How I navigated my pregnancy as a Series A founder

The news of Emily Weiss moving to the role of chairwoman of Glossier from her former position as CEO was riddled with gender biases in how it was covered by the media.

Even the more balanced coverage still highlighted that she is currently pregnant, as if it inevitably played a factor in her decision, even though Weiss’ official statement on the matter made no mention of family, pregnancy or children.

There certainly has been progress in recent years, but we cannot deny that we still harbor biases and assumptions about pregnant women in business. “How much time off will they take?” “Are they going to come back?” “Will they work as hard as they did before?” “Who’s going to watch their baby?”

I learned I was pregnant a few weeks after my health tech company raised a $14 million Series A in January 2021. And as someone who had previously experienced the trauma of a miscarriage, I had utterly thrown myself into my other baby — my company. The news of another pregnancy meant I needed to take care of myself and my company in a new way.

While the experience wildly varies and there is no ‘correct’ path to take, I want to share what worked for me while I was a pregnant founder and CEO. Kelsey Mellard

While the experience wildly varies from woman to woman, and there is no “correct” path to take, I want to share what worked for me while I was a pregnant founder and CEO. Women come up to me at conferences or catch me at events seeking specific and actionable advice, so I’m here to share what worked for me.

First and foremost, I decided to be honest with my investors and not delay the news or withhold any information. I hadn’t even told some of my family before I chose to tell my investors — I needed to share the news. Going into the call, I was incredibly nervous, so I decided to not begin with any small talk. My first words were: “I’m excited to share that George and I are having a baby.”

I am lucky enough to have chosen partners like Bryan Roberts and Dr. Bob Kocher from Venrock, Stephen Renfro at Optum Ventures, Hunter Walk at Homebrew and the team at First Round Capital, and they all were incredibly supportive. In the middle of the pandemic, when things looked so bleak, their faces lit up when they heard the news.

Investors are your business partners; they are people with whom you’ll have a relationship that’ll last several years, so it’s important to understand their stance on topics outside of work before you take a check. My investors had chosen to bet on me. So now, me having a baby was going to become part of our new game plan, and they understood that.

How the myth of the ‘girlboss’ harms emerging women in tech

On Lafayette Street in SoHo, young, fashionable women lined up around the block to enter a minimalist, millennial oasis, the most perfect Instagram feed brought to life. Staff members glided around the store in pastel pink suits, each embodying the kind of girl that Glossier made us all want to be: beautiful, yet effortless.

“We want to inspire, but we also want to be realistic and show beauty in real life,” Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss said in a 2017 interview with Inc, just as the brand had reached what Weiss herself described as “cult status.” Even Chrissy Teigen and Reese Witherspoon wore Glossier’s signature Cloud Paint blush to the Oscars

We understood the irony of the message as we sampled their sheer, almost-not-there lipgloss, then looked into a mirror decorated with white vinyl letters in the bustling pop-up shop: you look good, our reflection told us. Glossier affirmed our inherent beauty, then reminded us that we can be even more beautiful if we buy their “Boy Brow” pomade, which sold one tube every 32 seconds by 2018.

Glossier’s commoditized feminism aside, it’s no easy task to launch a $1.8 billion company in the brutally competitive beauty industry, especially one with such broad appeal. After all, Glossier’s founder and CEO Emily Weiss is very, very far from the first entrepreneur to profit off of our desire to look good. And who cares? That Cloud Paint is pretty magical, if we’re being honest. Like with many consumer brands geared toward women, we buy in not just because of the marketing, but because of the product itself.

Glossier founder Emily Weiss speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018

Glossier founder Emily Weiss speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018 Image Credits: TechCrunch

But as Weiss steps down from her current role and prepares for maternity leave, her success and subsequently typical choice to become her company’s board chairperson has been co-opted as the end of the “girlboss” era.

What even is a ”girlboss” anymore? Once a vaguely aspirational term of praise reserved only for affluent white women, the moniker now reflects the maddening contradiction of workplace feminism: we know that it’s not enough to just be a woman in power, and that what we do with that power matters far more than simply wielding it. Yet women founders and CEOs remain frustratingly rare as Silicon Valley’s glass ceiling persists, almost impenetrable – venture capitalists (only 13% of whom are women in the U.S.) allocate 98% of their funding to startups helmed by men. It’s no wonder, then, how we’ve ended up with the paradox of the “girlboss.” 

The making (and unraveling) of the ‘girlboss’ myth

Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso is credited with coining the term in the title of her 2014 memoir, “#Girlboss,” which chronicled her rags-to-riches success and was adapted into a Netflix show. The following year, she stepped down as CEO, and by 2016, her company filed for bankruptcy and was purchased by Boohoo. Then, Amoruso started a company called Girlboss that was likened to “Linkedin for Women.” She stepped down from that company in 2020.

“Girlboss” originally gained popularity beyond Amoruso’s book as a form of praise, according to Kirsten Green, co-founder and investor at Forerunner Ventures. Green has spent her career bankrolling the companies that define what’s cool, including Glossier, Outdoor Voices and Away, whose founders are often cited as the archetypal examples of “girlbosses.”

“I truly believe the ‘girlboss’ term was created to celebrate an emerging wave of female leaders – which is still rare in business, and was even rarer around 10 years ago when the phrase was popularized,” Green told TechCrunch in an email. 

The term itself, though, hasn’t aged nearly as well as Green’s portfolio. Years later, even Amoruso herself has expressed discomfort with the phrase.

“It’s not a compliment. It’s more of a mockery,” said Isa Watson, founder and CEO of social media app Squad. Watson, who holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has raised $4.5 million for her app, placing Squad in the mere 0.34% of companies funded last year with a Black woman founder.

The idea of the “girlboss” today is shrouded in privilege. Since its debut, the term has come to represent a small cohort of white, affluent millennial women who rise up into positions of power, preach the gospel of feminism, then ultimately fumble the millenial pink ball and fall from grace when it turns out that their politics just aren’t that transformative.

