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The secret of pitching to male VCs: Helping female crypto founders blast off

Female crypto founders are banding together to unlock the secrets of success in a male-dominated venture capital world.
Bridget Greenwood…

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Female crypto founders are banding together to unlock the secrets of success in a male-dominated venture capital world.

Bridget Greenwood is the founder of The Bigger Pie, a U.K.-based networking organization that supports women in blockchain globally. She says that even venture capitalists with the best intentions still end up funding male founders at disproportionate rates.

I stumbled over the appalling statistic that of all VC funding [in the U.K.], only 3% goes to female founders, 8% goes to mixed teams, and the rest goes to all-male teams, she explains to Magazine.

And that initial figure has gone down to 1.5% over the pandemic.

In more difficult times, it seems that VCs are falling back on what they know which is to fund male founders. This is doubly frustrating, as research looking at the impact of COVID-19 points to the benefit of feminine leadership during challenging times.

According to data from Pitchbook, the trend is international. Last year in the United States, startups with all-women teams received just 1.9`%, or around $4.5 billion, of the $238.3 billion in allocated venture capital. The 2022 figure was down from the 2.4% achieved the year before. 

Seeking to actively change this reversal, Greenwood founded The 200Bn Club with Amber Ghaddar. The initiative takes its name from a 2022 report on female entrepreneurs commissioned by the U.K. government and completed by Alison Rose, CEO of NatWest. A key finding was that investing in female entrepreneurship would add between 200 billion and 250 billion pounds to the countrys GDP.

Bridget Greenwood
Bridge Greenwood, founder of The Bigger Pie and co-founder of The 200bn Club.

Greenwood and Ghaddar embarked on a three-month research journey, during which they spoke with academics, investors and VCs. Ghaddar had already successfully raised money for her company, AllianceBlock, so she personally knew some of the struggles.

As Greenwood summarizes, We got two key points from our research. The first is that you need a warm introduction. A lot of the VC world is all about networking, and so we have gathered some 200 VCs to be part of our network so we can create these warm introductions.

The second point is harder to overcome and happens during the pitching process. As soon as it becomes apparent the founder is a woman, then the unconscious bias kicks in.

Pitching stage

Research published in Harvard Business Review singles out the pitching stage as a significant barrier for women. In essence, it says that men are asked promoted questions, whereas women are asked preventative questions which focus on risks and put founders in a defensive position.

Why is this important? Well, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, if you get asked preventative questions, you are five times less likely to raise money, period,” says Greenwood.

However, the good news is that if you understand and recognize a preventative question, you can then learn to answer in a promotive way so that you give yourself a much better chance at success. But this needs to be taught.

At The 200Bn Club, female founders are coached on how to best pitch to VCs, which also includes the somewhat controversial concept of not pitching like a woman.

Don't pitch
The abstract from Dont Pitch Like A Girl. (SAGE Publicatications)

While earlier research suggested that investors exhibit bias against women due to their sex, more recent studies have found that the picture is more complicated than that, and that being a female entrepreneur does not diminish interest by investors in and of itself.

A team of Canadian and American researchers conducted an experiment that found investors are actually biased against displays of feminine-stereotyped behaviors by entrepreneurs, whether from men or women. The research, titled Dont Pitch Like a Girl, found that behaviors coded as feminine were associated with negative perceptions about the entrepreneurs business competency.

Now, that doesnt sound any better from a gender studies perspective, but from a practical standpoint, it means female founders can work around the issue by using more masculine-stereotyped behaviors while pitching.

It turns out that while female founders are happy to talk about their team, they are much more self-effacing when it comes to speaking about themselves. And since the VC wants to invest in the leader, this is a damning habit for female founders, Greenwood says. 

We work with our female founders to deliver the pitch with confidence, assurance and faith in themselves. And we help them answer the preventative questions in a promotive fashion.

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ConsenSys on equality

Thessy Mehrain, co-founder and CEO of Liquality, has a background that makes her uniquely positioned to understand the system and how to disrupt it. She spent six years creating products at JPMorgan in the U.S. and joined the Occupy movement after the financial crisis, and it was from there that she discovered Ethereum.

So, I totally fell in love with Web3, but I also didnt want to be part of something that creates technology that repeats what we have in the legacy world, she tells Magazine.

