Changing Who Writes the Checks: Naseem Sayani on Women Investors, Social Capital, and Building the Women’s Health Pipeline

[00:00:08] Welcome to the Joy, Love, and Grace series on HIT Like a Girl Pod. I'm Grace Vinton and I'm honored to welcome to the mic Naseem Sayani, founder and CEO of GCWC and director of WAM's Innovators Circle. Thanks for joining me today, Naseem. Naseem S.: Absolutely. It's good to be here. It is so awesome to have you back to the pod. I know you have spent the past few decades moving through consulting, incubators, corporate VC, and now your own fund.

[00:00:36] Naseem S.: What was the moment you decided the industry needed more women allocating capital, not just more women founders raising it? Naseem S.: Yeah, it's a really good question because the moment was when I was spending a lot of time at the incubator building startups, working with great teams. The diversity angle was not sufficient. Naseem S.: There just weren't enough women involved in building, involved in thinking about what the building needed. And then the capital layer becomes that much worse.

[00:01:05] Naseem S.: So the skew is so heavy towards profiles that don't look like the two of us. And that dramatically changes what gets attention, what gets funded, and ultimately what we see grow up and do well in venture. And there's two problems there. One is we don't get the products. And then we also don't get the behaviors. Right? So a lot of what Uber and Airbnb did was actually taught us new behaviors. And if we're not funding products and solutions coming from different profiles, we're missing entire behaviors. And knowing that

[00:01:35] Naseem S.: That would only really change if we had more women involved in check writing, in activating capital and bringing their money to this ecosystem. That's the lever to pull to grow the pie, and then redirect that pie to things we care about. And things that we know matter for growth and for revenue and all the human benefits that we also want.

[00:01:54] Naseem S.: So true. And such an interesting way to see it. Now, I've heard you say in the past that women just generally bring a more collaborative, less command and control leadership style to investing. Can you point to a specific deal or founder relationship where that style actually kind of changed the outcome?

[00:02:10] Naseem S.: Yeah, it's a very different style of engagement and how we team, right? And across the ecosystem at the GP level, and it's also the founder level. So how we get deals done on this side of the ecosystem, I should say, it's very collaborative because we want everyone to succeed. There's a handle. It's not pervasive. We're working on it. But there's a real push towards abundance thinking and making sure that if I can be in this deal, then you can be in this deal and you can be in this deal.

[00:02:38] Naseem S.: Because if we all support this company, that company will do well and we all do better on the other side of it. And so the sharp elbows mentality, in my experience, just doesn't exist. And it also is, it's shifted how we work with founders as well, because it goes well beyond capital. It's really about resources and supports and how we can ensure that founder can build a business in the best way possible. And that it requires more than capital.

[00:03:03] Naseem S.: What have you found to be the most frustrating myth about women investors or women led funds that you still have to correct in fundraising meetings? Naseem S.: There's two. One is that we still get a little bit of the, oh, that's so sweet. Oh, you're investing in women. And it's wild. And you just look at them and you go, what are you talking about? This is about making money. That is 100% why I'm doing this. And I'm also here to change the world and help people.

[00:03:31] Naseem S.: And high impact should be able to run parallel to high revenue. And that combination is almost brand new for a lot of people. And so that we have to work around that logic and that mindset quite often.

[00:03:42] Naseem S.: And then the other is just the continued trope that women are bad with money. And we aren't. There's more than enough data in the wild now around companies led by women that perform well, that have strong stock market performance. We have women that aren't emotional the way we get characterized to be. We actually are really good at money. And a lot of it comes from the role we play in our households. A huge majority of us manage, coordinate 80% of household spend.

[00:04:12] Naseem S.: And if we weren't good with money, we wouldn't be able to do that. So it just doesn't make sense. And so it still comes up. It's still like, oh, that's so sweet. But we just have to talk around it and say, well, let me show you why that's not true. Naseem S.: So shocking in this day and age to hear that, but also not surprising, I think to any of us as well. That might still be a misconception. And it makes so much sense that we would be great at money. Hello, guys.

[00:04:35] Naseem S.: Right. And it's also not about being better than right. It's about also showing up in the same rooms with the same credibility, and the same ability to perform or to invest or to make the kind of change we want to make. Naseem S.: I have to remind every room I say this in that I'm not here to tell you to take money from him and give it to her. I'm asking you to grow the pie, and I'm asking you to take everyone seriously and not undercut someone simply because they look different than you.