“[The term “girlboss”] feels disconnected from reality, which is that there are very few women that have had this label applied to them,” said Sruti Bharat, who most recently worked as interim CEO at All Raise, a venture fund supporting women and non-binary founders. “They all seem to have slightly similar journeys, like they run consumer brands, maybe [have] slightly problematic racial politics, and some kind of takedown piece [is written about them]. That’s like the PR trope.”

Unlike the glowy skin depicted on Glossier’s Instagram, the reputation of its founder and CEO Emily Weiss is not without blemishes. Glossier’s management has faced well-deserved scrutiny for failing to support members of its retail staff, leaving them to endure racist treatment from customers. (Following the complaints, Weiss issued a public apology, and Glossier donated $1 million – half to organizations fighting racial injustice, and half to Black-owned beauty businesses). 

Then, when the pandemic hit, Glossier laid off all of its retail employees and shut down its physical stores. But just a year later, the beauty brand raised an $80 million Series E round at a $1.8 billion valuation to open up permanent retail stores in Seattle, Los Angeles and London, capitalizing on the dewy fairytale of its Manhattan flagship store.

Mandela SH Dixon, All Raise's recently appointed CEO

Mandela SH Dixon, All Raise’s current CEO Image Credits: All Raise

Early this year, the company slashed staff yet again. Glossier laid off one-third of its corporate employees, mostly on its tech team, as Weiss admitted to staff that the company got “distracted” from its core beauty business and got ahead of itself with hiring. Weiss’ recent departure from the CEO role, along with that of her CMO from the company altogether, only amplified the scrutiny – fairly or not.

Although a select few white women have been able to rise through the ranks of startup success, tech leadership is far from reflecting the populations its products serve. Even All Raise, which was founded with the explicit mission of supporting diverse founders, just recently appointed a Black woman, Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, as its long-term CEO. Dixon is setting out to broaden the nonprofit’s definition of inclusion after it was helmed by its white, female founder Pam Kostka for three years.  

‘They’re not collecting stats on that’

“The end of the girlboss era? What does that even mean?” asked Rosie Nguyen in a conversation with TechCrunch. Nguyen is founder and CMO of Fanhouse, a creator platform that just raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz. 

Despite the prevalence of the “girlboss” in pop culture, the reality on the ground for women entrepreneurs has played out much differently. Less than 2% of venture capital funding went to all-female founding teams in 2021, marking a five-year low. 

There’s a disconnect between the evolution of feminism in the outside world, juxtaposed with the frustratingly slow rate at which Silicon Valley realizes that a woman CEO shouldn’t be a novelty. Outside of work, women fight for an intersectional feminism that’s trans-inclusive, uplifts people of color and advocates for disability rights. But in startup culture, just being a woman in and of itself is seen as subversive.

“As a female founder, it kind of stops there, because that’s impressive enough to people, but I’m like, well actually, I’m also a Vietnamese immigrant,” said Nguyen. “I was born in Vietnam. I’m Southeast Asian. Like, do you know any Vietnamese immigrant female founders in a Series A startup? I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one, but they’re not collecting stats on that… Or, alright, I’m queer, I’m bisexual, but right now, everything is so white and male that anything else is already impressive to people.”  

The confusion around what “girlboss” actually means stems from its application to a broad range of poor management decisions, from the ignorance Weiss displayed about racism in Glossier stores (unfortunately, this is rather common amongst white CEOs) to the dangerous, life-threatening fraud perpetrated by Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes. 

The “girlboss” stereotype poisons the image of the woman CEO as more and more companies run by white men earn the overwhelming majority venture funding. And of course, those startups are by no means innocent when it comes to bad management.

“If you look at someone like Adam Neumann and WeWork for example, he was covered [in the media] in a very flattering light until the very moment when it all came tumbling down,” said Watson. “I mean, there’s a number of things that went wrong throughout the course of his tenure that were never brought up. And so when you have female founders that have simple management missteps, I just feel like they’re brutalized by the media, and the culture is anxiety-inducing.”

As it is, very few women founders even have the chance to ascend to the top of their field, and those who do are largely white women who come from privileged backgrounds. The female entrepreneurs who succeed by traditional measures are vilified as “girlbosses,” while women of color seem to be left out of the discourse entirely. That’s part of why Bharat, a woman of color with South Asian heritage, says she has never identified with the term.

If Weiss, the founder who built a makeup brand that’s been hailed as the next generation’s Estee Lauder, who pioneered the blueprint for several DTC brands that came after hers, is portrayed as a failure for taking maternity leave and switching executive roles at the company she created simply because she’s a woman, that doesn’t bode well for underrepresented founders without Weiss’s advantages. 

“I think it’s like second- or third-wave feminism, like ‘lean in,” Nguyen said, referencing the catch phrase of controversial, longtime Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, who just stepped down. “It’s the whole concept of feminism as like, why aren’t more billionaires women? It became laughable to people because the point is not having more female billionaires, the point is having less income inequality.”

The pitfalls of corporatized feminism

While the women who have been branded as archetypal “girlbosses” have largely failed to deliver on the promise of empowering women through selling makeup (or suitcases, or athletic gear), it’s worth examining why they’re even expected to do so in the first place.

“Just because a woman has been oppressed, or has been marginalized, or treated differently, doesn’t mean that she is also aware of how to fix it, or how to speak about it or is not perpetuating it herself. We’re always advocating for women to be icons … but the reality of that is it takes actual advocacy work and movement building and policy,” Bharat said.

The bar is higher for women entrepreneurs not only in terms of financial results they’re expected to deliver (cough cough, Elon Musk), or the thin margin of error they’re afforded, but also in terms of what their job description implicitly includes. The industry doesn’t look to white male founders to serve as perfect advocates for social justice issues. Indeed, the reality of our economic system is that it’s not their job, and whether we like it or not, corporate feminism isn’t going to save us from difficult ethical dilemmas either.

“I really feel for some of these leaders who are trying to learn as they are very much in the public eye,” Bharat said. “There’s very little room for error for women, and I’m not saying there weren’t mistakes. There definitely have been, but the room to recover is completely limited.”

