She Knows How to Play the Game

Indeed, it's at the intersection of networks of power and nuts-and-bolts entrepreneurial education where the FWE does much of its work. For three-and-a-half years, the forum has been offering its own boot camp for startups, called "the eSeries," where success is measured in millions of dollars raised. The program takes 15 to 20 "students," each of whom is starting an early-stage company. The entrepreneurs as a group choose which seminars they'd like to take over the three months: negotiating a term sheet, building an A-list board, determining your company's valuation, hiring talent, doing deals, and, above all, pitching your business plan. Classes are taught by top-tier VCs, attorneys, and CEOs -- all of whom become contacts for the students after the classes end.

Over the long term, the students form a kind of cohort, an instant alumni network of other entrepreneurs at their same early stage, whom they draw upon as they travel the startup road. So much for the outmoded picture of the lone-wolf entrepreneur going it on his own. "You can be more successful if you collaborate," says Brosseau. Indeed, some 20 to 30 messages per day are distributed on the FWE email list, which helps the group members tap into one another's networks: Does anyone have any contacts at this company? Which PR firm is still taking on clients? What's the going rate for a director-level marketing person?

For all of FWE's emphasis on training and education, though, Brosseau says that her most basic message to first-time entrepreneurs is: "Be bold. I kiddingly say that I give chutzpah lessons. So much of this is about having the wherewithal and the confidence to believe that you can do it. Women tend to spend way too much time preparing instead of just winging it. And the fact is, we can succeed by just winging it. There are times when taking a leap is better for you than taking another course."

One FWE event that's all about winging it is a sort of entrepreneurial dating game called "Get Connected." In fact, it was originally called "Entrepreneur Match.com," until a dating service with a similar name objected. Contestants display their skills -- marketing, finance, operations -- with a colored dot on their name tag. Strangers form instant startups and then race to create out-there business ideas in just a few minutes, complete with a one-page summary. After the "companies" do their pitches, the winning groups get a dinner for four together. "If in 20 minutes they could come up with something that creative and could work that well together in a situation where they've never met, who knows what could happen over dinner?" asks Brosseau.

Starting Up the Startups

Denise Brosseau knows what startups need because she's exactly the kind of startup addict that she now helps get funded. "I have the bug," she grins. "I totally have the bug." She's gone full throttle on no fewer than five startup companies herself, including a computer consulting business that she ran in her spare time while she maintained a full-time senior-executive job at Broderbund Software.

At her first startup, a Washington, DC-based travel agency, where she was employee number two, she worked 16 to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 7 months -- with only 3 days off. "It was hell," she says now. At the age of 24, she ended up in a hospital, utterly stressed out, with a kidney stone. And that's not her only startup battle scar. At Friend Technologies, a Bay-area company, the staff went from 18 employees to 80, dropped to 25 employees, jumped back to 80, and then had a total meltdown -- all in one year.

For the past seven years, however, Brosseau has focused her energies on helping other women entrepreneurs navigate the treacherous startup waters. The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, which began in November 1993, grew out of a research project by Jennifer Gill Roberts, a business-school classmate of Brosseau's. The study analyzed why women entrepreneurs weren't getting funded. (Back then, women-led companies were receiving less than 2% of all venture-capital funding.) "She concluded that women needed more knowledge about the venture process," says Brosseau, "that they needed better and stronger networks with one another, and that they needed access to attorneys and accountants, as well as to investors, so that they could move their businesses to the next level."

Thus was born FWE. When the group reached 250 members in the summer of 1997, Brosseau wrote a business plan. Months later, when the group's membership reached 350, she quit her job to run the organization full time.

Brosseau concedes that progress thus far has been slow but steady: The percentage of VC funds to women-led companies has gone up from less than 2% of $4.9 billion, or $98 million, in 1993 to 4.6% of $35.4 billion, or $1.6 billion, in the first half of 2000. And she insists that the pipeline is now primed with women who have the experience required to make a huge impact. From 1998 until the first half of this year, for example, the percentage of venture-financed startups with a woman on the senior-management team jumped from 21% to 43%. The women on those teams will be in a good position to go for the CEO slot at their next startup.