founding team’s background, experiences, motivations, and the business origins are significant chapters of the narrative that founders need to convey compellingly.

However, this storytelling journey can be particularly daunting for female founders, who often face additional scrutiny and must work harder to ensure their voices are heard. Stories of being interrupted, patronised, or overlooked are unfortunately common themes in the LinkedIn feeds of female founders.

A striking example comes from the cybersecurity upskilling startup, CAPSLOCK, where a tally was kept during meetings to observe how often their two female founders were addressed compared to their male co-founder. Alarmingly, the male co-founder was spoken to over 80% of the time, even in meetings chaired by Lorna, the CEO, and a co-founder.

So, how can female founders confidently amplify their voices? To explore this question, we collaborated with Antler to host our first Female Founder Roundtable, bringing together a group of female founders and VC communication experts.

Our roundtable explored everything from building a personal brand beyond the company to effectively handling online negativity.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the session:

Embrace your experience and expertise: It can often feel unnatural to talk about your personal achievements, with many founders admitting to hiding behind the company page on LinkedIn. However, confidently sharing your expertise enhances, rather than detracts, from your company’s credibility. By sharing your own experience and expert perspectives, whether as your own posts or by engaging in wider conversations, you build trust and highlight the experts driving your business.

Founder profiles are more than the individual: A founder persona isn’t just about building recognition for yourself – it enables you to show the type of leader you are. People are inspired to work for a leader who shares their authentic self, passions and experiences. That’s a lot more powerful than a company post on LinkedIn when hiring.

A compelling persona is key for investment: Funding for female founders is still drastically behind male counterparts, with female-founded companies in Europe receiving only 2.8% of venture capital funding in 2023. Jack Davies, the European Marketing & PR Director at Antler, emphasised the importance of a founder persona when looking to attract investors:

“Building a public persona as a founder is part of your job – you are the ambassador for your brand. From an early-stage VC perspective, we are looking to invest in you as a founder, just as much as the business, so your persona must showcase your passion and interest. We are looking for outliers who see the world differently. We want to know this person is someone who has it in them to win and build something that is category defining.”

Build your community: Whether it’s a personal connection or an active LinkedIn group, a solid community can help champion your efforts to raise your own profile. Whether that’s encouraging each other to bite the bullet and post accomplishments online or engaging with the content to support and encourage the author, you can build your confidence and persona one day at a time. Female Founder Rise was called out as a great place to start when you don’t know where to turn, connecting female founders throughout the UK for collaboration, support and growth.