The “Girlboss” label harms all women because it’s a reductive stereotype that detracts from the conversation around real issues in corporate culture and society. It’s a distraction that uses emerging women founders as a scapegoat for systemic issues instead of opening up a productive discussion on how we can reform workplaces to function better for all people, particularly members of marginalized communities.

By conflating all management mistakes as equal, we lose sight of each individual issue we’re trying to remedy – and by calling Weiss a “girlboss,” we risk discouraging women in leadership roles from taking risks, learning and growing. We also perpetuate the erasure of women of color in tech.

This isn’t the end of the woman founder and CEO. Instead, let’s make it the end of unrealistic expectations for women who run companies, and the hollow, corporatized feminism that comes as a result.

TechCrunch+ roundup: The Kindbody TC-1, Glossier’s mistakes, calculating startup runway

Historically, people who have difficulty conceiving children have been stigmatized.

A 2020 UCLA study found that approximately 15% of couples will have trouble getting pregnant, but Kindbody, which has spun up a network of fertility clinics since its founding in 2018, has taken a holistic approach to the issue.

With a focus on education that addresses the fragmentation associated with infertility care, Kindbody is growing at a remarkable pace, but it’s also helping many patients feel seen and heard for the first time.


Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members
Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription


In a three-part series, reporter Rae Witte explores Kindbody’s origins, its business, and how it is changing the face of fertility treatments through interviews with its founding team, who have set out to transform and improve the experience of trying to have a child.

With 12 outlets in 10 U.S. cities and unicorn status, Kindbody is poised for growth, having raised more than $154 million.

“We believe very much in the consumerism of healthcare, and what that means is you have to build healthcare around the consumer,” says founder and chairwoman Gina Bartasi.

  • Part 1: How compassion and inclusivity are helping Kindbody change the fertility industry
  • Part 2: Why focusing on holistic care helped Kindbody triple its revenue in 2021
  • Part 3: Chipping away at the problems of reproductive healthcare, one patient at a time

Thanks for reading and have a good week!

Ram Iyer
Editor, TechCrunch+
@extrabrunch

Does your startup have enough runway? 5 factors to consider

A closeup of a fuel-level indicator from a car dashboard indicating empty..

Image Credits: Jasmin Merdan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Myriad factors, like fuel load, ambient temperature and sea level, determine how much runway a 747 requires to reach takeoff speed.

Startups are similar: If the landlord hikes your office rent, a very comfortable 18-month runway could easily shorten to a year. Would that still leave you enough time to get off the ground?

In her latest TC+ post, angel investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi shares five factors early-stage founders should bear in mind when managing resources, including her simple burn-rate calculator.

“Having 12-18 months of runway between funding rounds gives you time to implement your plans,” she says. “It’s a careful balance of keeping burn rate at a minimum while investing in key areas.”

Mayfield’s Arvind Gupta discusses startup fundraising during a downturn

a rubber duck sits in a lonely puddle

Image Credits: diephosi (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)

Arvind Gupta, an investor at Mayfield Fund and founder of accelerator IndieBio, reviews several hundred pitch decks each year.

“In 10 days, I can do the primary research and work with the founders to come to a conclusion there. For a larger Series A check. It could take a little bit longer than that, but not that much.”

In a TechCrunch+ Twitter Space last week with Senior Editor Walter Thompson, Gupta talked about how the downturn is affecting seed- and early-stage funding, what he’s looking for, and candid advice for first-time founders trying to raise during a correction.

“You can still finance hopes and dreams, but just with smaller dollars, and you’re generally going to give up a little bit more of your company in terms of dilution during an economic downturn,” said Gupta.

“I expect that to start happening as well in the next year.”

What Glossier got wrong

Technology startup valuations are robust, so it’s only natural that entrepreneurs and investors would want to position firms as a straight tech play, regardless of the underlying business they’re in.

Once public, however, the markets will value you according to the sector in which you actually operate, writes Evan J. Zimmerman, the founder and CEO of Drift.

“The fundamental disconnect is that software-enabled businesses don’t necessarily monetize the same way that software-based businesses do,” Zimmerman says.

And that, he says, is what beauty brand Glossier got wrong, which led to it laying off about 80 staffers, most of whom were from its engineering team.

“That is ultimately the problem that hit Glossier: it forgot what business it’s in.”

Unpacking SailPoint’s $6.9B sale to private equity firm Thoma Bravo

Enterprise security products maker SailPoint’s agreement to be acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo lent a sliver of hope to tech startups looking for positive signs in a down market.

But the fact that its valuation sits at roughly 15x ARR could be mixed news for startups looking for an exit, wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange.

“Yes, it is a piece of good news for unicorns worth less than $10 billion because they can benchmark against a recent sale — one that could help them defend double-digit multiples of their ARR. But also no, because companies sell for a premium when they exit to private equity.”

Crypto is altering the investing landscape for even the most disciplined VCs

Image of abstract data visualization on purple background.

Image Credits: Andriy Onufriyenko (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

With more than $32 billion invested last year, and over $11.3 billion so far in 2022, fundraising at crypto startups is showing no signs of slowing, market downturn be damned.

But behind all the fervor, there is a fundamental difference in how investors write checks for startups in the space and what they get in return, reported Jacquelyn Melinek and Natasha Mascarenhas.

“In traditional equity investing, you want to have a Series A or seed-stage investor have 20% to 30% ownership of the company. But having 20% to 30% ownership of a token or of a network is very bad and frowned upon by the community. And web3 is all about the community,” Yida Gao, general partner at Shima Capital, said.

What Glossier got wrong

In recent weeks, Glossier has laid off about 80 employees (or a third of its corporate workforce), most of whom were on its tech team.

Although the company focused on technology when it was really a beauty business, it is not hard to see these layoffs in the light of the public market tech meltdown.

Many venture-backed companies believe they are tech companies — indeed, they were born that way — when in fact they are not. Leaders at these companies need to learn the business they are actually in, what makes those companies good, and direct their technical efforts towards those ends.

