 We have the next session, which has caught my eye and I'm sure you all are also waiting for this session or at least are looking forward to know what's coming up in this session because the topic is such, don't invest in women, no, no, no, don't invest in women because you don't need those $3 trillion opportunity. Well, discussing this topic on the panel is Jessica Cook, Jesse Draper. She is the founding partner of Helogen Ventures, as well as the creator and host of Emmy-nominated television series, The Valley Girl Show. Draper is the fourth generation venture capitalist who focuses on early-stage investing in consumer technology companies led by females and co-ed teams. Joining Jessica on the panel is the co-panelist who is another woman of power, Ritu Maria. She is the editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Asia Pacific and India. So Ritu and Jesse, we are looking forward for this amazing session and I don't think anybody wants to miss this opportunity. That's a lot, I am very excited to be here and having this talk here with Jesse Draper and you know, I think the very fact that today women are trying to help women entrepreneurs, that's one of the biggest things that can happen to the women in business community because that would make a lot of difference to essentially women who are looking to sort of break a leg in the field of business. So I think what Jesse Draper today is doing is something extremely fantastic because she's created a vehicle through which she is trying to help women founders in some of the most important aspects of their lives, which is really to build a business, find scale in their business and also be able to in some levels balance their family life as well as their career. So she supports them with funds, resources, tools, skills and gives them essentially the right foundation which will help them to prosper and succeed. So Jesse, it's wonderful to have you, to be talking to you over here at Thy Global Summit and you know, as a starting point, I would love if you can tell us a little bit more about halogen ventures and how are you empowering female founders by investing early stage capital in their startup organizations and especially, you know, what is it because obviously you've sort of put 50% of the human race outside of your investment criteria. So what is it that you look for in a women founder when you go out and make an investment in a startup which is essentially run by women or at least partially has women founders in its ecosystem. So I, first of all, I'm so excited to be here. I am so grateful to have been involved in Thai for many, many years. And the very first, I just like to say the very first speaking engagement I ever had was probably in 2007 or 2008 and it was to a women's group, the first I think women's group in Silicon Valley of Thai. And I interviewed Lata Krishnan who I met through Thai who is now one of my investors in my fund and I'm just, I love Thai, I'm so grateful to Thai, my entire family is grateful to Thai and my grandfather, my father and I all have been very involved with Thai for many years and so just a huge fan and honored to be here today. And I, yeah, so I run Halogen Ventures. We invest in early stage female founded consumer technologies. So there has to be a woman in the founding team of five. We have about 62 businesses right now and I like to say we have three male CEOs with a female co-founder just to, like we like men, we just wanna make sure there's women. It's funny when you run a fund focused on investing in women, you get a lot of very silly questions like, well, what if a man works there? And I say, well, we're building billion dollar businesses. So I hope that eventually a lot of men work there. I just wanna make sure that there are women in the founding team. And, you know, Rita, you kindly alluded to the fact that yes, this is a big opportunity. We're giving these companies the resources they need. But also women are an under, like they're underrepresented in terms of investment, in terms of investors, like holding investor seats. There's not enough women investors out there. So any women investors just get out there, go do it, raise a fund, we need more of you and it is, it's a $3 trillion opportunity. It's more than that. Women also in the United States, I know and I'm sure the statistics are very similar in India. They make, women make 80% of purchasing decisions in households. So why aren't we as involved in the building of these businesses since we're making most of the purchasing decisions? So yeah, we invest some of the things I look for. And I'm a former entrepreneur. I was a media entrepreneur, ran a tech news blogs that I started in 2008, the heart being this show called The Valley Girl Show. We were kind of like in those early days of distribution, acquired a few other tech blogs and now I'm on the investor side. And running this tech news blog site and The Valley Girl Show, I did five seasons of the show. And I quickly learned that after two seasons, I had only interviewed incredible men in technology. And that was a problem because I'm a fourth generation venture capitalist. And the first female in line, I grew up in Silicon Valley. All I know is startups and technology, but I didn't think I could go into that because I was female and I didn't see any women around me. And so I went into entertainment and kind of combined this technology entertainment background. And after two seasons of interviewing incredible men who I respect so much, I just realized that I needed to change something. And I was facilitating the problem I had seen as a young girl. And so I made an initiative to interview 50% women in technology on the show. And they came, I call it like the bat woman signal because I started just getting pitched all of these deals run by women. There is no lack of women starting companies. We saw nearly 5,000 deals last year. And I think it's because it's just like a magnet. It's really incredible to see how many women are starting these billion dollar businesses. And so I started saying sometimes you're a little too early for the show. I love what you're doing. I'd have a lot of them on. I'm forever grateful to the women of fashion tech back then because it was like Jen Hyman from Rent the Runway and the guilt group girls and Rebecca Minkoff. And I don't know if you are all as familiar with