This is the second article in a series on female founders and the funding gap, born out of a conversation I had with my friend Sephi Shapira - a successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and fundraising advisor who, over the past decade, has worked with female founders who have collectively raised north of $800 million. Sephi is also the father of two young girls and cares deeply about empowering women.
We started this series because the numbers are absurd: women make up 15% of tech founders globally1, yet all-female founding teams receive only about 2% of venture capital funding - and that’s been the average for 30 years2. If you have a male co-founder, your chances of getting funded go up by a staggering 1,054% (from an average of 2.4% to 27.7%)3. These numbers become even more confounding when you learn that businesses founded by women ultimately deliver more than twice as much per dollar invested4.
The gap between how women perform and how they get funded is one of the most persistent anomalies in the entire venture ecosystem, and unfortunately an area where little to no progress has been made.
In the first article, Sephi and I talked about agreeableness - the behavioral pattern that makes women better operators and worse fundraisers. This time, we are going to talk about something different: vision. And, more importantly, how to build it. Because unlike the funding statistics, this is a gap a founder can close herself.
Sephi warned me at the start of our conversation that he might say uncomfortable, even controversial things. He was right.
What follows is a summary of our conversation about the vision gap. I split them into discrete topics and provide guidance on what you can do about it.
Men are better at imagining an unrealistic self and that’s what investors are looking for
A few days ago I listened to Scott Galloway on The Diary of a CEO. I love to listen to Scott’s talking; he has a grounded, thoughtful, and data-driven way of explaining what he sees in the world.
While talking about Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO and the colossal vision behind it, Scott said - with the kind of candor that makes you wince and then, when you think about it, slowly nod: “But quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self and women are more measured. And I think that’s one of the things that has held back women as entrepreneurs - and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them.”
He then paired it with an observation by the late legendary investor - and Warren Buffett’s partner - Charlie Munger: when you meet someone with a crazy vision of their own potential - someone who seems slightly delusional, maybe even obnoxious about it - Munger’s rule was never bet against that person. Because occasionally they’re right.
What Galloway and Munger are essentially saying is that vision at the fundraising stage is the ability to inhabit a future state so completely - and so convincingly - that the people across the table start to believe in it not because you’ve proven it, but because you seem incapable of imagining a world where it isn’t true.
When you believe in your crazy vision so deeply, you step into a parallel timeline, and your very ability to access it so thoroughly is what empowers you to communicate your vision with conviction.
That, and you’re not suffering from impostor syndrome. More on that later.
In Fundraising Conviction > Execution
When Sephi and I sat down to record this conversation, he pointed out why a founder’s ability to communicate her vision with conviction is now more important than ever - and the way he explained it is something I hadn’t heard framed quite this way before.
“Technology has become completely commoditized. In the past there was something called MVP - a minimal viable product. If I could build a piece of software and show it to you, that would be very impressive - because that showed I can execute, that I have the discipline to build, I have aesthetic, I have taste. Those days are gone. Today you can vibe-code everything. When execution has effectively become commoditized - at least in software - then investors have shifted somewhere else. They’ve shifted towards your ability to portray vision - which is basically a very high conviction in your ability to deliver.”
When anyone can build the product, conviction becomes the product.
BCG found that businesses founded by women deliver more than twice as much per dollar invested - that’s execution. Women are good at that, and that’s precisely why so many hyperscale companies have women in senior operating roles (just a handful of examples: Sarah Friar - CFO at OpenAI, Claire Hughes Johnson - Founding COO at Stripe, Colette Kress - NVIDIA CFO, Daniela Amodei - President at Anthropic).
But women are losing the vision game. Our innate tendency to be more present-oriented and pragmatic inhibits us from claiming the future we want. And the thing that now matters most - vision, conviction, the ability to inhabit a future that doesn’t exist yet - is precisely the thing that’s structurally harder for many women to project.
Here’s where Sephi gets uncomfortable. And honest.
“It’s this constant, never-ending self-doubt that women have - constantly asking themselves: am I good enough, am I pretty enough - always doubting themselves. Men don’t have that feature. We don’t wake up in the morning asking if we are good enough. We just go out there and bend the world. And this self-doubt damages your conviction.”
Does this sound familiar? I have personally struggled with self-doubt and feeling that I am not good enough for years. The paradox, though, is that even as a child I was self-confident, a high achiever, and determined. So this begs the question, where is this constant nagging feeling coming from? This question has been haunting me for years.