The fundamental disconnect: Software-enabled businesses don’t necessarily monetize the same way that software-based businesses do.

Technology companies get the richest valuations and are endowed with the highest multiples of any sector. Pursuing those higher multiples means going to great lengths to show, both operationally and financially, that you “look” like a tech company.

For a firm like Glossier, looking like a tech company is the difference between having a price-to-sales ratio of 5.44, like Estée Lauder, or 31.6, like MongoDB. Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss knows it, and her investors do, too.

Tech companies are highly valued for a reason: when they work, they have high growth rates and very high margins. Companies therefore often make product decisions to achieve a tech business profile — like investing in engineering or eschewing margin-hitting operations.

Hunter Walk, for example, pointed out that pursuing software margins may be one reason social media companies avoid the cost center of human moderation.

The difficulty with these types of decisions is that you will direct your technical talent at the wrong problems.

But the narration changes once you go public. The markets work by taking companies, categorizing them, and then evaluating them on well-known metrics. You don’t get to decide what kind of company you are.

You might market yourself as a tech company, and you may very well use technology, but if the public markets decide you’re a beauty company then, well, you’re a beauty company (at least for valuation purposes) until you prove otherwise.

Glossier just laid off one-third of its corporate employees, mostly in tech

Glossier, the popular beauty brand led by former blogger Emily Weiss, let go of 80 of its corporate employees today, according to an internal email obtained by Modern Retail. The cuts, which amount to around one-third of Glossier’s corporate workforce, will primarily impact the company’s technology team.

“[W]e are shifting our technology strategy to leverage external partners for parts of our platform that we’re currently maintaining internally,” Weiss wrote in the email announcing the layoffs to staff.

The email recounts some of the company’s recent mistakes, including prioritizing strategic projects that “distracted” the company from its core beauty business and that executives “got ahead of ourselves on hiring.”

The tech team layoffs are notable for a beauty retailer that has often described it as a technology company. In numerous interviews throughout the past two years, Weiss and other executives have emphasized the company’s focus on its direct-to-consumer online shipping model and obsession with iterating the customer experience based on feedback.

The company built its own point-of-sale system and commerce APIs in-house, allowing them to deliver a “seamless” customer experience, former Glossier CTO Bryan Mahoney said in 2018.

Founded in 2014, Glossier is widely touted as one of the earliest breakout successes of the DTC model, and raised its Series E last July at a $1.8 billion valuation from Lone Pine Capital, Sequoia, Forerunner Ventures, and others. E-commerce sales typically account for 80% of Glossier’s revenue, the Business of Fashion reported last July. 

Despite its fundraising success, Glossier’s ascent has oftentimes been far from smooth. The company laid off its entire retail staff and closed all its physical locations, including its flagship New York City store, in August 2020. It also grappled with the fallout from an open letter written by some of its employees of color sharing their experiences of enduring racism from managers in its stores, prompting a public apology from Weiss.

Nearly a year later, the company seemed to change course on its decision to double down on e-commerce alone, saying it planned to use the Series E funding to open three new permanent physical stores in Seattle, Los Angeles, and London – as well as reopen its New York City location. It hoped to use the retail locations to build brand awareness and encourage customers to create content, areas Glossier became well-known for in its early days through its distinctive, millennial-pink aesthetic and clever use of social media marketing.

The company’s website currently says customers should “stay tuned” for more retail store openings this year.

Extra Crunch Live: Join Anu Duggal for a live Q&A on August 20 at 11am PT/2pm ET

Rent the Runway and Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies.

Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing.

Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur launched her first fund to invest in female-led startups. It took her 700 meetings over two years to make that first close, she said. Years later, venture capital has slightly taken note. But the Female Founders Fund, or “F Cubed,” has tracked female-led wins and bet big on the underestimated asset class.

Her early focus on female founders hasn’t evolved, but the landscape has. And in an unprecedented world of remote deals and democratization of venture capital, we’re even more excited to have Duggal join us on Extra Crunch Live this upcoming Thursday at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. EST/6 p.m. GMT

Those tuning in and taking notes are encouraged to ask questions, but you have to be an Extra Crunch member to access the chat. If you still haven’t signed up, now’s your chance! With the subscription, you’ll also be able to check out all of our stellar previous guests on-demand (watch those episodes here).

Female Founders Fund has provided seed institutional capital to entrepreneurs with over $3 billion in enterprise value. The firm has cut checks into women-led companies such as Rent the Runway, Billie, Tala, Peanut, Thrive Global and Zola. The fund has also attracted limited partners like Melinda Gates and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.

Duggal herself has a fascinating trajectory into technology investing. At 25, she started a wine bar in Bombay called The Tasting Room. She went on to get an MBA from London Business School, and co-founded Exclusively.in, an e-commerce company that got acquired by Indian fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2011.

Hear from Duggal on August 20 about how the investment landscape has changed for female founders, what she thinks of as a success story and if 2020 feels different than 2014. And Extra Crunch fam, make sure to bring your thoughtful questions for me to ask her live on air.

You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.

Lyft’s IPO is hot, YC demo day, two new unicorns, and what’s Boy Brow?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm took us through an IPO, a big round, 943 startup pitches, two new unicorns, and some scooter news. A very 2019 mix, really.

Up first we took a peek at the latest from the Lyft IPO saga. Recall that Lyft is beating Uber to the public markets, and we can report that it’s having a good time doing so. The popular ride-hailing company, second-place by market share in its domestic market, is oversubscribed at an already-healthy valuation. If the company will raise its price or the number of shares that it sells isn’t yet known, but early indications hint that Lyft timed its IPO well.

Next, we took a look at the recent OpenDoor round that has been long-rumored. Tipping the scales at $300 million, and valuing the home-buying-and-selling startup at $3.8 billion, the company’s latest equity event was a bit higher than expected. There are other players in its space, and the firm isn’t yet recession-tested. All the same, a Murderers’ Row of capital lined up for the latest round.