them, but they were early stage entrepreneurs in about 2010. And now they're running these enormous businesses. And they made it okay then for Cheryl Sandberg to come on the show and numerous others, Lata Krishnan, etc. And I started seeing these early stage deals saying, I don't have a lot of money, but I can maybe be a strategic advisor and get you immediate exposure. Or as I started making a little bit of money, I was in my 20s and I was just emptying my bank accounts into these companies. I was like $1,000, $5,000, will you take it? And some of those deals ended up doing really well for me. When I sold for a 25X return on the secondary market in less than 18 months. And then I came to a point with the show and the tech blog that I had to kind of make a decision because the investments were going so well and I thought, let's see if I could raise a fund. So I went out and I pitched 500 potential investors, as one does, closed maybe 50 of them and raised my first fund. We're now on the second fund and our companies are doing incredibly well. We sold one last year to P&G, went to Walmart. We're selling one right now. We've had about seven exits and returns and we're just getting going. And I'm just telling you, investing in women de-risks the opportunity, because there's so much data around this, but we're much more risk averse. Which I don't think we should look at as a bad thing. It just means we take much more calculated risk. So we're taking in many more data points than men are. But what we can take from men and learn from men is go with your gut sometimes. At the end of the day, I go through my 100 item diligence checklist in terms of you were asking what I look for. And I'll go through my checklist, but at the end of the day, I look at my team and I say, but do we feel good about this? Do we feel good about this deal? Because you're about to go through a 10-year journey with this person. And so I think you can take only so much into account. And when you're investing, you do need men and you need women. You need to de-risk. And then you need the gut check and the go for it as well. And so in terms of what we look for, we look for a very, like any great entrepreneur, we're looking for a fantastic entrepreneur, someone who can walk through walls, breathe fire. And we're looking for a first the product. Is it unique? Is it defensible? And then we look for product first. Is this something that in 10 years will be a billion-dollar business? Does it have some sort of traction? Is that a million in revenue? Is that 100,000 users? And if you're an early-stage investor, I mean, entrepreneur out there, don't stress about those numbers. We also invest pre-product. But what I want to see is some data around, why do people need this product? And then the third thing, which I should have put first, is obviously the founder. The founder is the most important thing. We love co-founders. We love complementary skill sets. We love it when you know what your strengths and your weaknesses are and that you figured out how to deal with your weaknesses. And we look for people who we can partner with for a long time. So you're sitting in Silicon Valley in your fourth-generation venture capitalist. So one of the points I would love to know more about is why did you pick up consumer tech as a category for investments? I mean, you probably, I'm sure it's much bigger than just consumer tech. But it says that halogen ventures focus on women founders who are particularly in women tech, consumer tech. So why consumer tech? What is the big opportunity for consumer tech, particularly within Silicon Valley that you see it as a great chip to make an investment? So while I grew up in Silicon Valley, we're actually based in Los Angeles. And we, in terms of consumer technology, we do about 25% CPG physical products that are typically e-commerce or market places that ship physical products with some sort of like defensible opportunities. So we have a company called Flex, which is a menstrual disc. That's an alternate tampon device, tampon's multi-billion dollar industry. And this is another option within that category. That's doing incredibly well. And then we do 75% pure tech plays. And so we have a company called the Squad app, which is like a Zoom type service for teenagers. They just partnered with Snapchat. You can screen share, watch movies with your friends. People are obsessed with it. It's been very fun. And then, yeah, in terms of consumer technology, I think it's a very, very vast, but because one, I came from media and I knew the opportunity of, like media I look at as simply a vessel for which to sell things through. So as a fund, I knew that what we could do for our founders is add media exposure. We do influencer strategies with all of these celebrity influencers and micro influencers all the way to full press strategy, all the way to go to market strategy. And so marketing is kind of our expertise. So when it comes to consumer, that is a real secret sauce. I think that we have specifically as a fund and being based in LA, that's very, very helpful. And then also, in terms of women, women are starting consumer businesses left and right. I think what I've realized is they're starting businesses in every single category. They're starting so many businesses that I actually had to really, really focus. And so we, right now we're very focused on beauty technology. We're invested in a great company called Prima Donna that is the inventor of the first nail bot where I can take a picture of all of you with my smartphone and print it on my nail from their printer in under two seconds. And then we're very focused on work from home, future of work technology. And that was even before COVID. So that's been going pretty well for us. And then, I'm sure you can attest that the United States government is incredibly inefficient. And so we are focused on companies that are consumer focused, but also can work with the government. We're really focused on childcare as a category, foster care oriented technologies and trying to actually solve some problems within the government. The government is a multi-billion dollar business. It's bigger than the Fortune 500 companies combined. And they have, all the technology exists to solve these problems. We just need to plug it in. So those are three of the verticals we're excited about within consumer. And