The Impostor Syndrome
Self doubt is at the root of the “impostor syndrome,” which is a specific failure of the mechanism that converts external evidence into internal identity. The person can see their achievements, yet can’t take ownership of them. It is a tendency to doubt one’s abilities and attribute any success to luck rather than to hard work.
Impostors feel that they are not worthy of their position or title, and therefore they feel they are acting a part and are not qualified for their position. As a result, the impostor syndrome makes it harder for high-achieving women to internalize their successes and see them as proof of their capabilities.
There’s research that backs this up - and it’s more rigorous than I expected. In a paper titled “He’s Skilled, She’s Lucky” - researchers found a consistent pattern: men’s success was attributed to ability, women’s success to luck. Women are socialized to attribute success to external factors (luck, timing, help from others) and failure to internal ones (I’m not smart enough). Men tend to do the reverse5.
In the workspace, a meta-analysis of 108 studies, covering more than 42,000 participants, confirmed that women experience impostor syndrome more frequently and more intensely than men - consistently, across fields, geographies, and career stages6.
A KPMG survey of female executives found that 75% had experienced it in their careers, 74% believe their male counterparts don’t experience self-doubt as much as they do, and 47% say their self-doubt stems from never expecting to reach the level of success they’ve achieved7.
This attribution asymmetry means women accumulate experience without accumulating confidence. Each success gets filed under “got lucky,” each setback under “confirmed.”
How do you deal with Impostor Syndrome?
I asked Sephi, what does he advise female founders he coaches when their self-doubt is hurting their ability to raise funding. “I tell them,” Sephi said, “quit the negative talk. It is not your brain’s job to make you confident. That is your job. When you find yourself indulging in self-doubt, stop it. The solution could be as simple as going for a run or catching up with a friend. If you cannot control your brain, you are in trouble.”
Learning the art of self-observation and being able to separate myself from my own thoughts, has been one of my biggest practice allies. Everyone should learn this skill. Especially female founders.
Another practical exercise I recommend, when you find yourself in a self-doubt doom loop; draw two columns. Write only factual evidence that you are an impostor (i.e. “it’s luck”, “I don’t deserve it”, “I only got here because of someone’s help”, etc.) in one column, and factual evidence that you’re not an impostor in the other. Most people find the second column wins decisively. The exercise forces you out of feeling like an impostor and into facts of what you are actually doing and achieving.
Confidence is not the absence of doubt. It is the refusal to negotiate with it.
Hunters vs Homemakers - The Evolutionary Biology POV
Let’s talk about 250,000 years of human development - men going out on a multi-day hunting trip to feed the village. There’s no negotiating with the tiger. This kind of task, which for generations was predominantly fulfilled by males, requires vision, conviction and force, in other words: bending reality to will.
How we evolved, Sephi says, is “women kind of stayed back and took care of the kids and the village. They collaborated. And the brain developed for 250,000 years for these functionalities. So women had to be much more pragmatic, practical. They had to negotiate, deal with specific things. It’s not idealistic - it’s pragmatic interaction, to get things done.”
Fundraising, Sephi says, is “first and foremost conviction - almost idealistic. It’s opposite to being pragmatic. Because if you think about it rationally, you give up in a second. The statistics are against you. The data is against you.”
The default pragmatism, which is what makes a successful homemaker - is also what makes women effective operators. It is women’s innate ability to see reality clearly, to plan around constraints, to negotiate rather than steamroll. These are characteristics passed along over generations of females tending to the tribe by taking care of the home and the children.
However, all of this works against you in the exact moment when an investor needs to feel that you’d bet everything on this vision, and feel no doubt about it.
Pragmatism runs companies. Conviction funds them.
The Elizabeth Holmes Story
Which brings me to Elizabeth Holmes. I don’t want to spend long here, because her case gets weaponized in ways that aren’t fair to the actual argument. But she comes up every time someone talks about women and big vision - usually as a warning, as a reason to stay measured.
Holmes had an audacious, truly inspiring vision. She had unwavering conviction. She raised $700 million and was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine as the next female Steve Jobs.
She also fabricated the science.
I remember that when I read the WSJ report that exposed her fraud, I was deeply saddened. It sat with me heavily for days. First, I was sad for Elizabeth. Then, I was sad for all of us women founders. I knew that this case will make it even harder for us to go out and pitch bold, changing-the-world visions to investors.