While still working at JPMorgan in 2015, she heard Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, speak at a fintech conference and was blown away by his vision. Shortly after, she jumped ship to ConsenSys and began working on a project to explore swapping between Bitcoin and Ethereum in a decentralized manner without a middleman. That project evolved in time into her startup, Liquality.

In 2016, Mehrain also created the New York-based Women in Blockchain group to help address gender inequality in the sector. The group now boasts 3,000 members.

Working at ConsenSys provided her with great support, access to technology and a co-founder Harsh Vakharia, who also previously founded the startup Etherbit. Coming out of ConsenSys, Mehrain recognizes she had many advantages over other unaffiliated projects.

Thessy Mehrain, co founder of Liquality
Thessy Mehrain, co-founder of Liquality. (Photo supplied)

The pair successfully raised $7 million in 2021. When asked if she experienced different treatment as a female founder, Mehrain replies: 

How would I know? I was never raised as a man. However, coming out of ConsenSys definitely gave us an edge and warm introductions. It was at that point, during our raise, that I became aware of the dominance of men in this space. At Liquality, we are focusing on the Global South, so we knew from the get-go that we needed to have diverse representation in our funders. That changed our thinking and our outreach.

We knew that diversity makes products more sustainable its not just the right thing to do, its the right thing to do in business terms. We needed to explain that to our investors. But its more than having diversity at the cap table, its what you build afterwards.

Mehrain and her co-founder have assembled a team that reflects the culture in which they want to grow. We work hard at this. Its not an afterthought. For example, we have a female engineering lead and a lot of strong female engineers but that took work. 

We are creating a legacy as we go. Its very important so the next generation of women founders and leaders have role models and supports to help them.

Corporate backgrounds help

A strong corporate background can also help female founders navigate the stormy VC waters. Ayelen Denovitzer was previously with Bain and Revolut, and co-founding Solvo has been her first startup role. She raised $3.5 million led by Index Ventures over just three weeks last year.

Denovitzer did not notice any limitations due to being a woman, but she is also happy to debunk some common urban myths.

Ayelen Denowitzer
Ayelen Denovitzer, co-founder of Solvo. (Photo supplied)

There is this notion that female leaders are more risk-averse and are more emotional when it comes to decision-making, but I think that is largely debunked. Of course, there is unconscious bias, but we are making inroads on those notions too, she tells Magazine, noting that individual differences are much more salient.

I believe it is more down to individuals how we mix. I am much more methodical than my co-founder, which is a me thing rather than necessarily a female thing.

Like Mehrain with Liquality, it was important to her that the VCs at the cap table reflected the projects ambitions. Solvo is a retail-facing financial app that aims to bring the best features of crypto without the complexities and jargon.

So, we needed retail-facing VCs to come onboard, says Denovitzer.

Finding the right fellow co-founders is another element more important than gender. Helena Gagern and Grace Wang, co-founders of Web3 messaging app Salsa, both agree.

We had shared values which was of top importance to us both and similar energy levels, Gagern tells Magazine.

They bonded over a pilot project during two weeks in Austria, where they learned about passion, energy and pragmatism. They knew they would work together on a bigger project, which turned out to be Salsa, for which they raised $2 million.

We were fundraising in a bear market and initially were looking for $500,000. 

However, the co-founders quickly realized that this amount was too little and jumped it up to $2 million which quite possibly ensured their success. 

Another element of their success was that they had met their investors in real life at conferences over the past two years. Those warm introductions went a long way to smooth the path to success.

I didnt feel being female was a disadvantage, but I did strongly feel the underrepresentation. This pushed us to approach female VCs as a priority, says Gagern.

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Benefits of being a female founder

Wang tells Magazine that there are a host of benefits to being a female founder. Once you get over the imposter syndrome issue, being a woman can make you stand out in a male-dominated space. All-female teams are rare, and so we pushed this to our advantage. And we also reach out to other female founders helping each other.

Helena Gagern and Grace Wang
From left to right: Helena Gagern and Grace Wang, co-founders of Salsa.

