I have spent a few months doing some sort of startup work with my friend Yang and I want to record this journey.
The first step is always hard. Even already with a founding team which were all recruited by her, we had several difficulties we needed to face. Very realistic ones.
First, the current market in China is shit so we need to get funds from the US and ideally create the company in the US. We also know the political environment is changing fast in China and coule always be a ticking bomb. Therefore we know it is most ideal to start the company in the U.S.
Second, we only have 1 full time member Yang and all the other members still hold a full time job. This is tricky because your product needs to be mature enough in order to attract people to willingly join you full-time, but without full-time contribution things can be tricky. However I also consider this to be something solvable if we can make better plan for time management and the way we schedule meetings.
And finally, I do think as women founders our ideas can differ a lot from men and it would be harder for us to get funds. The data is cruel. According to another article,
in the US last year, only 12% went to teams with a female founder. And on the flip side, a whopping 71% of US-based venture capital firms have zero women investors.
And therefore, it is clear that after submitting the YC application for Medium Rare, we would need to find other funds that support women or focus on women. As my uncle suggested, finding an investor is almost like finding a romantic partner, works the best if you are already interested in each other. Therefore if we want to create a women friendly product we better get the funds from other women who already have empathy on this topic. I also should have come up with the list of funds where we can try our luck.
