 Kia ora koutou. No mai hai damae ko Erika Austin Tokungiwa. We will open the session today with Akarakiya as we transition the energy of the virtual space into our formal session. Akarakiya is a non-religious blessing and is a practice of the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori people. So here we go. E te hui whai te matouronga kia marama, kia whaitake ngā mahi katoa. Tu maia, tu kaha, aroha atu, aroha mai, tātou ia tātou katoa. Greetings to you all. My name is Erika Austin, the community activator at Edmund Hillary Fellowship and the host and tech mission in the background for the session. The Edmund Hillary Fellowship, EHF, is a community of 500-plus innovators, entrepreneurs and investors committed to Aotearoa New Zealand as a base camp for global impact. Our vision is that Aotearoa New Zealand inspires global leadership and solutions for the future generations to come, built on the principles of tangata titi and values of the Edmund Hillary. In the session we will hear from fellows and angel investors Kirsty Reynolds and Sean McGrale on bridging the gender gap, empowering women founders in New Zealand. As advocates for women entrepreneurs, this is a follow-up session after their duo presentation on the mystifying early stage fundraising, which is available on our website. So Kirsty and Sean will be making a compelling case for why investing in women-led businesses is marked. They will also analyse the multi-faceted reasons behind the funding gap from bias to lack of networks and will outline actionable strategies women founders can use to increase their chances of getting funded. So firstly some house key things. So this session is being recorded and will be listed on the EHF website afterwards to share with your peers. Please stay muted but feel free to put your observations, questions, comments in the chat box as we go and hopefully we'll make it an interactive session. And some of you may leave at any time and that is okay and you can catch up with the recording. Before I hand it over to Kirsty and Sean a little bit about them. So Kirsty Reynolds is an EHF fellow angel investor and company director with deep experience investing and start-ups and working with ambitious New Zealand SME businesses that are poised for international expansion. She has been an active angel investor since 2015 and has 25 years of commercial experience developing New Zealand businesses internationally throughout the Asia-Pacific region. These experiences help inform her understanding of the unique challenges faced by business owners in general and are invariably constrained by limited resources, thereby impacting their ability to scale their businesses internationally. Now Sean, Sean McGrale is a committed social entrepreneur and impact investor based in Auckland, New Zealand. As an EHF investor fellow, he propels entrepreneurs to create world-changing businesses with a focus on UN sustainable development goals like gender equality, clean energy and fair work. Prior roles include managing director at Golden Seeds where he supported women-led start-ups and co-founder of Paint Night, an award-winning social impact company that became one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. So, Kirsty and Sean, thank you so much for taking the time today. Over to you. Thanks for having us and we're going to start off sort of defining the problem at a sort of very high level and then get into a little bit more tactics about what women founders can do to tilt the playing field in their favour. Alright, so just at a really high level, why does this matter that to get women on the playing field of entrepreneurship? So, both Kirsty and I believe that some of the world's biggest problems require an all-hands-on-deck approach. And we think entrepreneurship does play a big part in solving a lot of those problems. And without women at the table, it's like trying to run a marathon by hopping on one leg. So, we'll be happy when everybody's participating fully. And the numbers really speak for themselves. Like many of you will have read that there are studies that have been done that actually show that women founders outperform male founders in terms of their metrics. There's often better team dynamics and they're often more capital efficient. So, the news isn't all bad. The trend lines are heading in the right direction. So, there has been a rise in women entrepreneurs in New Zealand and globally. So, currently right now 32% of all New Zealand businesses are owned by women. And women-owned businesses have grown over 114% in the last two decades. And globally, this trend is also true in one-third of all businesses are owned by women. But despite these rising trends, there are some gaps. And these gaps are both in relation to funding as well as in the leadership space. So, women in the US receive about 2.3% of venture funding. In New Zealand, the statistics are a little bit better. We have about 18% of early stage funding going to our women-led businesses. And if we look at this in context of leadership, in the US, about 7.4% of CEOs are women of the Fortune 500 companies. And I looked at the stats for NZ for the NZX 50 and we're at 14%. But in comparison, that's 7 out of 50 CEOs of women in New Zealand. And now we recognize that, you know, women are just sort of one group that it's tougher to raise money. And there's other groups as well that also face challenges. But we think that gender equity is just one step towards equity of all. So, we don't