Moving on, Kate went to Y Combinator’s Demo Day and got a closer look at the accelerator’s latest batch. There were a ton of two-minute pitches, many of which sounded the same, but chances are we’ll see a few unicorns emerge from the bunch. And, interesting tidbit, some of the companies actually forwent Demo Day and raised capital before they could hit the stage!

Later, we discuss two new unicorns. This week’s unicorns had a theme and one that was new to Equity. This time, both the billion-dollar businesses mentioned on the show were founded by women. As Kate noted, there aren’t too many of those, so to see two in the same week is great.

Glossier, founded by Emily Weiss, brought in a $100 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital . The round values the beauty business at a whopping $1.2 billion, tripling the valuation it garnered with a $52 million Series C in 2018. As for Rent The Runway, a startup founded by Jen Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, it closed a $125 million round led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Bain Capital Ventures. This round values the company at $1 billion. Hyman took to Twitter to share some inspirational words on raising capital as a woman, a pregnant woman, in heels!

And finally, we took a look at a Parisian scooter tax. Mostly because Alex wanted to talk about Paris.

And that’s Equity for the week. We’ll see you soon!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

Glossier triples valuation, enters unicorn club with $100M round

Glossier, known for its flagship line of barely there beauty products, has landed a $100 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital. The round values Emily Weiss’ business at a whopping $1.2 billion, fully cementing the company as a startup “unicorn” and tripling the valuation it garnered with a $52 million Series C in 2018.

News of the round was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by Glossier.

“We are building an entirely new kind of beauty company: one that owns the distribution channel and makes customers our stakeholders,” founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss said in a statement.

As part of the round, which included support from newcomers Tiger Global Management and Spark Capital and existing investors Forerunner Ventures, Thrive Capital, IVP and Index Ventures, Glossier has hired Vanessa Wittman as its chief financial officer. Wittman previously held the same role at Oath and Dropbox. She replaces Henry Davis, who left the direct-to-consumer makeup brand in late 2018. Other recent additions include Edith Chen, Glossier’s new vice president of supply chain operations, and Nick DeAngelo, vice president of operations.

To date, New York-based Glossier has brought in nearly $200 million in venture capital investment, making it one of the most well-funded privately held beauty businesses. What’s next for the company? Weiss tells The WSJ an initial public offering isn’t out of the question, but didn’t provide a timeline. It’s been about five years since Glossier went from blog to business; it still has plenty of time before investors are pushing for an IPO.

Since it launched as a beauty blog in 2010, Glossier has grown into a 200-person business with $100 million in annual revenue in 2018. It has established two brick-and-mortar shops and expanded from au naturel makeup to “dialed-up extras” fit for the Instagram crowd. The recent launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play, hints at a future where Glossier is a multi-brand beauty empire competing with the likes of Ulta and Estée Lauder.

Makeup is a huge and growing industry venture capitalists have been sleeping on. Megan Quinn, a general partner at Spark Capital, who led the round in Glossier on the firm’s behalf, says online beauty sales are expected to reach $120 billion by 2024. She expects Glossier to win the beauty market as a result of its intimate connection with customers, word of mouth customer acquisition channel and community-building tactics.

“To say that [Weiss] is a force of nature obfuscates her true superpower: she is a fantastic listener,” Quinn writes in a blog post. “By weaving her unique point of view with the feedback loops of her community, she has built a platform to power additional brands that respond to her customer’s needs. More importantly, she has built a world-class team of product designers, supply chain experts, marketing muscle, and arguably one of the largest engineering teams in beauty to make it happen.”

Glossier launches its first spin-off brand, a line of Instagram-friendly ‘dialed-up’ beauty extras

Glossier, known for its line of understated makeup products and a cult-following of millennial Instagrammers, is getting colorful with the launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play.

The company — led by founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss, who built the nearly $400 million business from a makeup blog called Into The Gloss — has raised a total of $92 million in venture capital funding from top-tier consumer investors Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures and IVP. Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake and Forerunner founder and general partner Kirsten Green, are among the company’s board members.

Weiss introduced Glossier in 2014 as a clean-skincare and natural beauty advocate. Today, the direct-to-consumer business boasts a growing line of barely there makeup, designed to mimic Weiss’s own subtle, au naturale vibe. The launch of Glossier Play, inspired by 1970s’ nostalgia, is its first foray into bright colors, glitter and, in the brand’s own words, “dialed-up extras.”

“We wanted to explore color the Glossier way,” a spokesperson for the company said. “This meant developing high-quality products without the moody, expert-centric rhetoric of most luxury brands. Glossier Play is all about fun and creative expression. These products were two years in the making, and just like Glossier’s modern essentials, they are designed to stand the test of time (not trend-driven or fast fashion).”

Glossier Play’s initial line-up of “extras” includes colored eyeliners ($15), highlighters ($20), multi-purpose glitter gel ($14) and the “Vinylic Lip” ($16). Customers can purchase “The Playground,” a set that includes each of the new products, for $60.

The advertising campaign for the Instagram -friendly line will be led by none other than Instagram star Donté Colley, as well as pop musician Troye Sivan. The new line and future spin-offs will help Glossier compete with beauty incumbents, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal, for example, in a market estimated to be worth $750 billion by 2024.

Glossier, headquartered in New York, counts 200 employees, meager in comparison to its nearly 2 million — and growing — social media following. The company surpassed $100 million in annual revenue in 2018, it tells TechCrunch, and acquired 1 million new customers. In total, Glossier retails 29 products across skincare, makeup, body, and fragrance.

The company won’t be introducing additional brands this year and clarified it is not a brand incubator.

These 50 founders and VCs suggest 2018 may be a tipping point for women: Part 1

For the last several years, we’ve compiled profiles of women founders and investors at the end of each year because they’ve either raised substantial amounts of money or otherwise achieved notable milestones.

This year, we don’t want to wait until December. We’re too excited about the progress we’re witnessing, with women-led startups getting seed, Series A or later-stage funding each week — all while top venture firms grow more serious about pulling women into their most senior ranks, female VCs band together to fund female founders and other women go about launching their own funds.