But why the focus on female entrepreneurship? Aside from offering gender equality, there is data that points to female founders achieving better results. According to a study from the Boston Consulting Group, businesses founded by women produce twice the revenue from every dollar in funding than men. Given that they also receive less than half the funding, thats a better bang for your VC buck.

Statistics compiled by Springboard, which helps accelerate the growth of women-led companies, suggest that even a little bit of gender diversity helps and that startups with at least one female founder outperformed all-male founding teams by 63%. 

Finally, Mehrain is pragmatic in this gender-balancing game and says men often want to help but just dont know how.

You know, white males are the best allies. Right? Tell them what to do, tell them what is needed. Make them allies and really have them understand how important this is. Then its a win-win for all.

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The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast— September 2023

This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE)…

This post presents an update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We describe very briefly our forecast and its change since June 2023. As usual, we wish to remind our readers that the DSGE model forecast is not an official New York Fed forecast, but only an input to the Research staff’s overall forecasting process. For more information about the model and variables discussed here, see our DSGE model Q & A.

The New York Fed model forecasts use data released through 2023:Q2, augmented for 2023:Q3 with the median forecasts for real GDP growth and core PCE inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), as well as the yields on ten-year Treasury securities and Baa-rated corporate bonds based on 2023:Q3 averages up to August 30. Moreover, starting in 2021:Q4, the expected federal funds rate between one and six quarters into the future is restricted to equal the corresponding median point forecast from the latest available Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) in the corresponding quarter. The current projection can be found here.

The change in the forecast relative to June reflects the fact that the economy remains resilient in spite of the increasingly restrictive stance of monetary policy. Output growth is projected to be almost 1 percentage point higher in 2023 than forecasted in June (1.9 versus 1.0 percent) and somewhat higher than June for the rest of the forecast horizon (1.1, 0.7, and 1.2 percent in 2024, 2025, and 2026, versus 0.7, 0.4, and 0.9 in June, respectively). The probability of a not-so-soft recession, as defined by four-quarter GDP growth dipping below -1 percent by the end of 2023, has become negligible at 4.6 percent, down from 26 percent in June. According to the model, much of the resilience in the economy so far stems from the surprising strength in the financial sector, which counteracts the effects of the tightening in monetary policy. Inflation projections are close to what they were in June: 3.7 percent for 2023 (unchanged from the previous forecast), 2.2 percent for 2024 (down from 2.5 percent), and 2.0 percent for both 2025 and 2026 (down from 2.2 and 2.1 percent, respectively). The model still sees inflation returning close to the FOMC’s longer-run goal by the end of next year.

The output gap is projected to be somewhat higher over the forecast horizon than it was in June, consistent with the fact that the surprising strength of the economy is mainly driven by demand factors such as financial shocks, as opposed to supply factors. As in the June forecast, the gap gradually declines from its current positive value to a slightly negative value by 2025. The real natural rate of interest is estimated at 2.5 percent for 2023 (up from 2.2 percent in June), declining to 2.2 percent in 2024, 1.9 percent in 2025, and 1.6 percent in 2026. 

Forecast Comparison

Forecast Period2023202420252026
Date of ForecastSep 23Jun 23Sep 24Jun 24Sep 25Jun 25Sep 26Jun 26
GDP growth
(Q4/Q4)
1.9
 (0.2, 3.6) 
1.0
 (-1.9, 4.0) 
1.1
 (-4.0, 6.3) 
0.7
 (-4.2, 5.7) 
0.7
 (-4.4, 5.8) 
0.4
 (-4.7, 5.5) 
1.2
 (-4.2, 6.6) 
0.9
 (-4.5, 6.3) 
Core PCE inflation
(Q4/Q4)
3.7
 (3.4, 3.9) 
3.7
 (3.3, 4.2) 
2.2
 (1.5, 3.0) 
2.5
 (1.6, 3.3) 
2.0
 (1.1, 2.9) 
2.2
 (1.2, 3.1) 
2.0
 (1.0, 3.0) 
2.1
 (1.1, 3.2) 
Real natural rate of interest
(Q4)
2.5
 (1.3, 3.7) 
2.2
 (1.0, 3.5) 
2.2
 (0.8, 3.7) 
1.8
 (0.3, 3.2) 
1.9
 (0.3, 3.4) 
1.5
 (-0.1, 3.0) 
1.6
 (-0.0, 3.3) 
1.3
 (-0.4, 3.0) 
Source: Authors’ calculations.
Notes: This table lists the forecasts of output growth, core PCE inflation, and the real natural rate of interest from the September 2023 and June 2023 forecasts. The numbers outside parentheses are the mean forecasts, and the numbers in parentheses are the 68 percent bands.