mean to downplay that it's a challenge across the board, but we wanted to sort of start off with 50% of the population being disadvantaged. So, how do we understand what is behind this issue? Well, the problem is multi-faceted. There's human bias. We tend to commune, relate to people that look similar to ourselves. And so, men, you know, and a lot of women-led businesses are actually trying to solve women's issues. And so, men tend not to have an understanding of some of these women-centric businesses. There are outdated cultural norms around family and around responsibilities that still impact the way we do business. There's also bad behaviour, lack of network and know-how in terms of knowing how to access capital. And many people have seen the likes of Shark Tank and are a little bit intimidated with the idea of how to go about raising capital. So, these are sort of some of the multi-faceted reasons. But one of the things that we're going to explore further on in the presentation is this idea that many of the businesses may not actually meet the criteria of an investable business for angel and venture capital. So, we also want to let you know that you're not going it alone. We're not sort of presenting this over on the side that nobody else is aware of. So, within the ecosystem of investors, it's recognized that this is a problem. So, there are VCs and angel groups that do take bias training to make themselves aware of when there's not a completely level playing field. There are also grants and other incubators and accelerators that are specifically for women-led businesses. So, you know, this is a topic that people are trying to address across the board within the investment ecosystem. So, let's kind of bring some reality to this. The fundraising isn't easy for anyone. It doesn't matter who you are, what gender you are. It is difficult. So, this idea of being resilient is incredibly important. Rejection is going to be part of the journey. And I remember my mum, she was a schoolteacher, and she said to me one day, Kirsty, I could wallpaper an entire room with the number of rejections that I've had when I've applied for jobs. And I said, well, mum, why do you keep going? Because at the end of the day, you just have to keep going. So, rejection is not the end. Learn from your experience and continue to refine what you're doing. Keep iterating what you're doing. So now, what can women founders do to increase their chances of getting funded? So, first of all, you should be aware of bias. And oftentimes people think of, you know, why they might not be getting funded as straight up sexism or misogyny. So, bias is a little bit more insidious. It's unconscious and it's drilled into people over basically their whole lifetimes and their societal norms and their personal experiences gained over a lifetime. So, and both men and women can exhibit these bias and stereotypes. So, this isn't just sort of men behaving badly or asking, you know, certain questions. But women can also exhibit this as well. You should be able to start to identify what is called a promotion question versus a prevention question and we'll get into that in a little bit. And then if you're asked questions about family or relationship situations of, you know, who's going to look after the kids if you're travelling so much and things like that, that they might not ask a male founder. So, just be aware that's one of the biggest reasons why women tend to get less funding. So, let's just explore a little bit more about what we mean by these promotion questions and prevention questions. So, a promotion question is something which is oriented, is a question which is oriented towards growth, towards expansion. Whereas a prevention question really is all about risk mitigation. How do we prevent something happening? The only thing from an investor founder point of view, from a founder point of view, is you need to be proactive in your responses. You need to actually answer the question in the positive rather than being defensive. So, this idea of flipping it, redirecting it with a promotion answer will actually allow you to raise a lot more capital than if you answer it in the defensive. And the study that was originally demonstrated that the women that did flip those questions towards a promotion answer went on and in 14 times more capital than people that answered in the negative. So, for those of you that might be considering bringing on a co-founder, you know, you may want to think about bringing on a male co-founder. So, we're not saying that you should bring on a male co-founder just to bring on, you know, somebody onto your team. But if you are considering it, consider that. And then studies have shown too that gender diverse teams are five times more likely to raise money compared to women only founders. So, this could tilt the playing field in your direction. So, now we want you to think around this diversity within your cap table as well. We don't want you wasting time with organisations that haven't necessarily invested in women founders before. So, as a rule of thumb, think about, have they invested in at least five women founders? And I'm sort of talking about venture capital organisations now. Do they have women partners in their organisation? And, you know, below we've listed a few examples of different organisations that are actively in the space trying to support women founders accessing capital. Now, another big thing is alignment with investor appetite. So, this is sort of