Some of you will note that this list is far from comprehensive, and we’ll readily agree with you. But we think it’s better to celebrate the accomplishments of some of the women who deserve attention than try to capture every last person we’d include if only there were more hours in the day.

Herewith, a list of 25 founders and investors who’ve had a pretty good 2018 so far, with a second list of women in the industry coming shortly, so stay tuned.

Brynn Putnam, founder and CEO of Mirror

Harvard grad Brynn Putnam was once a professional ballet dancer, but she may eventually find more fame as a serial founder. Two years after her last performance in 2008 with a ballet company in Montreal, Putnam started a New York-boutique fitness studio, Refine Method, around a high-intensity, interval workout. It would later sprout into three studios in New York and attract the likes of Kelly Ripa and Ivana Trump.

Now, Putnam is using its founding principal — that gym users can wring more from their workout hours — to build yet another business called Mirror. Centered around an at-home device, it looks like a mirror but enables users to see an instructor and classmates for fitness routines like Pilates, all while tracking their performance on screen. Mirror isn’t available to buy yet, but investors are already sold, providing the company with $13 million in funding earlier this year so it can bring its product to fitness buffs everywhere.

Ritu Narayan, co-founder and CEO of Zūm

Ritu Narayan led product management at stalwart tech companies, including Yahoo and eBay, but her biggest challenge eventually became how to ensure that her kids got to where they needed to go during her working hours. She knew she wasn’t alone; there are roughly 73 million children under age 18 in the U.S., many of whom are driven around by frenzied parents who are trying to make it through each day.

Enter Zūm, a now 3.5-year-old company that promises reliable transportation and care for children ages five and older. Zūm isn’t the first kind of Uber for kids. In fact, another competitor, Shuddle, shuttered in 2016 after burning through more than $12 million in funding. But Narayan’s company appears to be doing something right. Earlier this year, Zūm raised $19 million in Series B funding, including from earlier backer Sequoia Capital, which is famously metric driven.

The company has now raised $26.8 million altogether.

Daniela Perdomo, co-founder and CEO, goTenna

When Hurricane Sandy cut off power in and around New York City in the fall of 2012, Daniela Perdomo and her brother, Jorge, were struck by the need for a network that would enable people to call or text even when there’s no Wi-Fi or cell signal. Today, that company, goTenna, is taking off, powered by an early device it created that pairs with a cell phone via Bluetooth to transmit messages using radio frequencies, along with a newer version of the device that allows them to create a kind of mesh network.

To date, the company has sold more than 100,000 units of its devices. It has raised roughly $17 million from VCs. In May, the company also partnered with an outfit called Samourai Wallet to launch an Android app that, beginning this summer, will enable users to send bitcoin payments without an internet connection. The move could prove crucial for some of its customers, particularly in disaster areas.

Chloe Alpert, CEO and co-founder of Medinas Health

Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of surplus medical supplies are discarded every year, according to Chloe Alpert, the founder of Medinas Health, a Berkeley, Calif.-based startup that uses inventory data and matching software to help big hospitals sell excess equipment to small clinics and nursing homes.

Alpert thinks Medinas can create cost savings for both sides by creating something that’s fast and trustworthy and working with third parties who can disassemble, ship and re-assemble medical equipment.

Investors believe her surplus marketplace has a shot. Her 10-month-old company raised $1 million in funding earlier this year, including from Sound Ventures, Rough Draft Ventures, Precursor Ventures and Trammell Ventures.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, co-founder of Promise

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins was raised by a single mom who occasionally fed her two daughters with food stamps before a union job enabled the three to escape welfare. But that formative experience made a lasting impact. In fact, after graduating from college, Ellis-Lamkins worked for a union that helped organize low-wage home care. By the time she was 26, she was head of the San Jose-based South Bay Labor Council.

Ellis-Lamkins is far from done in her work to ensure that the disadvantaged can prosper. Her newest project: working in partnership with governments that release people from jail on condition that they work with her company, Promise. The big idea: Promise provides support to people caught in the criminal justice system to ensure they can return to their jobs and families until their case in resolved, rather than remain incarcerated because they can’t afford bail. The latter scenario happens all too often, agree VCs. Toward that end, earlier this year a handful of investors — including First Round Capital, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, 8VC and Kapor Capital — provided Promise with $3 million to help put an end to it.

Jesse Genet, founder and CEO of Lumi

In 2014, Jesse Genet was trying to convince a panel of investors on “Shark Tank” to write her a $250,000 check for five percent of her company, which, at the time, sold photo printing kits online. Genet left empty-handed, but she didn’t give up, instead turning her company, Lumi, into a business that designs and supplies beautiful packaging for many top e-commerce companies that sell directly to consumers. It also landed $9 million in funding earlier this year led by Spark Capital, with participation from Forerunner Ventures and earlier investor Homebrew.

It’s been a process, but Genet seems to have anticipated it would be, telling Business Insider back in 2015, “One key thing is not to rush your own business . . . Even if you’re not making a ton of money, that experience of just living the company day-in and day-out, getting that feedback and experience, is something you can never replace.”

Sarah Guo, general partner, Greylock Partners

Sarah Guo didn’t necessarily set out to become a venture capitalist. She certainly didn’t imagine she would become one of the most senior investors at one of the oldest venture firms in the country. Yet Guo is both of these things, having been promoted last month to general partner at 53-year-old Greylock Partners five years after joining the firm as a principal.

For Guo, the appointment caps a lifetime spent in the world of startups. Before joining Greylock, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she led much of the bank’s coverage of business-to-business tech companies and advised public clients, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga and Nvidia.

A graduate (for both her undergraduate degree and MBA) of the University of Pennsylvania, Guo also worked previously at Casa Systems, a 15-year-old tech company that develops a software-centric networking platform for cable and mobile service providers and that — in a twist that we think is pretty neat — was founded by her parents.

