The Purse

Female angel investors and how can more women invest? Listen to the podcast interview with Maya Ghosn

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Female angel investors and how can more women invest? Listen to the podcast interview with Maya Ghosn

Jana Hlistova

Aug 27, 2023

Welcome to our #200 weekly newsletter.

“For women taking control of their financial future”

-Jana Hlistova

From The Purse

In this week’s newsletter, a spotlight a short extract from the interview with Maya Ghosn on The Purse Podcast.

Maya is a Lebanese/Brazilian investor and advisor to purpose-driven organisations with a focus on mental health and sexual health.

We talk about (including) female angel investors, Maya's investment thesis, how Maya invests in startups, how to level the playing field for female founders and how do we encourage more women to invest?

Listen to the full interview here.

And you can review the news in brief so you stay on top of global financial, economic and investing trends.

I hope you enjoy this week’s newsletter.

Until next week,

Jana

Female angel investors and how can more women invest?

We talk to Maya Ghosn on The Purse Podcast about female angel investors, levelling the playing field for female founders and how more women can invest in startups.

Maya Ghosn has joined us on The Purse Podcast.

She is a Lebanese/Brazilian investor and advisor to purpose-driven organisations with a focus on mental health and sexual health.

Maya is an active angel investor, investing personally and through Sequoia's scout program, as well as a Principal at Bridge Builders Collaborative, a US-based investment group focused on mental health.

Below is a short extract from the interview.

Jana: In the UK, only about 14%-17% of women invest in startups. But only half a percent of female angel investors have achieved a portfolio of 10 startups or more, which comes to about 157 women (in total)..out of a pool of approximately 3,500 or so angel investors. What are your thoughts on this? Why do you think that is?

Maya’s response:

I'll speak about the status quo more generally in terms of this paradigm of women investing far lower rates than men at the angel level.

I think that applies to both geographies (UK & the US). And I think there are a couple of very similar reasons.

One of them is just awareness.
I think that socially, this is very data driven in addition to qualitative from my own life experience, but collectively, women don't tend to talk about a business and certainly not their personal investments as much as men do.

It is not something that is a socially encouraged. It's not something that I think women are conditioned to do or supported in doing from a very early age.

If you think about the kinds of questions that parents or extend family members or teachers ask young girls versus the kinds of questions that are asked to young boys.

They're very, very different, right? I think that for girls, it's questions around maybe beauty or connection or social lives.

Versus with boys, it's what are you building? What did you create? I'm using this because I think it's important to understand that the roots come from very, very, very early days.

It doesn't mean we can't change them, but I think a lot of women are conditioned to not see that as something that is worth sharing…

So I think awareness is a really big one.

And speaking from my own lived experience, the facts that I learned in a very opportunistic way, just inspired by somebody I wanted to back.

The second is the risk. So angel investing in objective terms is extremely high risk, but there's a difference in how men versus women perceive the risk and I'd say internalise the risk in the sense that.

Generally speaking, women and men invest in risk differently.

So men, when they invest money, they see it as their money and they're more happy to take a risk with it.

Versus women (who) tend to think of money to invest as belonging to the household. And so they have a higher bar for responsibility and therefore I think tend to be less risk loving. So I think that's an important dynamic that's at play because again, angel investing is subjectively a very risky thing.

The third thing is honestly a confidence and kind of stigma question.

The idea of women having a higher bar for feeling like they have the permission to do something professionally is not specific to this issue, right?

We see that in a lot of different areas where we see that women have placed the higher bar on themselves for asking for a promotion, asking for a raise, applying to that job. Whereas men are much more willing to just kind of jump into it.

And so we see that here in the sense that I was reading research that was interviewing UK women and said that fewer than a third of women in the UK rate themselves as a six or above out of 10 as it relates to their confidence in choosing even an investment account.

So literally only one third of women have any sort of confidence of 6 or above out of 10 in reading their ability. So I think that there is this self perception that is really holding women back.

And I don't personally like to extrapolate from that and say women have less knowledge. I don't think that's necessarily true. It's that women have a higher bar for the knowledge they need to feel confident or to feel adequate investing versus men.

Do you see what I mean? I think that's really where the issue is…

Listen to the full interview with Maya Ghosn.

Financial news

US Federal Reserve terminal rate nudged higher following Jay Powell's Jackson Hole speech. Markets are now pricing in another 15bps of rate hikes.
Debt is becoming more and more expensive: US 10y real yield briefly exceeds 2%, highest since 2009.
European Central Bank (ECB) QT continues with balance sheet shrank to €7,153bn, lowest level since March 2021. Total assets now equal to 53% of Eurozone GDP vs Fed's 30%, BoE's 33% and BoJ's 126%.
UK retailers plan to cut jobs as spending slump deepens, says CBI. Barometer of retail activity falls for fourth consecutive month to lowest level since March 2021.
After the outstanding Nvidia figures and outlook, analysts have raised the average price target for the chip giant from $520 to $620.
It really looks as if a new computing era has begun: Nvidia reports Q2 Data Center revenue of $10.32bn, up 171% YoY. "During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive Nvidia H100 (artificial intelligence) infrastructures," CEO Jensen Huang said.

Crypto: bitcoin, ethereum, DeFi & NFTs

Bitcoin has dipped below $26k, smaller cryptos head lower on Fed's Powell's hawkish remarks. BTC is currently trading at $26K+
Ethereum (ETH) matched Bitcoin’s pace. At its current price of $1,647, it is down 1.6% from last week.
The only notable depreciation over the last seven days fell upon holders of Uniswap (UNI) and Avalanche (AVAX). AVAX fell 7.2% to $10.02, while UNI crashed 7.9% to $4.58.
Pepe confirms former team members stole $15 million from multisig wallet. The theft was allegedly orchestrated by three ex-team members who accessed the Pepe multisig wallet, later deleting their social accounts and distancing themselves from the memecoin project.
Sweeping U.S. tax proposal met with boos from the crypto world. Minutes after the U.S.’s long-awaited proposal for taxing crypto gains went public, objections erupted from those tied to decentralised operations counted as “brokers.”