the hot topics of where money is flowing right now. So, software right now is getting a lot of money, AI, robotics, whereas other sectors such as retail, wholesale and professional services don't typically attract VC funding. So, you might be getting nose from investors that you're talking to just because it doesn't meet with their sort of thesis on the world. So, if that's the case and you've gotten a lot of nose, maybe consider bank loans or tapping into personal networks or alternative funding sources if you're getting lots of nose from the venture world. And then, you know, studies have been done that women led businesses tend to be in low growth industries. So, as mentioned here, you know, bootstrapping friends and family bank loans, there's other ways to raise money and we'll get into that a little bit later too. So, another, so we've kind of wanted to help people also understand why do some businesses just not access funding via angel or VC. And so, if we were categorising them into sort of four categories, a bad business. So, that's a business that unfortunately makes up about 40% of the market where they're just never going to make money and they have a tendency to sort of stop doing business within a couple of years. A side hustle is something that somebody might start on the side of actually working for another company or as an employee for a business. And they might be earning maybe 10,000 or 200 that, you know, up to 200,000 of additional revenue from running that little side hustle. And that could be anything from being a reseller on trade me, running a netsy shop, that kind of thing. When we're talking about lifestyle businesses, this is the majority of businesses in the market today. They generally have revenue of sort of between one and $10 million in annual sales. They've got maybe one to four employees and it throws off enough cash to really support the founder, but not for an investor. And so, it's more of a lifestyle business for that founder. 57% of businesses fall into that category. So, what is important to understand is that we're looking for in the angel space and in the venture capital space. We're looking for investable businesses and I'm going to let Sean talk about this in more detail. But there has to be a clear pathway over $10 million worth of sales. And this really fits less than 5% of startups who begin this journey. Yeah, so if you're getting a nose, you might really fit into the first three categories in the view of investors. So, I know my experience is, I meet a lot of lifestyle businesses where founders have a great business. They should just keep on going with it, but I'm not going to invest in it just because there's sort of a ceiling to how far they can grow that business. So, some basic criteria that almost all investors look for is one which is market size. Are you tackling a problem where currently people are spending over a billion dollars in generating sales from all the companies that are out in the world that are trying to solve this problem? Is it a billion dollar market? In New Zealand, this tends to be one of the biggest killers of why businesses don't get funding. It's a smaller market and if you've kind of said like, I'm only going to be in New Zealand and I don't have any international dreams, it does kind of limit how big you can actually get your business. So, oftentimes you have to look overseas to begin with. Then we also look for, investors look for a profit margin of 20%. Or have a business that might only have one or two percent generally that's going to scare off a fair number of investors because they're comparing your business with say a software company which tends to have high profit margins. Also growth, they want to see that you're growing year over year and at a pretty decent clip. So a 20% year over year growth is sort of a minimum for early stage companies. And then do you have a real competitive advantage? Are you building a better mousetrap or is it really just a better logo? So I run into this a lot with founders who, you know, what they're really proposing is more of a marketing play rather than actually having built a better product. So before you go on and talk to any investors, make sure you do Google search on your competitors and market size and also have an Excel spreadsheet showing how your business functions. And, you know, it needs to be about a three year growth plan to where, you know, how does this all kind of come together? So that'll make you more of an investable business. So we know that gender diverse teams within businesses outperform businesses that don't have that level of diversity. So we want to suggest the same thing when it comes to your cap table. If we think about the fact that women who are writing checks to invest in women-led businesses really only make up 15% of the market. It's really important not to lock out the other 85% of potential male allies that could actually be investing in your business. So you want to make sure that you are pitching to both men and women when you go to raise your capital. And it's really important to have those male investors on board in your first round to increase your likelihood of second round funding. We also recommend that you build strong networks. So there's lots of groups out there. There's meetups and Facebook groups that support women and offer mentorship and are also investor networks. So make sure you tap into those and build out your networks in those areas. So in the same way that I talked