Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and C.E.O. of Bumble, didn’t bother to pull punches onstage at Vanity Fair’s second-annual Founders Fair summit at Spring Studios in New York on Thursday. “I think traditionally, power is perceived as something that belongs to men and is an excuse to behave in a disempowered way,” she said in conversation with Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, and Jessica Iclisoy, the founder and C.E.O. of California Baby. “I think we’ve been conditioned to think that there’s only one seat at the table . . . and I love that more women have been like, no, we’re going to build more seats.”
Wolfe Herd, a co-founder of Tinder, knows as well as anyone the obstacles that women face. She was involved in litigation related to harassment and discrimination after she left Tinder to start her own match-making company four years ago. Then, last month, Match Group, which owns Tinder, sued Bumble for violating its patents and trademarks. Bumble was quick to fire back, publishing an open letter to Match Group—“We swipe left on you . . . We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and, now, to intimidate us”—and filing a counter-suit accusing Match of using duplicitous tactics to obtain confidential information and attempting to scare off would-be investors. “Crowded meant ‘for men,’” Wolfe Herd said, in response to a question about what it was like entering a crowded dating-app market. “In this moment of failure and heartbreak, I saw the opportunity to rebuild something, to go into a crowded space and do it differently. I got so lucky because I was underestimated.”
Female entrepreneurs from a number of industries—media, politics, tech, fashion, and real estate, among others—convened at Vanity Fair’s Founders Fair to share stories and challenges of starting and running some of the world’s most innovative businesses. The day-long event, which featured a conversation with Jennifer Garner, began with a conversation between Katrina Lake, the founder and C.E.O. of online personal-shopping company Stitch Fix, and Emily Chang, a Bloomberg Television anchor who recently published a book about Silicon Valley’s boys’ club. “It really is pathetic how little money is going to female entrepreneurs,” Lake said. “I can be a visual representation of why you should back women.” (Another case in point: Anastasia Sartan, the founder and C.E.O. of Epytom, who announced on Thursday afternoon that her company would launch a program to sell made-to-order clothing designed by artificial intelligence, and informed by data from individual users.)
34-year-old Lake was the first female C.E.O. to take a company public in 2017, when Stitch Fix had its November I.P.O. “Relative to the V.C. world, which is a very low bar, I’ve met a lot more women investors in the public-market side, while in the V.C. world it’s single-digit percentages, where the people you meet will be women,” Lake said. “Seven percent,” Chang added, referring to an often-cited statistic that only seven percent of partners at V.C. firms are women. “Seven percent in the V.C. world,” Lake said. “I’d ballpark it at 15 percent [in the public market]. Still low, but better.”
Over and over, female founders emphasized the importance of breaking down barriers for other women. “We focus a lot on diversity . . . Diversity has really shown to get a better performance at a company,” Jennifer Fonstad, the co-founder of venture-capital firm Aspect Ventures, the largest female-founded venture firm in the world, said in another panel. Fonstad, who co-founded the firm with Theresia Gouw in 2014, added that 40 percent of Aspect Ventures’ portfolio of companies have a female co-founder. “If you have a diverse team, not only do you have a broader set of ideas when you’re making decisions,” Fonstad said. “It helps you avoid blind spots.”
Women’s representation in politics was also a topic of discussion during the day-long summit. So far in 2018, a record 575 women are running for office. “I think a lot of women don’t get asked to run. If you think about who the gatekeepers are in the Democratic Party . . . they try to go with a safe bet, who historically is a rich, white, old man,” Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run For Something, an organization seeking to support young, diverse candidates for down-ballot office, said in conversation with Lucy McBath, a congressional candidate in Georgia’s 6th District and Leslie Cockburn, a congressional candidate in Virginia’s 5th District.
Nearly every panel touched on #MeToo and Time’s Up, two pervasive subjects both in and out of Hollywood. “Six months later, the staying power has been surprising,” Tina Tchen, co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, said. “It’s a moment we’ve never seen before . . . to have come with that velocity, that amount of strength, and to have that staying power.” Time’s Up, which aims to help women dealing with sexual harassment in the entertainment industry and beyond, launched on New Year’s Day, just before the 75th Golden Globe Awards. Tchen, who served as assistant to President Barack Obama, chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, and executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, added that #MeToo’s Hollywood origins differentiate it from similar moments in the past. “I have to give the women of Hollywood credit,” she said. “They wanted to be sure that they did something that would meet the needs not just of women in their industry.”
