Affluent Alpha Ladies Unite!

We held our second meeting last night for a group of women who are engaging in a conversation about investing their assets to align with their values. We are also focused on how the finance world could better engage women. Maybe, it's just the Bay Area, but all of these women are interested in the private markets, including angel investing and putting money into venture, private equity and hedge funds. The group discussed banding together to buy into funds with seven digit minimums. First things first: women want to feel more secure with the logistical aspects of their financial picture, like estate planning and life insurance. Then, they'd be ready to move on to "high-class" problems, such as identifying the right private equity fund to invest in. Reminders for financial advisers: women grow weary of feeling that their adviser uses too much jargon, that they have to push to get clarity on fees or more cooperation on values based investing. From our survey (currently, we have 64 respondents. I'll write more about the survey after we get 100 responses), affluent women want to see a vastly improved financial services landscape. Over 50% responded that financial institutions "give me a headache" or worse. Some of the features they'd like to see: clear, simple language (81%), greater transparency on fees (80%), to invest my assets to align with my values (91%), more competence and/or confidence with money and investing (90.0%) and many more eye-popping findings. Note that this is a biased sample. Over 1/3 of respondents have more than $1 million in liquid assets.

Launching a Fund for Bay Area Women Angels

I am launching a small seed stage fund with Julie Chin for SF Bay Area women angels. We will invest in Bay Area technology companies and will not have a gender lens on the equity of the founding team. This is a small group of well-connected visionary women with backgrounds in engineering, design, corporate development, business development, marketing, and PR, from the leading technology companies (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Zynga) and accomplished start-up entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. We are giving preference to women who are excited to add value to companies through strategic advice and introductions. We believe these key members of the start-up ecosystem will deliver superior returns through their grasp of the future direction of technology. We also believe that women's different approaches to investing, ie, systems thinking, impact orientation and investors as consumer (ie, don't need to go home and ask the spouse to "get" it) will result in top returns. Let me know of any women angels that we should be engaging.