about making sure that you identify male allies and you have a diverse cap table, it's really important that you don't just network with women, that you actually engage consistently with a network consistently across a range of vehicles or organisations to help you access and build those relationships. Ask for warm introductions through your contacts. That's really, really important as well. And you can get that either from LinkedIn or approaching directly people in your network. And men should definitely be part of the solution here. This shouldn't just be women solving the problem. Men need to be at the table as well. So ask for mentorship from men. Ask to tap into their networks. Ask them to advocate for you within the investment community. So make sure you're engaging with them and that they're participating as well. And if you haven't built an advisory board, I highly recommend that as well. So another avenue for potential funding is crowdfunding. So in New Zealand, we have snowball effect. And some of the interesting statistics that come out is that women are actually a lot more successful at raising capital via crowdfunding than what their male counterparts are. And it seems to be really good for consumer brands. And I know Anna's on the call today so she might want to share a little bit more about that. But it helps those brands in particular create community support for what they're doing. However, there is something to keep in mind that ultimately if you are looking to raise capital offshore, some businesses have experienced a little bit of pushback when there have been crowdfunding involved in the cap table as well. Yeah, and just to touch on that real quickly, you want to have make sure if you've got 500 small investors that there's a clause in there that, you know, kind of forces them to be dragged along. So you don't have to get approval from all 400 is where it becomes sticky. Also another way to raise funding is non-deluded funding. So there are grants out there specifically to fund women-led businesses. There's also competitions. And then there's also corporate sponsorships. So these are just a few ways that you can raise capital without giving up any equity. Tends to be some of the best money that you can raise. But so consider those and educate yourself if you're not familiar with those areas. So now let's just turn for a moment to when you're pitching for capital. How you communicate both verbally so your oral communication as well as your non-verbal communication becomes really important. Be mindful of what you say, your body language, what you're wearing and be confident. What we're wanting to make people aware of is that as women we can have this tendency to say sorry or I think or maybe or it's possible, which actually creates a level of uncertainty for investors because that sort of communication sort of suggests that maybe you don't know. Whereas if you are more confident and you state your case in the same way that we were talking about promotion answers before, if you state your case powerfully and you have good eye contact then you're far more likely to actually raise the capital that you're looking to raise. The other thing is don't downplay your achievements. Own the room. Be the tall poppy in the room. Be authentic and let your passion shine. So another question we thought was going to be good was just is raising capital from angels and VCs right for you. First off, you should do some soul searching. Figure out not only are you kind of trying to consider if it's right for the business but also is it right for you. Investors can be painful to deal with. There's a lot of governance and reporting that's required and having to report which and a lot of processes have to be put in place which for many founders can make them bristle. And then also you can get fired from your own company by your investors so only 25% of companies that make it to the IPO stage actually have the founder as CEO. So many people think that Elon Musk was a founder of Tesla. In fact, he actually was an investor in Tesla and fired the founders there. Steve Jobs also got fired from Apple so make sure this might not be the right thing for you because investors do have an upper hand and can remove you from the business. And then also, take an honest look, is your business attractive to investors? And then when you do take money, you're somewhat forced or expected to grow your business very, very quickly once you've got that funding injection. So make sure it is right for you. So what are some alternatives to venture capital? Well, sales are actually your best form of capital. And too many businesses come in thinking, well I need investors on board and actually completely lose sight of the fact that actually generating revenue from old fashioned sales is still your best way to grow your company. It provides confidence for investors and also the banks and it demonstrates that you really are building a product or a service that is in demand and that market will pay for. And these are just a few other alternatives to funding your startup. So bootstrapping is, you know, if you happen to have some cash on hand and fund it yourself, that's also great. Friends and family, bank loans, line of credit, supplier financing. So sometimes, you know, there's generous terms where you might not have to pay them for 90 or 120 days. Definitely take advantage of that if you have a physical product. And there's grants, government and also foundations are funding