Beyond the 2%: Turning a gender problem into a founder-alignment problem

When I started fundraising for my company, I didn't think of myself as a "female founder,"  I thought I was building a strong business. Then I started hearing no…

I pitched the way I know how to pitch: grounded in customer traction, realistic growth, sustainable economics. I was selling a company solving a real problem for retailers. Somewhere along the way, I had a quiet but destabilizing thought  - maybe this isn't my path.

Around International Women's Day, many cite the same statistic - women-founded companies receive roughly 2% of venture capital funding. The frustration behind that number is real. Structural bias exists in who gets into rooms, how confidence is interpreted and what kinds of ambition feel familiar to decision-makers.

But reducing the conversation to a single statistic can obscure something equally important: sometimes the issue isn't founder quality, it's founder-investor alignment.

Choosing the Harder Path Early

For me, entrepreneurship didn't start in a VC conference room. It started with a decision about how I wanted to begin my career.

After college, I had the opportunity to participate in Venture for America, a two-year fellowship that places you at a startup, teaches you by immersion, and if you are still standing at the end of it, nudges you toward starting something yourself.

Over time, I realized the advantage of choosing VFA wasn't just learning how startups operate. It was avoiding the mindset shift that would eventually be required  with more traditional career paths of finance or consulting.

When you start your career making good money, it becomes much harder to imagine the financial sacrifice and uncertainty that early-stage founder life requires. The risk with that path isn't that the dream disappears overnight; it's that it slips away one rational decision at a time, until "I'll do it later" becomes "I never did it."

Choosing immersion over comfort trained me to tolerate ambiguity. It also shaped how I think about risk - not as something to eliminate, but as something to align with my values.

That perspective became critical when it was time to raise capital.

Where Gender Quietly Shows Up

Investors are often conditioned to reward bold, aggressive forecasts and expansive narratives about domination and scale. Many women,  myself included,  tend to present practical numbers, defensible assumptions and disciplined growth plans.

That difference in framing can be misread.

Add to that the reality that most venture decision-makers are still men, and certain communication styles feel more familiar than others.

None of this means women can't raise venture capital. Many do. But it does mean the default path isn't neutral.

And it raises a harder question: if the only way to be fundable is to reshape your company, are you building the business you actually want?

The Billion-Dollar Question

For years, the celebrated startup arc was to pitch VCs, raise a large round, scale aggressively and aim for a billion-dollar exit. I absorbed that narrative like many founders do. Early-on, I assumed if we wanted to build something meaningful, VC was the gateway.

But capital always comes with expectations. Growth timelines. Exit horizons. Definitions of success. During our seed process at Endear, there was only one potential investor who aligned with how we wanted to build. Most were still operating on the familiar script.

The hardest part wasn't hearing no. It was feeling pressure to manufacture an answer to a question we didn't believe in:  "How are you going to exit for a billion dollars?"

If you have to revise the truth about your ambition to get funded - you're not just buying the runway, you're buying future conflict.

As a result, my perspective on the "2% problem" has evolved.

Bias absolutely plays a role in venture funding, but we should also expand the conversation. Not every strong company is meant to be a hypergrowth venture-backed rocketship. Not every founder wants to optimize for the same outcome.

The real leverage comes from clarity:

• What kind of company are you building?
• What tradeoffs are you willing to make?
• What outcomes are your investors underwriting when they say yes?

At Endear, my co-founder and I decided early that we weren't building a growth-at-all-costs business. We wanted durable economics, real customer value and long-term sustainability.

Today, we're fully aligned with our investors. They understand what we're optimizing for. They support it. And that alignment has given us far more freedom than chasing capital ever could.

I wish more women received venture funding - but I'm also grateful for the resistance I faced. It forced me to examine my assumptions about success. It pushed me to choose a path that fit the company we were actually building and not the one I thought I was supposed to pursue.

Funding is not the end. It's a means.

And the most powerful decision a founder can make isn't just whether they can raise capital,  it's whether the capital aligns with the future they're trying to create.