Forecasts of Output Growth

Source: Authors’ calculations.
Notes: These two panels depict output growth. In the top panel, the black line indicates actual data and the red line shows the model forecasts. The shaded areas mark the uncertainty associated with our forecasts at 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 percent probability intervals. In the bottom panel, the blue line shows the current forecast (quarter-to-quarter, annualized), and the gray line shows the June 2023 forecast.

Forecasts of Inflation

Source: Authors’ calculations.
Notes: These two panels depict core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation. In the top panel, the black line indicates actual data and the red line shows the model forecasts. The shaded areas mark the uncertainty associated with our forecasts at 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 percent probability intervals. In the bottom panel, the blue line shows the current forecast (quarter-to-quarter, annualized), and the gray line shows the June 2023 forecast.

Real Natural Rate of Interest

Source: Authors’ calculations.
Notes: The black line shows the model’s mean estimate of the real natural rate of interest; the red line shows the model forecast of the real natural rate. The shaded area marks the uncertainty associated with the forecasts at 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 percent probability intervals.

Marco Del Negro is an economic research advisor in Macroeconomic and Monetary Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

photo of Gundam Pranay

Pranay Gundam is a research analyst in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

Donggyu Lee is a research economist in Macroeconomic and Monetary Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

Ramya Nallamotu is a research analyst in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

photo of Brian Pacula

Brian Pacula is a research analyst in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.

How to cite this post:
Marco Del Negro, Pranay Gundam, Donggyu Lee, Ramya Nallamotu, and Brian Pacula, “The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast— September 2023,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, September 22, 2023, https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2023/09/the-new-york-fed-dsge-model-forecast-september-2023/.


Disclaimer
The views expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author(s).

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The Big Picture of the housing market, and its almost complete bifurcation, in 3 easy graphs

  – by New Deal democratI want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives that inflation is still rampant, even though…

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 - by New Deal democrat


I want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives that inflation is still rampant, even though almost all official measures show it rapidly decelerating, and even completely absent on a YoY basis currently by a few measures. A big part of that has to do with housing, and since I’ve discussed several facets of that issue in discussing the data releases this week, I wanted to pull that together into a “Big Picture” summary. I do that in 3 simple graphs below.

Graph #1: Active listing counts of existing homes (red, left scale) vs. new housing under construction (blue, right scale):



The average mortgage on an existing home is something like 3.5%. Huge numbers of people either bought or refinanced when mortgage rates were 3%, and now those people are locked in. For example, a $1000 monthly interest payment at 3% is a $2333 monthly interest payment at 7%. Those people are locked into their existing home for the foreseeable future.

As a result, the existing home market has collapsed. As I showed yesterday, sales are near 25 year lows. The active listing count above, which averaged 1.3 million in the years prior to the pandemic, even with a modest recovery in the past year is still only about 700,000, a -600,000 decline.

Meanwhile the number of new homes under construction has risen from about 1.125 million annualized in the years before the pandemic to about 1.725 annualized, a mirror image +600,000 increase.

In other words, the seizing up of the existing home market has diverted people to the new home market.

Graph #2: median price of existing (red) vs. new (blue) homes:



The NAR only lets FRED publish the last year of their price data, which is not seasonally adjusted, but that is fine for today’s purposes, so the above graph compares it with the not seasonally adjusted price data for new homes.

The lack of inventory of existing homes means that prices got bid up, and remain bid up. Builders responded by building lots of new units, and unlike existing homeowners, they can respond to market conditions by varying their price point, which the above graph shows they have done. The median price for a new home went down -$100,000, or 20%, a few months ago, and is still down about -15% from its peak last year.

Graph #3: Single vs. multi-family units under construction:



The Millennial generation and the first part of Gen Z are well into their home-buying years. But because they have been priced out of large parts of the market, due to both the aforesaid big rise in mortgage rates, but also the post-pandemic increase in prices, they have had to downsize their target from single family homes to the less expensive condos or apartments.