women led businesses. There's incubators and accelerators that often put you through a program and then at the end of it often will invest, you know, $100,000 or so. There's initial coin offerings. And also take somewhat of a risky bed of like leveraging your credit card or home equity loan and things like that. But, you know, you should only do that if you have 100% confidence that you can pay this back in a short amount of time. But it is a way that I've seen some companies get that funding that they need to launch their business. I know we kind of ran through that, but we wanted to leave a lot of room here to open it up to the floor to see what people have. So feel free to ask away. I don't know, Erica, did any questions come in on the chat? Yeah. So Julia has a question. So I have her concerns by female founders that the male co-founders were given excessive power and credit by external people such as investors. Can you address what we might need to know about potential downsides of having a male co-founder? Well, I think in general, co-founders come with pitfalls. So making sure that you are aligned and have open on honest communication. So I think aside from gender, you know, I've seen lots of co-founder arrangements fail. So a co-founder agreement between each other and setting that up first, you know, before you bring somebody on is important. So really define the terms of the roles of who's responsible for what and if someone needs to exit, you know, there's some terms there that are agreed upon before bringing them on. I've also seen situations where just by bringing on an investor in general, employees sometimes take the word of investors. And give it much more weight. So even though the investor might only have, say, 10% of the business, because a lot of employees view them as having money and success, they sometimes outweigh the investor's opinion more so than even the founder's opinion. So I've seen it go other ways. I don't know. Kierce, did you want to jump in there? No, look, I think that the reason why we wanted to bring this to people's attention is that while 2.4%, I think of funding goes to women-led businesses in the US, there's about another 18% or between 14% and 18%, which actually goes to male and female co-founded teams. So we are sharing this in the view that you actually increase your chances of raising capital if you do have a gender-diverse team within your founding team. So just wanted to bring that to your attention more than anything. Right. So we've got a comment and a question from Anna. So just to celebrate, half of the successful campaigns on Pledge Me are led by women and some haven't had any pushback. And her question is one thing I've been wondering is how society makes women more risk aware, which can be off-putting when you're pitching or even put you off from raising investment. Any thoughts on how to address this? Do you want to take that one? Yeah. So I'm just trying to understand the question, how society makes women more risk aware? Anna, do you want to speak to that? What is the particular point that you're wanting us to answer? Yeah. So just in the research that I've done in the past, what I found was women are often seen as risk-averse, but what we saw is actually the risk-aware. And to know how they're going to pay for things and make things happen. And there's just that risk-awareness that means when they're going out to pitch, they're really aware of all the risks. And that makes it harder sometimes when they're not pitching this big, huge dream, they're a little bit less cowboy. So just if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think you're right on point there because women are slightly less risk-averse. But they also, statistically, they show that there are actually a lot more capital efficient. They ask for what they want, and they're more capital efficient with it. And so that is something that I think we can be proud of. But I agree with you that we often don't ask for enough. So we really need to be able to look and say, well, actually I need this to provide an 18 month to two year runway, rather than a year because you don't know what's going to happen in that year. You don't know whether there are going to be some circumstances within the market. So actually being able to have the confidence to ask for more is really critical. Does that help answer the question? And if I can jump in here too, I think women also in New Zealand there's a cultural bias to give a realistic view of how much capital they're going to raise and what the company is going to do. I generally tell entrepreneurs to give a best case scenario, not an unrealistic. It still needs to be within that realm of being reasonable, but give a best case scenario because the role of the founder is to be the biggest cheerleader, the most enthusiastic. Don't worry the investor is going to be the rain cloud that will come in and sort of dampen that and then they're going to come up with their own sort of worst case scenario. And then, you know, hopefully land somewhere in the middle, but I find a lot of founders here in New Zealand tend to aim for that middle from the get go instead of sort of painting an optimistic picture. I don't want to make it, you know, completely unreasonable but sort of promote that sort of the growth opportunity and this is what it could be in the future. So really paint that best case scenario picture. I also think that often businesses will underestimate what it takes to actually develop