[00:05:04] Naseem S.: And I love that you're saying this too, as somebody who is angel invested in 30 plus female founded companies over the past decade. And I'm wondering what kind of pattern matching mistake did you make kind of early on that you'd warn other women investors about kind of with your experience, kind of just wanting to teach them better about, yeah. Naseem S.: Yeah, that's a great question. And my investment portfolio includes my angel investments and my fund investments. And early on,

[00:05:34] Naseem S.: One, you can make the mistake of getting very excited about an opportunity because it's something that you know you want and not testing enough for scale and for growth and for the ability to actually build on a fairly accelerated growth curve. And it takes a while to build the intuition to do that. And so one or two of my early checks were great and fun and I loved what they were doing, but there just actually wasn't a way for that business to scale the way that it might have wanted to.

[00:06:04] Naseem S.: And so getting better at testing for those things. Also, it's okay to make mistakes when you're investing and we have to not be... It's good to be cautious. You should be risk averse. I don't want to take away those things. But we have to give ourselves a little bit of grace on understanding what it takes to build a company and asking questions of our peers and looking for information that we may not have.

[00:06:29] Naseem S.: And I was reasonably good at it upfront, but I have now become much more deliberate about seeking out information that's coming from other people in the space or coming from other companies to really stress test what that company is doing before I get involved. It's just seeking information from the founder is not enough. You have to go broader than what the founder is telling you.

[00:06:48] Naseem S.: As more women enter the investor seat, do you see the rules of venture changing at all? Or are women investors still mostly playing a game designed 10, 15, 20 plus years ago?

[00:06:59] Naseem S.: So it's a little bit of both. We are absolutely still deeply embedded in a game that was built decades ago. And it has not shifted to fully include our perspective and include our way of engaging, interacting, investing in the way that it could. I like to describe it as we've moved into the house and the walls and we're repainting walls and moving furniture and we're doing all these things and the people already there are going, what the hell is going on?

[00:07:25] Naseem S.: And so we will continue to do that. And then we also need to be building our own houses and setting our own tables and designing it differently from the ground up. And that's happening right now. It just has to go faster. I always want things to go faster. Naseem S.: And we also have to bridge the gender divide. There's a lot of social capital that moves across the female founder, female investor side of the ecosystem. And similarly, there's an expansive amount of social capital that moves around the male founder, male investor side of the ecosystem.

[00:07:55] Naseem S.: We have to bridge those two things because we need that social capital to move back and forth. The hurdle we're at now is that a lot of the companies that we invested in, pre-seed and seed are now reaching their series A and B rounds. And enough of the relationships across those two sides of the investing game are not built strong enough for us to warm hand our relationships and our investments to those later stage funders. And that's a lot of what the ecosystem is talking about now.

[00:08:23] Naseem S.: So tell us a little bit more about WAM's Innovators Circle. You've called it the pipeline engine for women's health innovation. What does that pipeline look like? Where do most promising companies stall out before they get funded? What is it? And what are some of your key learnings alongside it? Naseem S.: Sure. Yeah. We launched the Innovators Circle about a little over a year ago. And the entire purpose was to put more collective energy around the early stage pipeline, specifically around solutions that support women's health, whether they

[00:08:53] Naseem S.: may be directly, differently or disproportionately related to conditions that matter to us. And the objective is on one part to coordinate the funds more deliberately and have us all talking to each other more often, looking at pipeline together, looking at our portfolios together.

[00:09:09] Naseem S.: The other is to coordinate capital more efficiently. So right now, everyone, the founders are sending individual emails to all of the funders they could speak to, which takes a lot of time and energy. When if we were paying better attention or more coordinated attention, I can say, to what's happening in the ecosystem, what companies are building, what innovations they're building, where are they in their development and growth process? What kind of things do they need? What resourcing do they need? Then we can be picking up what we know is coming and planning ahead for it.

[00:09:39] Naseem S.: And saying, great, this company is hitting their A round. How can we help coordinate it? Who can be involved? Who doesn't know about them yet that we can teach? Who can we shun the deal to? And we can support that growth at the fund level and be more coordinated with the founder level.

[00:09:54] Naseem S.: The biggest need behind that was two things. One, we don't want to lose any innovations early stage. So there's a lot of activity happening early stage. And if it doesn't get funded early stage, it'll never make it later stage, especially if it's very important and can scale in venture, we want to make sure we catch it. And then the second is making sure we have good, smart, well-built companies ready for later stage investment.

[00:10:17] Naseem S.: So there's also an investment collaborative underneath the WAM umbrella, which is the later stage funds that are also committed to women's health. And we want to be able to bridge relationships across those two groups so that we know what they're looking for and what their pipelines want. And we know what's in our pipeline and we can connect the dots more easily. Naseem S.: So interesting. And now tell me a little bit too about GCWC and the work that you're doing there as well. Naseem S.: Yeah. So GCWC I launched late last year. It stands for Game Changers, World Changers.