Here’s the distinction that we need to keep front and center. Conviction rooted in first principles of physics, and in execution signals, is a superpower. Conviction untethered from reality is fraud.
Vision is a claim about the future. Fraud is a lie about the present.
The problem wasn’t that Elizabeth dreamed too big. The problem was that she got high on her own supply. It got addictive, she got completely enmeshed with the story that she sold to investors, and she ended up lying about what was real. How interesting that the people on her board of directors were old, white statesmen who were confirming her bias.
In other words, a great founder needs to know how to bridge vision and execution. Vision means dreaming big, telling a story of the future you’re wanting to create with the conviction of someone who understands what it takes to manifest this vision. Execution means be honest about where you are and how far you are from your goal.
Vision inspires execution. It’s the North Star that guides us in the night. Execution is the methodical laying down of building blocks that enable the vision to crystalize in 3D.
Vision and execution are not the same thing - and conflating them has made women more hesitant to claim large visions precisely when the world needs us to claim larger ones.
How to be both a visionary and a pragmatist
I’ve been thinking about all of this through something I wrote a while ago: non-duality at work.
The concept, borrowed from consciousness philosophy, is the practice of holding two seemingly contradictory truths simultaneously - without collapsing one to make room for the other. In my case, I had to hold the reality of losing 80% of my revenue overnight during COVID, while simultaneously imagining something that didn’t yet exist: a bold new vision for rebuilding and transforming the business.
Holding together the grueling daily work of turning around a distressed business, with the exciting future I was building towards, I ended up raising $60M Series C at a valuation twice as high as my last round.
You must accept reality more than you love your ideas or your aspirations. And yet you must also be able to see past reality into the future you’re building. This is exactly where a strong collaboration between a visionary CEO and a pragmatist COO can change the world - just look at the example of Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX.
I think that’s the real ask for female founders in fundraising. I am talking about being able to hold both vision and execution - at the same time, without either one canceling the other out.
And, very importantly, be aware of context. Especially when you are fundraising to an audience that is predominantly male.
“The essence of fundability,” Sephi said, “is if your conviction is stronger than the investor’s doubts, you’re fundable. That’s it. If you have an unwavering conviction in yourself and in your company and you literally do not care - you’re going to get funded. And it’s very hard for women to hold this position.”
In a fundraising context you have to step into the future. There is a parallel timeline that is uniquely accessible to you because of what you know about the world, your thesis about where it’s going, and the specific insight you’ve assembled that no one else has quite put together yet.
Be there. Communicate from there. Do it with the same conviction you would have if you were telling an investor about something exciting that actually happened, like a trip you took to a different country.
At the same time: be rigorous. Think from first principles. Translate that vision into an operating plan. Make sure you have financial projections that hold up, with both an aggressive scenario and a conservative one. That you know what it takes to execute on your vision.
The founder who can say “here is the world I see” and then “here is exactly how we get there” is the one who signals both vision and competence. That combination is rare. It is also learnable.
Investors fund the convinced. Markets reward the competent. The founders who change everything are both.
Claiming the Future: Two Moves to Practice
Here are two moves you can start practicing this week.
Pitch from the memory of the future. Write your 60-second pitch dated three years from now, in the present tense. Then deliver it the way you would describe a trip you actually took. This turns the parallel timeline into a drill. The more often you visit that future, the more naturally you speak from it.
Sell the future. Report the present. Keep your vision claims and your proof claims on separate slides, so your conviction never has to borrow from your honesty.
If any of this is landing for you, if you know what you are building and why, yet you can’t quite say it at the scale it deserves - I’d love to hear from you.
Leave a comment. It also helps me write better, and it helps the next founder who reads this know she’s not alone.
Startup Genome. Only 15% of Tech Startup Founders Are Female (2023). Startup Genome Report
Harvard Kennedy School, Women and Public Policy Program. Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship. Harvard Kennedy School Research
US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem, Pitchbook, March 2026
Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet, June 2018, BCG Report: Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet
Swim & Sanna (1996), "He's Skilled, She's Lucky: A Meta-Analysis of Observers' Attributions for Women's and Men's Successes and Failures," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
“Gender differences in impostor phenomenon: A meta-analytic review,” ScienceDirect (2024) also here
Amazing read, thank you both for sharing these insights.