Charlotte Fudge, founder and CEO of CentralReach

CentralReach builds practice management software for the developmental disabilities sector, with a focus on both research and practice. It isn’t the kind of company to make headlines, but the five-year-old, Pompano Beach, Fla., company managed to attract the attention of powerhouse firm Insight Venture Partners. Insight invested an undisclosed amount of funding in the company earlier this year, some of which CentralReach has already used to acquire Chartlytics, a behavioral change analytics software startup.

For Charlotte Fudge — a registered nurse who founded CentralReach and continues to lead it as its CEO — the developments have to be exciting. She has spent her career focused on people with autism and related disabilities; having the deep-pocketed support of an investor will presumably help her company reach more people than ever.

Emily Weiss, founder and CEO of Glossier

Emily Weiss has been called the “millennials’ Estée Lauder.” It didn’t take long for her to get there, either. Indeed, a little more than three years ago, Weiss was still overseeing highly popular blog Into the Gloss when an early meeting with Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures helped move Weiss in a new direction: that of selling beauty products that cost a fraction of what some traditional brands charge and are pared back in every other way, too.

Customers are fanatical about the company, whose Instagram counts 1.2 million followers and counting. Investors love the company’s look, too. In February, Glossier closed on $52 million in Series C funding in a round that it characterized as oversubscribed. The company has now raised $86 million altogether.

Anne Boden, founder and CEO of Starling Bank

There are powerful women in banking; there are powerful women in tech. Anne Boden is among a small but growing number of powerful women who are straddling both worlds, and her influence seems to grow by the month. The former COO of Allied Irish Banks and a former top executive at RBS and ABN AMRO before that, Boden is now founder and CEO of Starling Bank, a digital-only outfit that does its lending via smartphones, gained its U.K. banking license in 2016 and has big ambitions to expand across much of Europe.

Indeed, as rival challenger bank Revolut eyes the U.S., Starling — which has already raised a reported £48 million by hedge fund manager Harald McPike — is currently looking to raise another £80 million in fresh capital in an investor search that could potentially extend beyond the U.K. The company also quietly blew up a partnership with the fintech unicorn TransferWise, which it had partnered with last year to provide international payments capabilities. As Boden told TechCrunch last month of the move, Starling figured it “could provide a better user experience by doing it ourselves.”

Shruti Merchant, co-founder and CEO of HubHaus

When Shruti Merchant dropped out of a med school program in Concord, Calif., to move 40 miles away to San Francisco, she didn’t know anyone, so she and six other people who discovered each other on Craigslist rented a big house together and . . . they became great friends in the process. Merchant was already trying her hand at entrepreneurship, but the experience made her think a bigger idea might center on managing such co-living situations, so she co-founded HubHaus to do exactly that.

So far, so good, it seems. HubHaus, which rents out large houses and subleases out bedrooms, creating housing communities in the process, now oversees dozens of properties in L.A. and San Francisco. It also raised $10 million in Series A funding earlier this year, led by Social Capital.

Kathy Hannun, co-founder and CEO of Dandelion

Nearly straight out of college, Kathy Hannun was brought onto the evaluation team of Alphabet’s X group, which is responsible for coming up with the next “moonshots” for the company. Eventually, she and several colleagues spied an opportunity too good not to pursue independently. The end result: Dandelion Energy, which says it makes “geothermal heating and air conditioning so efficient, it pays for itself.”

Investors certainly don’t mind relying on Dandelion. New Enterprise Associates, BoxGroup and others provided the year-old, Brooklyn-based company with $4.5 million in fresh funding earlier this year, bringing its total funding to $6.5 million to date. The day after the new round closed, Hannun had a baby.

Ran Ma, co-founder and CEO of Siren

Ran Ma spent years as a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University and, before that, as research assistant at Johns Hopkins Hospital, working in nephrology, including as it relates to kidney disease. In those roles, Ma learned plenty, including that kidney disease impacts up to 40 percent of diabetics, and that diabetes afflicts roughly 400 million people — a giant percentage of whom are unable to feel pain from ulcers and gangrene, which can lead to amputations.

It’s those kinds of stats that compelled her to start Siren, a three-year-old, Copenhagen- and San Francisco-based company that’s making textile products that empower their wearers, starting with machine-washable and dryer-proof socks that can measure a wearer’s foot temperature to show him or her what’s going on through a connected app. (A heat spot, for example, can signal a burgeoning infection.) Investors certainly like Ma’s approach to helping diabetics detect potential injuries before they become debilitating. They provided the company with $3.4 million in funding earlier this year. Among those footing the bill: DCM, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund.

Nicki Ramsay, founder and CEO of CardUp

After spending roughly eight years with American Express in a variety of roles, Nicki Ramsay spied an unmet need. Specifically, AmEx customers couldn’t use their credit cards to pay for rent or taxes, among other things. Her solution: CardUp, a company that enables users to set up recurring payments to use their credit cards, from Citi, Visa, MasterCard and elsewhere, to pay for everything from rent to car loans to insurance to — in the case of small business owners — employees’ salaries, all while earning rewards. (Why just pay your rent, when you can pay your rent and get 70,000 air miles in the process?)

Investors clearly like the idea of providing incentives to users willing to use their credit cards as a financing tool. In March, Sequoia India and the seed-stage venture firm SeedPlus gave Singapore-based CardUp $1.7 million in seed funding, money it is using to grow its staff, as well as market itself to a growing number of small- and medium-size businesses.

Gwyneth Paltrow, founder and CEO of Goop

Goop, the wellness newsletter-turned-media and e-commerce company founded a decade ago by actress Gwyneth Paltrow, gets plenty of grief for its highly unscientific advice around vaginal steaming and the dangers of bras. Perhaps most famously, it has marketed jade eggs to its followers, suggesting that they put them in their vaginas to cultivate their sexual energy.

While funny to a great many people, Paltrow may get the last laugh. In March, her 150-person company raised $50 million in Series C funding from new and earlier backers, including New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Fidelity, money that Goop intends to use to expand internationally, including through experiential retail, “image events” and through good-old-fashioned marketing.