then looking at sustainability and anything in FemTech. I love that space just in general. And I think you can go into consumer. There's so many different categories we really have had to focus. But you feel that the whole opportunity of building billion dollar companies is as high in consumer tech as it is in deep tech because we've seen practically companies start in three years back and now they're almost like unicorns. And it's just like you feel that it's sort of hit that mark in no time at all. Do you feel the same opportunity lies in consumer tech too? Oh, definitely, definitely. I mean, you look at, I mean, you look at Amazon, you look at, I mean, there's many, many opportunities. And now our whole behavior in consumers changing. So we're seeing unique even B2B opportunities that facilitate the consumer experience that we're seeing as multi-billion dollar opportunities. But yes, we only go into billion dollar markets. Sure, absolutely, that's, so I mean, tell me that the pandemic has sort of changed the way we've been approaching our businesses. So particularly, being now in the investor, as an investor, how difficult has this period been for you? To raise your fund, to get exits, to sort of able to be able to balance your portfolio companies, keep them above the water so that they don't sink. So I mean, what all, I mean, particularly one, your lenses as an investor, how, as a woman entrepreneur, how tricky has this period been for you? And secondly, how have you been helping other women entrepreneurs in your portfolio to stay afloat? Yeah, such a good question. And first of all, I know it hasn't been easy for everybody. So I hope everyone is doing okay and that they're healthy. It has not been easy, I think, for anyone. This is just a new way of living, at least over here. And I think everywhere is just weird. We're living, I've just convinced myself we're living in an alien world and we're like, eventually we'll go back to planet Earth. But it's been, in terms of being a fund manager going into COVID week one, because we're in early stage, we were actually seeing our companies take little hits to revenue much earlier than, you look at the public companies, they hadn't even caught up. And so when we were starting to hear 60% hit to revenue, 90% hit to revenue, I got all of my companies on a Zoom call. It might not have been all of them, it was about 50 of them because I think I only had the 50 Zoom thing. And I just said, here's what we recommend. Figure out how to make sure that you have 12 to 24 months of runway, become a marketing machine. If you can't sell, you might as well build your brand, apply for the PPP loan, which was the loan that the United States government was giving out. And we just made all these recommendations right away. We also offered a lot of business service provider hours and just helped as much as we could. I mean, we usually are the 24 hour hotline. Like I was a few minutes late getting on our sort of pre-call because I was, I'm closing a deal right now. I mean, I'm usually like the 24 hour hotline, during COVID it's the, I don't know, 28 hour hotline or something. And we just tried to be available to our founders. We also helped them raise, a lot of them said, wait, I don't have 24 months of runway. I need to just like raise a quick bridge round. So we participated, we raised SPVs with our investors as well, they like to have direct investment access. And so I felt like we paused everything we were doing as a fund, re-strategized, tried to support our companies, tried to see who was, you know, taking a hit. Luckily, we only have about 2% travel and events oriented companies. And so we were doing okay. Some strange ones were taking off like the squad going into COVID had over a million users and because they're this Zoom type service for teenagers, like you can imagine the astronomical growth where one of my team members had to help go operate over there for a minute till we could hire and place people. And then we have like trust and will, which is an estate planning online service and sold more wills in the last year than ever before, which is so sad, but good for business. And so it's just, it's been fascinating to see what has done well. And we just tried to support them however we possibly could, but we actually were in the middle of our fundraise. I can talk about this now because I couldn't talk about this before. But we were in the middle of our fundraise and we had to pause because we wanted to make sure our companies were okay. And so we ended up fundraising for our businesses a lot more than for ourselves. And then we just closed our fund on Monday, which if my PR person's listening, she's gonna be so mad that I just said that out loud, but we just closed our fund finally. And I wanna share because it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I closed, we have 84 investors. We raised $21 million. So imagine how many people I spoke to. I mean, I probably spoke to 400 people in the last and it took me almost two years because we paused going into COVID, took six months off, helped raise for our companies. And then, it's no easy task. And I like to say that especially for women and for men, often entrepreneurs come to me and they say, well, everyone said no, no one's investing in my company. And I'm like, well, who's everybody? Like who's everyone? And they're like, oh, well, I talked to eight investors. I'm like, so plan on talking to 100 because then something will happen. If 20 in a row say no, you might need to like ask for some feedback and rejigger your deck a little bit and answer some questions that you weren't aware they were concerned about and then go back out there. But if you plan on having 100 meetings, something should happen. And it's just, I think it's important to know like you can't give up, you have to keep going. And yeah, that was the hardest thing I've ever done. And I think for a moment, I was like, can I fundraise through Zoom, is that possible? And then when I started, I realized, oh wow, like I can. And I think it's absolutely incredible. I mean, we're investing through Zoom, so, but I think it's incredible that I have like 20 new investors that I've never met in person. I think that's just crazy to me, but that's how business is being done and business needs to continue and we need to continue to support these companies.