BREAKING THROUGH

employees—illustrates the city’s unusually collaborative
culture.
Katrina Lake, the company’s founder and CEO,
had worked as an intern for entrepreneur Sukhinder
Cassidy, who at the time was the CEO of pioneering
social commerce site Polyvore. Lake had an idea for her
own online retail venture. It was a website that would
connect customers with a personal stylist who’d handpick
fashion-forward items for them and then mail
out a box of trial items every few weeks. Any items the
customer didn’t like could be returned postage-free,
and customers would only pay for the items they kept.
Lake summoned the courage to approach Cassidy with
her idea. Cassidy’s response was unforgettable. “She
basically said, ‘I want to be first money in. I believe
in this,’ and she wrote me a check,” says Lake. “That
meant so much. Many people were telling me it was a
great idea, but this was a check for thousands of dollars.
It was a powerful moment for me.
Augmenting the collaboration culture in San Francisco
are some of the nation’s most powerful femalefounded
venture capital firms. (About 10 percent of
all female venture capitalists currently working in
the U.S. are graduates of Stanford.) The city offers a
number of public and privately funded support organizations
such as La Cocina, an incubator that offers
commercial kitchen space and tech support for women
launching food businesses. The SBA-backed Renaissance
Entrepreneurship Center targets business planning
and marketing skills classes for lower-income
residents and entrepreneurs in non-tech sectors.
“San Francisco is so interesting now,” says Renaissance
Center CEO Sharon Miller. “The rents are rising
but the opportunities are rising as well.”
Miller points to the city’s creative approach to
funding as a prime example of what’s working, noting
that San Francisco is where some of the world’s
major crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and microloan
platforms got their start. “The Bay Area is super
fortunate,” she says. “We have a number of nonprofit
loan funds…that make investments in businesses that
a bank cannot make. They have much greater flexibility
in lending to businesses. Those are our two primary
tools, non-profit loans and crowdsourcing.”
New business owner Kelly McVicker has been taking
classes at the Renaissance Center for the last couple
years as she has slowly turned one of her hobbies,
pickling, and her grandmother’s canning methods into
a full-time venture. “I’d been going along for a year or
two just running on creative steam thinking, ‘If I just
work hard and am passionate, it’ll all work out,’” she
says. “But I realized that I need a business plan, pillars
and structures under the business.”
McVicker, who registered her McVicker Pickles as
a small business in San Francisco in 2012, says mentors
at the Renaissance Center as well as other business
owners she has met in the many fairs and markets
that comprise the city’s burgeoning “maker movement”
convinced her to expand her offerings beyond
$13 quarts of pickles and $5 jars of beer mustard.
McVicker is now a sole proprietor, working mostly out
of her home, and entirely self-funded, re-investing
profits into growth as she goes along. Her caution is
not uncommon among female entrepreneurs in any
city, but Miller would like the future for women in the
Bay area to be a little more radical, a little more Silicon
Valley-style leading edge. “Women often don’t feel
capable of things they are completely capable of,” she
says. “I think women do take tremendous risks, but
they want to make sure everything’s OK before they
take that risk. It’s important to help women build up
that confidence: ‘Yeah, you actually can do anything.’”
Wirowek points to other confidence-boosting programs
in the greater Bay area that have the potential
for longer-term, wide-reaching impact on gender diversity
in the tech sector. In the first quarter of 2016,
for instance, NAWBO sponsored a workshop for female
entrepreneurs at Google headquarters on how to land
contracts there. NAWBO also offers regular access-tocapital
workshops for female founders, and is in its
second year of providing scholarships and mentors for
young women leaning toward STEM careers (science,
technology, engineering and math) as employees or,
eventually, startup founders themselves.
“What we’re addressing here is a society issue,”
says Wirowek. “We don’t have as many women yet in
the tech sector saying, ‘OK, I can do this better and
I’m going to go start my own business and compete
against you.’ It’s time we change that.”
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