As part of their adjustment described above, apartments and condos are being built hand over fist, and builders are offering price or financing concessions. Single family houses under construction have declined by about 20% from summer 2022, while multi-family units soared to a new all-time record, about 20% higher than their level in summer 2022.

It’s the housing version of shrinkflation, since - although the data isn’t easily available - I think we can take notice of the fact that apartment and condo units are considerably less expensive on average than single family detached houses.

[As an aside, note that a very similar thing happened in the 1970s when the Baby Boom generation was well and truly into their first home-buying years. While the Millennial generation is slightly bigger numerically than the Boomers, since the total US population was only 50% of its current size back in the 1960s, proportionately the Boomers had an even bigger impact on the market.]

That’s the Big Picture of the almost complete bifurcation of the current housing market. The “shrinkflation” I’ve described above is very much a part of why the public continues to believe that inflation remains a big problem. 

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New study unveils direct synthesis of FCMs via solid-state mechanochemical reaction between graphite and PTFE

A research team, led by Professor Jong-Beom Baek and his team in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST have achieved a significant breakthrough…

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A research team, led by Professor Jong-Beom Baek and his team in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST have achieved a significant breakthrough in battery technology. They have developed an innovative method that enables the safe synthesis of fluorinated carbon materials (FCMs) using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and graphite.

Credit: UNIST

A research team, led by Professor Jong-Beom Baek and his team in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST have achieved a significant breakthrough in battery technology. They have developed an innovative method that enables the safe synthesis of fluorinated carbon materials (FCMs) using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and graphite.

Fluorinated carbon materials have garnered considerable attention due to their exceptional stability, attributed to the strong C-F bonding—the strongest among carbon single bonds. However, traditional methods of fluorination involve highly toxic reagents such as hydrofluoric acid (HF), making them unsuitable for practical applications.

In this study, the research team introduced a straightforward and relatively safe approach for scalable synthesis of FCMs through mechanochemical depolymerization of PTFE—a commonly used compound found in everyday items—and fragmentation of graphite. By utilizing ball-milling techniques that induce both mechanical and chemical reactions, they successfully produced FCMs with significantly improved performance compared to graphite.

The use of hazardous compounds like fluorine gas or HF in conventional carbon fluoride production raises safety concerns, increasing manufacturing costs associated with stringent safety measures. To address these challenges, Professor Baek’s team devised a solid-phase fluorination method using PTFE—an inert polymer known for its stability under atmospheric conditions and harmlessness when consumed orally.

Through experiments, it was observed that subjecting PTFE to higher energy than it can withstand leads to molecular chain breakage and radical formation—initiating a reaction resulting in the production of carbon fluoride complexes. These complexes then adhere to the surface and edges of graphite particles during subsequent processes.

The resulting FCMs demonstrated superior storage capacity and electrochemical stability compared to traditional graphite anodes. At a low charging rate of 50 mA/g, the FCMs exhibited storage capacities 2.5 times higher (951.6 mAh/g) than graphite, while at a high charging rate of 10,000 mA/g, their storage capacity was tenfold higher (329 mAh/g). Remarkably, even after more than 1,000 charge/discharge cycles at a rate of 2,000 mA/g, the FCMs retained 76.6% of their initial capacity compared to only 43.8% for graphite.

“This study highlights not just safe fluorination methods but also the broader potential of solid-phase reactions,” stated Boo-Jae Jang, a researcher in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST.

“This research prompts us to reconsider materials that are commonly found in our surroundings,” added Professor Baek. He further emphasized the significance of understanding solid-phase reactions as it opens doors to developing novel materials that were previously unexplored.

The study findings have been published ahead of their official publication in the online version of Advanced Functional Materials on July 27, 2023. This work has been supported through the U-K Brand and Carbon Neutrality projects of UNIST, and the Creative Research Initiative program through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea.

Journal Reference
Boo-Jae Jang, Qiannan Zhao, Jae-Hoon Baek, et al., “Direct Synthesis of Fluorinated Carbon Materials via a Solid-State Mechanochemical Reaction Between Graphite and PTFE,” Adv. Funct. Mater., (2023).


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