I attended a networking event the other night called “Networking for Fundraising Success”  organized by The Capital Network (TCN) and  New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA). The event brought together the area’s top entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel Investors and strategic partners for an evening of networking.

My husband and I try to attend as many of these networking events as possible as it’s a great opportunity to meet potential investors.  Since Sole Envie is going to be seeking funding in the near future, we’re trying to build a name for ourselves cause everyone knows that the best way to meet potential investors is through a personal introduction - an investor is going to be much more likely to invest in people they know.  These events are also a great way to meet potential strategic partners and a way for us to practice and finesse our elevator pitch.

Click here to buy my "Don't know nothing about shoes!" t-shirt that I designed at Zazzle.com

At these events, they conveniently have venture and angel investors wear a name badge with a green sticker on it  (green = $$$$) so you know who to talk to. Entrepreneurs wear yellow stickers.  You can always tell an investor by the large group of people standing around them. (I’d really love to know what the combined net worth of everyone in that room is).  I have to admit these events are a little hard to navigate if you’re not a particularly pushy person.   You can be in the middle of a great conversation with someone (usually an investor) and another entrepreneur will just shamelessly push their way though and interrupt your conversation mid-sentence to introduce themselves. I guess all the good manners that were instilled in me by my parents don’t apply in the fundraising world and I’d better throw them out the window if I want to get anywhere. Cause come on, let’s face it, 2 months from now when I’m in a boardroom presenting my business plan to an investor, they’re not going to remember me for my manners- no matter how winsome they are.

The event also got me thinking about gender bias and what it’s like to be a woman pitching a business model that merges fashion with technology to venture or angel investors who are all typically men.  These events tend to be focused around the tech and bio-tech industries of Boston’s 128 corridor which means that I’m usually one of a handful of women in the room, one of few consumer driven companies, and most definitely the only fashion related company. You may ask what is a fashion company doing at a tech oriented event? While Sole Envie is a custom shoe company for women, we’re also an internet based start-up focused around user-generated content (shoes!) that is powered entirely by technology (or at least one day we will be)  - much like Amazon or even Cafe Press. In the end, we’re all moving physical goods but without state of the art technology we couldn’t do what we do.  Sole Envie’s success is going to be based upon successfully developing a powerful interactive configurator (for designing shoes), a social network (think Facebook like features) and a dynamic online community.  This dependence on technology will extend into our back-end supply chain and logistics systems.

At these events there are always one or two men who will invariably throw their hands up and say in a somewhat condescending tone, “I don’t know anything about shoes” as I’m pitching the model -  before I even have a chance to describe the concept. It’s like they hear the words “women” and “shoes” and their brain just shuts down.  I want to say to them, “oh you don’t wear shoes?” or “does your mom still dress you then?” but I can’t of course and instead I have to find analogies they can relate to such as “It’s like “Dell” for shoes except instead of letting people design their computers, we’re letting them design shoes.  Shoes - a 40 BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY!

Why don’t they ask “why custom shoes?” Or ask about our our revenue model, our forecasted sales or even our exit strategy? Why not ask about other parallels in the Mass Customization space that have become successful? Zazzle.com for instance. Zazzle is an online marketplace for customized products such as custom t-shirts, postage and most recently custom Keds, that attracts about 2 million visitors a month.  Their estimated revenue is projected to top $80 million this year.  I’m sure Ram Shriram (Google’s founding board member and one of Google’s earliest investors) didn’t say to the folks at Zazzle, “I don’t know anything about t-shirts or mugs” when his venture firm Sherpalo Ventures decided to fund them for 16 million dollars in Series A equity funding a few years ago.   Forget Mass customization companies…what about other online shoe companies? Zappos for instance. They sell shoes. Last I checked Zappos was on track to top 1 billion in sales revenue this year.  Would these men say “I don’t know anything about shoes” if they were to meet Tony Hsieh, the current CEO of Zappos?

As a woman, if you even bring up the word “shoes” in front of a man, they just assume the reason you are starting a shoe company is because you’re just obsessed with shoes.  Take the one investor, for example,  who kept proudly proclaiming to me that he was a “technical geek” and just assumed (without asking me my background) that because I was a woman starting a shoe company I couldn’t possibly be a “technical geek” too. My husband is the co-founder and CTO of Sole Envie. If this guy had been talking to my husband instead of me, would he have immediately assumed that because Eric was starting a woman’s shoe company he wasn’t a “technical geek”?  I can assure you that my husband is the biggest “technical geek” I know!  I love fashion, but that’s not the reason I started Sole Envie.  I started Sole Envie because I wanted to start an internet-based company and I have a fascination for the concept of user-generated content and mass customization.  Knowing what I know about the market and my own experiences with custom shoes, shoes just seemed to have a lot of potential. To me, figuring out what it takes to implement mass customization from a user-interface and back-end supply chain/logistical standpoint is as interesting to me as the actual shoes.

And it’s not just the men at these events. It’s friends, family and other women too. I’m sure when people hear what I’m doing they think, “Monika and her little shoe business” or they think of this as a hobby I run out of my basement (ok I admit, I work from my kitchen table - usually in my pajamas). Heck even my mom unconsciously does it. The other day my mom was talking to some relatives who wanted to come to Boston but could only meet during the work day and my mom said “Oh you should call Monika. She doesn’t work.”  Of course I know my mom and I know she didn’t mean it that way. What she really meant to say was that I had a flexible schedule, but I can’t help thinking that if it were my brother and he was starting a company revolving around the next big thing in renewable energy,  things may have come out a little differently.

It’s not all bad though. In fact I find the whole thing kind of amusing. Most people are very open minded and the ones that aren’t usually come around and get excited about Sole Envie’s potential once I’ve told them a little more. As an entrepreneur, especially in the relatively uncharted area of Mass Customization,  you spend 1/4 of your time actually moving your company along and the rest of your time educating and convincing people about your concept. It’s all part of the game and either you learn how to play or you get out!  I can’t wait till the day I’m the one wearing the green sticker in the room and I have a group of men crowding around me and I can say to them, “I don’t know anything about football, NEXT!”