How One Investor Plans to Disrupt the Silicon Valley Boys' Club

Jonathan Sposato announced he will only fund start-ups founded by women.

Marissa Mayer, president and CEO of Yahoo! (Mike Pont/Getty Images)

May 26, 2015· 1 MIN READ

Jennifer Swann is TakePart’s culture and lifestyle reporter.

There's been a lot of talk about how to close the gender gap in Silicon Valley, but one major investor has a big stake in the issue—and wants to put his money where his mouth is.

Jonathan Sposato, a Seattle-based entrepreneur who made a fortune selling two of his tech companies to Google, recently declared his bold plan to disrupt the Silicon Valley boys' club: by only investing in companies that have female founders.

"I think, candidly, it is very hard for female entrepreneurs to get funded," he told a crowd of more than 150 investors at the Seattle Angel Conference last week, according to GeekWire. "I think sometimes it can be very hard for entrepreneurs to get funded if they don't fit the canonical image of that sort of Silicon Valley or Seattle area tech guy."

The GeekWire chairman and PicMonkey CEO supported his proposal with anecdotal data that suggested men have an unfair fund-raising advantage over women simply because they look the part. Three men with impressive résumés and a great idea can raise $1.4 million for a new start-up within two or three months, he said. But if three women with equally stellar experiences seek the same funding, "it takes longer," Sposato said. "And I think we need to examine why that is."

Sposato is right that women-founded start-ups often don't get funded, and when they do, they typically are funded at the lowest levels: about $100,000, compared with the average start-up deal in 2012, which was about $7 million, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Nearly 80 percent of women entrepreneurs didn't receive venture capital, and often, they use their personal savings instead, according to a report by the Kauffman Foundation.

Sposato's pledge to change the status quo came as a spontaneous response to an audience question about how the investment community was faring these days, he told CNN Money.

"This is an issue I've been thinking about for a while. It's been bubbling up, gestating," he said. "We have to change the balance of how people think about starting companies."