[00:10:46] Naseem S.: And it's two parts. So on one part is a media platform that houses my podcast and also my sub stack and the conversations there. The podcast is fully focused on fundraising conversations with female founders. It's all the really hard stuff. It's the real deal things that happen when women go out to raise.

[00:11:03] Naseem S.: And the intent is to land on the insights and the learnings and the things that I know now that I didn't know before. So that if any other founder listens to the series, they walk out with a toolkit and they have a better understanding of what they're what they could see and then how to navigate it. And most importantly, they'll know that it's not personal. These things are happening all over the ecosystem. And so it's not you. It's the system. And you just have to have a way to navigate around it.

[00:11:28] Naseem S.: So that's the podcast. It's been a lot of fun. We're recording season three right now. And then the sub stack is focused on this core question of what it looks like to redesign venture capital. Naseem S.: And if we were to think about it from a female lens, if we were to think about it with AI as a baseline rather than the addendum, how does that change pattern recognition? How does it change fund construction? How does it change engagement with founders and with the ecosystem?

[00:11:52] Naseem S.: So I'm working on exploring a lot of those topics and surfacing some new thesis statements, hopefully, on what venture could look like. And that's what the sub stack is for.

[00:12:00] Naseem S.: And then on the other side is I am fundraising again. So I'm working on putting something new together that could still focus on health tech and fintech and get into later stage rounds. Series A rounds are part of the strategy and want to be able to support founders that are building real infrastructure, real intelligent infrastructure that can power health tech and fintech in much bigger ways so that we're set up for what the future needs and we'll be building it now.

[00:12:26] Naseem S.: We love to hear that, Naseem. And you have always been an inspiration to us. You've been on the pod years ago and it's just so amazing to see your growth and just see the growth of the community since then. It's just fantastic to hear. From the folks that you've interviewed on your podcast, folks you've interviewed for your sub stack, what are some of the biggest challenges you feel are just going under reported right now in the industry? It's just under the radar.

[00:12:52] Naseem S.: Yeah. So I don't know if it's under the radar so much as we're just not fixing it. So there's still a really big stigma problem. So it's a stigma problem in the broad understanding, and I'll stick with women's health because I spent a lot of time there, broad understanding of what women's health actually is and why it matters and what the different variations within that. And there's also a really deep semantic problem.

[00:13:17] Naseem S.: So I'm saying women's health here, but I actually want us all to start saying the health of women or just saying precision health.

[00:13:24] Naseem S.: We characterize it in certain ways that I believe make it inadvertently exclusive. And so we haven't, we're not getting the right kind of engagement and the right understanding of the category because it is just healthcare. We just happen to be thinking about a different user profile than we've thought about before. And if we did that better, it's a whole arbitrage opportunity that we're not leaning into enough right now. And early stage is doing it, later stage is not.

[00:13:51] Naseem S.: So the semantics are something I work on a lot and I think about a lot is that instead of saying that it's breast cancer or something, it's just, it's oncology and it happens to be focused on women. We have to get specific on breast cancer, yes, but I don't want it pigeonholed into women's health because of the stigma. And so that needs to shift. I want the semantics to start to shift so that it's more well understood, broadly understood, and we're not having to do the education all the time.

[00:14:16] Naseem S.: And then it's, to my point earlier, it's the social capital that isn't being fixed fast enough. And we still have capital and relationships that move in one circle, they move separately in a different circle, and we're not bridging it enough yet. And that's what I really believe we have to spend more time on, is making sure we can all walk into the different rooms and be as effective as possible.

[00:14:37] Naseem S.: So interesting. Now, if a founder is building in women's health or the health of women, which I love that rephrase, I do think that quote unquote women's health needs a rebrand to the health of women. I think it's a true statement. What does a woman founder in women's health need to do differently in a pitch rather than a founder in a kind of a more generalistic health category? What would you recommend?

[00:15:01] Naseem S.: Yeah. So my big recommendation, and I've said this in a few rooms recently is I want founders to lead with money and not lead with pain. And what happens in this category a lot is that the pitch decks will spend two or three pages on pain, on what the audience is experiencing, on how bad their lived experience is, on XYZ problems that come with whatever the condition is, which is all very important and necessary and not to be discounted.

[00:15:29] Naseem S.: However, you lose your audience if you spend too much time on it. And so instead, I would recommend starting with how big the category is, how much enterprise value is being lost, how much money is getting spent on solutions to support that condition, and how much more could be spent? Is it fragmented? Can we consolidate it? What is going on with the money flows related to that lived experience?