Naomi Hirabayashi and Marah Lidey, co-founders of Shine

While Naomi Hirabayashi and Marah Lidey worked together at a nonprofit in New York, they formed their own personal support system with each other and close friends; they wanted to create something like it for others, too. There were already plenty of self-care apps, but none reflected their experience as women of color. As Hirabayashi told TechCrunch earlier this year, “We saw there was something missing in the market because well-being companies didn’t really reach us — they didn’t speak to us. We didn’t see people that looked like us. We didn’t feel like the way they shared content sounded like how we spoke about the different well-being issues in our lives.”

The product they settled on would become Shine, a startup that sends users a daily text with actionable tips around confidence, daily happiness, mental health and productivity to help them get through the day. Investors are feeling good about Shine, too, seemingly. Two years after raising seed capital, the company nabbed $5 million in Series A funding in April led by earlier backer Comcast Ventures, with participation from numerous other outfits, including The New York Times.

Ankiti Bose, co-founder and CEO of Zilingo

Ankiti Bose is the rare female founder in Asia’s startup scene, but that fact doesn’t seem to be slowing down her company in any way. Rather, Zilingo, an e-commerce startup that recreates online the experience of visiting Southeast Asia’s bazaars, raised $54 million in fresh funding in an April round that brings the company’s total funding to $82 million.

Why are investors so enthusiastic? Bose’s background — she worked both as a McKinsey analyst in Mumbai and later an as investment analyst for Sequoia Capital in Bangalore — certainly helps. But so does the market she is chasing. By providing a way for independent merchants to operate online storefronts, Zilingo is managing to compete effectively against the likes of Amazon in what’s expected to be an $88 billion market by 2025.

Aditi Avasthi, founder and CEO of Embibe

Five years ago, Aditi Avasthi decided to apply what she’d learned about economics at the University of Chicago and two years at Barclays to help students in her home country of India. The result was Embibe, a Bengarulu, India-based online coaching startup that tries to address not only access but also under-performance by taking a forensic approach to everything a student does online and trying to reach them when and where they most need help. The idea is to deliver far more accurate feedback — while simultaneously having to rely on fewer teachers.

Avasthi must be on to something. Earlier this year, the Indian conglomerate Reliance paid out $180 million to the company in exchange for a 73 percent stake in the business, a part of which came from Embibe’e earlier investors. It was a big win for these backers, Kalaari Capital and Lightbox, which appear to have provided Embibe with just $4 million in backing. Of course, it’s none too shabby a development for first-time founder Avasthi, either.

Katie Haun, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Earlier this week, nine-year-old Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced its first female general partner: Katie Haun, whose star has quietly been rising in the Bay Area over for the past couple of years. Haun, who is leading Andreessen’s new $300 million crypto fund with general partner Chris Dixon, is kind of a big deal, so it’s no surprise that a16z nabbed her.

Among her other many accomplishments, Haun spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where she focused on fraud, cybercrime and corporate compliance no-nos alongside the SEC, FBI and Treasury. According to Haun’s bio, she also was the DOJ’s first-ever coordinator for digital assets, and she led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the task force that investigated and ultimately took down the online drug marketplace Silk Road. Haun is also a lecturer at Stanford Business School and she’s a director on the board of the digital exchange Coinbase, which was backed early on by a16z.

Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall, co-founders of Winnie

Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall know how to build products. Mauskopf spent most of the last decade working on products at Twitter, Postmates, YouTube and Google, while Halsall was doing much the same at Postmates, Quora and Google. No wonder that when the two came together to create Winnie — a mobile app that offers parents information about nearby kid-friendly places, what sort of facilities for families a location may have and, more recently, an online community where parents can ask questions and participate in discussions — investors took notice, investing $2.25 million in the company two years ago.

They haven’t lost interest. Instead, the now two-and-a-half-year-old app, which has reportedly surpassed one million users, just locked down a fresh $4 million in seed funding earlier this week, led by Reach Capital. Winnie has now raised $6.5 million altogether.

Falon Fatemi, founder and CEO of Node

Falon Fatemi used to take pride in becoming Google’s youngest employee at age 19. But after logging four years with the search giant and another two years at YouTube, Fatemi is making her mark by building her four-year-old startup, Node, into an ever-growing operation.

Just in April, the company — which makes an AI-driven search tool that helps people understand who in their professional network can be the most helpful at any one point in time and why — raised $5 million in fresh funding from Recruit Strategic Partners and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo. The round brings Node’s total funding to $21 million altogether.

Renee Wang, founder and CEO of Castbox

Renee Wang was born in China and reportedly attended a boarding school in the rural countryside outside Beijing, tutoring her fellow students — while also teaching herself to code. Indeed, after graduating from Peking University with a double major, Wang found herself at Google, where she worked for the company in Tokyo for more than four years. It was there, from inside the search giant’s operations, that she could see spikes in user searches for podcast content and decided there was room for an app to dominate the space.

Enter Castbox, an app that uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to power some of its unique features, like personalized recommendations and in-audio search. The app is also capable of suggesting what to listen to next based on users’ prior listening behavior, and its in-audio search feature actually transcribes, indexes and makes searchable the audio content inside podcasts. With so much going on, it’s no wonder investors are listening. In April, they gave Castbox $13.5 million in Series B funding. Altogether, it has raised $29.5 million.

Laura Deming, partner of Longevity Fund

Photo: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images

Twenty-four-year-old Laura Deming is younger than most of her venture capital peers, but she’s taken seriously nonetheless — and it’s no wonder. The New Zealand native was home-schooled, developing along the way a fascination with the biology of aging. In fact, before she was even a teenager, she found herself working in the lab of Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging. By the time she was 14, Deming was a student at MIT, and by age 16, she was a college-drop out, having been accepted into Peter Thiel’s two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people “who want to build new things.”

Build things, she has done. Last year, Deming closed her second venture capital fund with $22 million. Earlier this year, Deming took the wraps off an accelerator program, too, one with backing from famed investor Marc Andreessen, the early-stage venture firm Felicis Ventures, and other, unnamed investors. The idea is to help startups, especially those focused on late-onset medical conditions get to a significant “value inflection point” within four months, which is how long the program runs.