their markets internationally. So they might be asking for half a million dollars for their business, not be and be talking about opening up in a couple of markets, but not being aware that actually to open up a new international market is going to take half a million dollars just on its own. And so actually having businesses working thinking strategically about getting their sales up locally and then local market is important as well as trying to build an international strategy. So there's, you know, there's an element of sometimes we think we can do more with the little amount of money that we're trying to raise than what we actually can. And so asking questions, talking with experienced people in this space, you know NZTE is a great resource for helping businesses that are wanting to come out and emerge and look at. Export markets in that way as well. So, you know, just thinking about that in terms of their capital raise piece. Anything so Bailey, would you mind taking yourself off me and asking the question or would you rather I read it out for you. Not so good. Okay. Hi Sean. So I'm probably in the weeds, but I'm getting a little bit overwhelmed by the market size is the accountant and me. I'm like, how do I get this accurate enough. So I'm working on a strategic planning and operations software but taking a regenerative approach to it so there's not really an exact competitor that I can go to. It has the potential for global reach, but I'm wondering the best approach to sizing the market. Is it to take a competitor like another software that's kind of tangential and abstracting from there by by looking at that or am I over baking it and you can explain like from your perspective, what is reasonable. So the way that I would do it is figure out who like how many customers potential customers around the world or in the market that you'd be going after. How many of them are there potential like 100%. If you had a magic wand and you could capture 100% market share of the people who you're solving the problem for so hopefully you have like, what is the problem. What's your solution. And for all the people that are experiencing that problem whether it's companies or, you know, consumers. And then what do you think you're going to charge. If you're going to charge 100, and you've got 40 million people who might fit this category you would just basically say 40 million times 100. That's generally my market size. So that's a really simple way if there's like no market that currently exists for this product. So that's what I would recommend. And then, you know, I said there was a rule of thumb of just $1 billion. Now if it's 700 million, I think you'll still get some interest from investors. But if it's 7 million, you're not going to get any investors so that's sort of where the market size rule of thumb comes in of how to figure that out. Is that helpful. Yeah, no that's really helpful. And I think I'm at the stage where like the pricing specifically isn't something that is sorted just yet, you know, if it's like SAS based pricing or a few like how to layer it. Is it kind of just finger in the air. Whenever you're considering right now, I mean because sometimes people like oh I only need to charge $1 and there's a million customers out there. Well, okay, now you have a million dollar business. It might make sense now to charge $100 because now that's $100 million business. You know, it should be within the realm of what people would actually be willing to pay. That's how you might want to think about it. And particularly a lot of people say oh I'm going after a billion dollar market, but the price of my product now is only, you know, it's 90% lower. It also impacts your market size now that you're going after. And last question on that is how much validation do you like. I'm sure you guys are kind of scratching at the surface to go like is this valid. So what kind of validation would you be looking for it for like an angel investment stage. So it's a really good question. And Bailey, I would say if we look at the different stages of investment, the precede stage is really when you've got an idea. So you don't have to validate it other than then share what you think the global opportunity is for your business. Okay, when you go for the seed stage, you generally have to have about a million dollars worth of revenue. Under your belt to raise that next round of capital. So you're, you know, and there might be things in between. But the point is, is that you've got a minimum viable product. You've proven it with customers. You're out there and you're looking to raise more capital to build scale towards what would be a series A, B or C further down the track. Okay. So it's just really sort of understanding those terminologies and where what kind of investor you are looking for. The other thing to keep in mind is in New Zealand, we've got a very small market. So the players in New Zealand tend to be generalists as opposed to specialist investors. Whereas as soon as you go into an offshore market, you'll have venture capital companies that will specialize in tech. Or specialize in deep tech. Or software as a service. Or in agri tech. Or in food and beverage. So then you can specify and look for organizations that are relevant to what it is that you're trying to do. And so I just kind of want to share that with you because that's a fundamental difference between the New Zealand market and say the American market, which is, you know, more advanced and