[00:15:51] Naseem S.: Anchor the story there upfront, and then absolutely talk about the pain, but don't overdo the pain story upfront. Because now we're asking for, because in that instance, we're asking someone to believe in the lived experience of something that they have no awareness of, rather than talking to them about opportunity.

[00:16:08] Naseem S.: Now for women's health investors, great advice. Now for women's health investors, I would love for you to give advice too on where are areas where they can easily change the system and it's just like a quick, it's something that they can absolutely do in their day to day and where areas you feel maybe they need to just keep things going as it is until the system's ready to change. Naseem S.: So for women's health investors or health of women investors, there's a lot of opportunity in digital health. There's a lot of opportunity in biotech as well.

[00:16:36] Naseem S.: There is continued opportunity in consumer health. And right now funds are dedicating themselves to one or more of those swim lanes, but not looking across them. And I believe there's an opportunity to look across them more than perhaps we are right now. Biotech is a very hard sector because it needs so much capital upfront. And so a lot of biotech is struggling right now because it doesn't actually fit venture easily.

[00:17:03] Naseem S.: And so the place where we could be thinking really differently is structurally, what kind of fund can better support biotech? Is it a longer fund life? Is it a different vehicles that support early stage biotech versus late stage biotech? Do we need to set up different expectations for our LPs? Because we risk losing a lot of great innovation in biotech right now because it just doesn't fit a 10 year model the way we would like it to. And that's where I think there's more problem solving that we could get into.

[00:17:30] Naseem S.: The other part is we are still in a lot of cases focusing on women's health still in siloed conditions. So focus on maternal health or we focus on autoimmune or we focus on XYZ other condition. And I would love for us to be thinking more about the full integrated experience of her health because these things are all connected and related. Naseem S.: Autoimmune conditions are connected to endometriosis, which is connected to gut health, which is connected to everything else. All of that affects your maternal health.

[00:17:59] Naseem S.: So we have to address these things in combination and in coordinated ways rather than as individual things because it affects scale, it affects growth, it affects the quality of the companies we invest in. And we're not having the impact on care delivery at the level that we could be because product solutions and even our investing styles are still living in conditioned swim lanes rather than more coordinated swim lanes.

[00:18:26] Naseem S.: Fascinating. So fascinating. Now, as we're thinking about your history and your past and what led you to where you are today, if you could give your younger self a piece of advice, knowing what you know now, what would you tell her? And if you could tell young women looking to get into investing, what encouragement or advice would you give them?

[00:18:45] Naseem S.: I would tell them to ask questions sooner. The biggest piece of advice I would give myself is I should have been doing this earlier. I should have been thinking about investing when I was in business school, maybe before business school, and I didn't really start thinking about it till years after. And now we can be thinking about these things sooner. We should be thinking about what we want our portfolios to look like, where we want our capital to go, getting out of just having a checking account and a savings account. And this is getting better.

[00:19:13] Naseem S.: So there are a lot of young women who are now building funds earlier or thinking about VC much earlier than I ever was. So it's great. And I just want to see more of that happen because of the amount of influence we can have. And once there's more of us that show up in the room, it's not an exception anymore. Naseem S.: To finish this conversation off right, where can our listeners find you online? Naseem S.: They can find me on LinkedIn for sure. So I'm fairly active there. You can follow, ping, try to connect. We can always find time to talk. And then the sub stack is the other one.

[00:19:42] Naseem S.: So it just launched a few weeks ago. You can find it. It's gcwccapital.subsec.com and subscribe and follow along and read and comment. And I want engagement. So I want us to talk about all these ideas and build this together. Naseem S.: So that's the second. And then the podcast, it's called The Capital Flex. You can find it on any platform where you listen to pods. And then there's two seasons of content out there that are exciting and fun and so interesting. So listen in, send me your thoughts. I'd love to hear how people like it.

[00:20:09] Naseem S.: Love it. Thank you so much, Naseem. It's so great to have you on again. And it was awesome learning from you today. And I hope we'll have you again in another two to five years to see what else you're just up to and what other ways you're changing the world. Naseem S.: Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. It was good. It was good to be back. Naseem S.: And thanks to you folks for joining us too. Check out the Hit Like a Girl pod and Hi Tea with Grace website for more interviews with great guests like Naseem today. Cheers.

[00:20:33] Naseem S.: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Hit Like a Girl pod. If this episode resonated with you, please follow us on social media at hitlikeagirlpod. That's H-I-T like a girl, P-O-D across all platforms. And to learn more about the show, our guests, or to join our waitlist for what's coming next, please visit our website. The link is in the show notes.

[00:20:59] Naseem S.: The Hit Like a Girl podcast is built on joy, fueled by love, and led with grace. We're so glad that you're here. We'll see you next time.