The Catalyst of Capital

Leslie Feinzaig knows the numbers. Women-founded startups across the United States received only 2% of venture capital investment in 2023.

Grim as that is, it keeps a fire burning under Feinzaig, the chief executive officer and founder of Seattle-based Female Founders Alliance (FFA), a nationwide community for women and nonbinary startup founders. Feinzaig also founded venture capital fund Graham & Walker, the venture capital arm of FFA, to invest in early-stage women-founded tech companies.

The women entrepreneurs she works with share her ambitions.

“They don’t want to do something small,” says Feinzaig, who founded FFA seven years ago and Graham & Walker in 2021. “They want to ring the Nasdaq bell in 10 years.”

Since its founding, FFA has grown into a community of more than 4,000 VC-backed, women-founded startups across North America. It has helped more than 400 founders raise more than $100 million in pre-seed capital the past five years alone. It offers mentorship programs, peer-to-peer support networks, and educational workshops, with an eye toward equity and inclusion.

The idea was born out of Feinzaig’s own experience launching a startup in 2016, but her grasp on the crucial role of venture capital funding goes back even further. After earning her MBA from Harvard Business School, Feinzaig studied the life cycle of businesses under economist Clayton Christensen. She learned that, largely due to venture capital, well-run businesses could dominate their industries in less than two decades, and that funding was critical in closing the gender-pay gap and elevating women into leadership positions.

Now that she has two young daughters, Feinzaig’s motivation is even stronger. She’s fully aware that the work she’s doing today will directly shape the business landscape her girls inherit when they enter the workforce.

When raising funds for her own startup, Feinzaig was hit with a hard dose of reality. Despite having growing sales and a solid personal track record — by then, she’d established herself as a product manager at Microsoft Corp., Big Fish Games and Julep Beauty — VCs weren’t biting. She couldn’t understand why, until she started connecting with other women and realized how much systemic bias they were up against.

It was clear that not only were they being passed over, but the infrastructure for women to learn and gain tactical support from other women was virtually non-existent.

“If I went to women’s groups, they would be greatly supportive, but not helpful in this very specifi c world of venture capital,” she says. “And if I went to venture capital groups, I was the only girl in the room.”

She would have to create that space herself. It started as a Facebook group for a handful of CEOs in Seattle, who met monthly and offered each other emotional and tactical support. In 201 they planned a pitch event, inviting 50 investors and 50 women startup CEOs.

“At the time, the investors had never been in a room with that many women CEOs,” Feinzaig says. “It was so transformative.”

The success of the event gave her the impetus to take the group to the next level. Female Founders Alliance became an official social-purpose corporation that connects and serves founders across the country. Meanwhile, Feinzaig launched Graham & Walker (“No a*holes allowed,” the company declares on its website). The firm has funded 35 companies so far, including several based in Seattle.

Among these is PairTree, a digital platform that’s streamlining the process of adopting children. Seattle-based Erin Quick, the company’s CEO and co-founder, has firsthand experience with adoption and knew how onerous it was for professionals, families, and birthing mothers. She wanted to use tech to smooth some of that friction, and says that Feinzaig got her vision immediately.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this lady gets it right away, and she doesn’t pull any punches,’” Quick recalls.

Whereas some investors might overlook a founder without a technical background — one of many reasons women face higher barriers to funding — Feinzaig saw that Quick had all the skills and expertise needed.

“Most female founders are first-time founders,” Feinzaig says. “They come from outside the tech industry. They’re seeing problems related to their own unique experiences in their fields, or in their communities, and they’re looking to solve them through technology.”

Seattle and Washington state are decidedly a mixed bag when it comes to women. A 2023 report from Fundera named it the best city for women entrepreneurs in the country, noting that women make up 44% of the city’s self-employed business owners and that the pay gap between male and female business owners is just 6%.

However, Washington state also holds the dubious distinction of having the second-largest gender pay gap in the United States. Women across the state made $18,400 less in average wages than men in 2022. New research from the National Partnership for Women and Families found that only Utah has a larger discrepancy, at $20,649.

Things aren’t improving, either. Research last year as reported by U.S. News & World Report revealed that women in 2021 made only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Using U.S. Census data, the National Partnership found that women across the state in 2022 made only 70 cents for every dollar made by a man.

Part of Feinzaig’s success comes from her deep network. Seattle entrepreneur Jane Park, who has invested in Graham & Walker, once hired Feinzaig as a product manager at her cosmetics startup Julep. When Park later launched Tokki, an innovative take on digital greeting cards, Graham & Walker led the company’s seed-round funding.

“It is amazing to have enough women in the ecosystem for us to be repeat players,” says Park. “I think that is kind of the dream, that there is some efficiency that comes from knowing people in your space. Leslie is a great evangelist for women, period.”

Feinzaig has also established herself as a trustworthy leader, racking up numerous accolades, including a spot on Forbes’ Most Powerful Women from Central America, Worth’s Worthy 100, Puget Sound Business Journal 40 Under 40, and one of Seattle magazine’s Most Influential People. She serves on the boards of the Washington Technology Industry Association, the Girl Scouts of Western Washington, and the Harvard Business School Equity and Entrepreneurship Initiative Alumni Advisory Board.

While the tech world has a long way to go, she’s more committed than ever to furthering her mission. “If I ever build anything more important than the Female Founders Alliance, I will be shocked,” she says. “This is ‘pretty once in a lifetime.’”

With additional reporting by Rob Smith.