a much bigger market. So therefore they can achieve that level of specialization. I hope that's helpful. And that was great. Thanks both. Yeah. I just wanted to add to do a Google search as best you can for market size. There's lots of like research things that you can just grab the headline to get an idea of what, you know, it might not be Bailey for your specific, but you'd be shocked at how many times angel investors talk to entrepreneurs and they haven't done a Google search on what, how big their market size is. So Google can be your friend and try and dig that out. Or talk to a local librarian who might be able to help you as well. Or an investor too. They might be able to help you figure that out as well. Anyone else have any questions. Feel free to put up your hand and or meet yourself. In the meantime, I've got a question, actually. You talked about finding those allies in your network and especially with male investors. Do you see a rise in interest about like understanding how to be allies for women founders and women entrepreneurs and how, how to best actually find them and I guess educate and, you know, and support that journey of becoming an ally. Yeah, I mean, it is tricky. I feel like golden seeds about 20% of the members were men and archangels here it was a smaller percentage of the last meeting I went to. It's a great question. I don't know how to cultivate cultivate it. I do know that sometimes men might not feel as comfortable ending entering a sort of a women's only space. I think that's probably more issues that men need to work through than anything else. But I don't care. So do you have any thoughts on that? Right. Look, I think that there are male allies. There are a lot of men that, you know, they have daughters and they have mothers. They have sisters. And so it's really one being conscious of the communication style. So when you are communicating with that person, is that person exhibiting inclusive kind of dialogue in their questioning or in their communication. And so those people are the ones that you really want to start to build relationships with and look to develop networks from as well. So I, yeah, I've, Sean's a great ally. I've worked with other people as well who've been great allies, you know, and of course there are some that are not. But you start to have that sense of those that are and that are going to kind of provide you with the leg up and those that are not. And so in terms of educating people, I think as Sean and I have pointed out, there is a willingness. To to grow this, you know, to develop the network and the to be more inclusive. What we are sorry is distracted. Yeah, lost my train of thought. Sorry. I mean, I would just say, you know, for me, one of the biggest motivators is that women do perform men, just the return on investment. So if nothing else, you know, pure greed should drive some men to invest in women led businesses. It's just a better investment. You know, if you're trying to choose to put your money behind this company or that company. And they're both sort of the same on every other aspect of business led by a woman is likely to perform better. So, you know, pointing that out to men could sway them. And that comes back to those prevention questions and promotion questions. Actually, there is a male lead businesses that should have a few more prevention questions asked to ensure that the money that investors are putting in is actually, you know, going into the right places. So let's not look at prevention questions as being all completely negative. It's about risk mitigation. And so what we were trying to share there was about how you can turn it around towards a promotion answer, which gives you the ability to to raise capital and answer it in the in the positive. The other aspect is what we've really wanted to bring your attention to is this problem is not going to be solved by just getting more women investing in women led businesses. We need a the market to be working constructively together. Men and women to to solve this problem together. So that's why we wanted to share some of this information today with you and encourage you to network more widely and to find those male allies that can help you open up your funding resources. I feel like that's another another session to delve even. I've got a question from Kelly. Are these slides being shared? Are you happy for us to share the slides with the participants today? Yes. Yep. Cool. I will make sure to email out these slides to you all. So we can continue to explore and and yeah, let's let's continue this corridor and and do another session. If that happens. So I don't see any other specific questions. But the comments. Thank you, Kirsty and Sean. Great. Let's wrap it up and we'll give some time back to your day. So thank you again for this amazing corridor and Kirsty and Sean. And thank you everyone here that has tuned in live. We have all of our past EHF live sessions on our website or just drop you a link so you can also look at the last session that Kirsty and Sean did a couple of months ago. If you have an idea for a live session, please let me know. Here is my details. Please feel free to email me. We'd love to make these sessions relevant to you and the communities that you belong to and associate with. So let's close with the karekia. Tuia i runga. Tuia i raro. Tuia i roto. Tuia i waho. Tuia i teheretangata. Ha rungo te po. Ka rungo te au. Ti hei. Mauriora. Ngamahinui. Ka kite ano. Thank you. Thanks everybody.