Inspiring women founders in STEM. Also circular economy opportunities in ESG.
3 Women-First Founder Thoughts to Share
If you’re still hunting for new ideas, you probably haven’t seen this week’s How Would You Build It yet. No worries, you can still catch our chat with Victoria Jackson of WomHub – which has grown to so much more than just co-working, btw. They’re doing all kinds of amazing stuff: from igniting STEM passion in young women to female founder journeys, accelerators and funding support.
Our fave highlights
1️⃣ Female STEM Engineers Make Great Founders
In fact, it seems to be part of a natural journey/progression: Get STEM-educated, graduate, work in engineering, and then a lot of women naturally end up choosing to go the entrepreneurial route.
And WomHub focuses very much on helping founders in engineering, mining, green technology, software and tech through incubation and accelerator programmes specifically catered to women – see more here.
2️⃣ Women May Have a Different View of Sucess
And therein lies many opportunities. As Victoria mentions here, women might not have the unicorn-level goals of building that IPO in lieu of building a stable, sustainable family business. Not always, though, but often enough that there might be opportunities in helping more women unlock just that – how do we help fund that, how do we connect people there to realise value?
Another point that goes back to our main feature is that you do often find women in extremely high-profile positions, with decades of valuable domain skills, who exit the workplace to build a family. And then you have companies in need of that level of skill, who can’t afford to acquire it full-time, but would pay handsomely for just an hour or two a week of her insights.
Figure out a way to bring more of those two together, and you could have a very neat solution.
3️⃣ Unlocking Opportunities in the Circular Economy
It’s often hard to see how you actually make money out of reuse and upcycling etc. but Victoria points out here that there could be unique opportunities in building products or vehicles for the ESG space that can help smaller green companies get access to voluntary carbon credits because there’s a lot of good work happening there that’s maybe not getting the support it deserves.
Another worthy thought is that as Economic Social Governance marches on, there might come a tipping point of adoption. And if you were to start developing a software solution now to help those hard industries who are currently building in the space, you could benefit when that opportunity unlocks – more on that here.
BONUS: There will be way more unique women founder insights like these in two weeks’ time at Innovation City’s Digital Divas Summit. In fact, Victoria will be there, along with an amazing line-up of female founders and founder supporters.
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