<aside> 💡 This white paper is written by Lily Wu, (Co-founder of WOW Pixies)
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A. Why invest in women-led projects and startups?
As someone who has worked in startups and with VCs over the past decade, it’s clear statistically and experientially that most of the gatekeepers to traditional VC funding are men, which means, a majority of funding goes to men-led startups.
Why does this happen, you ask? There’s a thing called “pattern-matching habits” where due to unconscious bias, VCs tend to seek the same kinds of companies that they’ve supported in the past, which are often tech companies led by men.
The result is that in 2020, only 2.3% of funding went to women-led startups.
Yet, here’s the kicker. When women-led startups do get funded, they’re more likely to be successful. They ultimately deliver higher revenue... more than twice as much per dollar invested! To summarise, they’re a frickin’ great bet.
I didn’t make this up, read the BCG research. ☝🏻
B. How do we change this statistic with NFTs?
Now that we’re in NFTs and web3, the beautiful thing is, we don’t have to rely on investor money to get projects funded. Your fans and customers are also your investors. We have this unique opportunity to put our money where our mouth is. Whether you’re a man or woman or non-binary, we can put our money where we value.
As statistics and our twitter feed shows, women creators make up less than 20% of the space. By investing in women-led projects, by encouraging other women-led startups to come up and succeed, the increase in diversity in a space will have a positive effect on everyone, and we can grow that pie together.
C. We have not yet onboarded enough women into the NFT space
The reason why projects like World of Women, Boss Beauties, FLS, WomenRise etc have typically taken longer to sell out or to “moon” (yet when they do, watch out), is due to the fact that women still make up a small % of the NFT marketplace. It’s human nature to buy into projects that you can see yourself in, which is why projects like Bored Apes, and CryptoPunks are so heavily male dominated. As NFTs become more mainstream, we will see a much higher demand from women to find projects that they can relate to... driving up prices in the market for these women-led projects.
<aside> 💡 Graph depicting World of Women transaction volume. Price stabilised at ~1.9 eth for months (basically years in NFT time) before recent uptick to >8 eth. Yet regardless of price, they continued to deliver value and consistency month after month.
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