Are you interested in learning how to bridge the gap in entrepreneurship for underrepresented communities? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with Naseem Sayani, co-founder of Emmeline Ventures, to discuss her journey as an angel investor and her dedication to supporting diverse founders. Naseem shares how her background in management consulting and her passion for women's health, financial inclusion, and sustainability led her to become an angel investor and co-found Emmeline Ventures with her partners La Keisha Landrum Pierre and Azin Radsan Van Alebeek. They dive into the challenges faced by female founders in securing venture capital funding, the importance of diverse representation in investment, and the need to reshape the conditioning around risk and failure for women in the entrepreneurship space. This episode provides a captivating insight into the world of angel investing and the invaluable work being done by Emmeline Ventures to support underrepresented founders. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by female founders and the vital role of investors in driving equity and inclusion in the startup landscape, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and fostering diversity and inclusion in business.
Are you interested in learning how to bridge the gap in entrepreneurship for underrepresented communities? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with Naseem Sayani, co-founder of Emmeline Ventures, to discuss her journey as an angel investor and her dedication to supporting diverse founders. Naseem shares how her background in management consulting and her passion for women's health, financial inclusion, and sustainability led her to become an angel investor and co-found Emmeline Ventures with her partners La Keisha Landrum Pierre and Azin Radsan Van Alebeek. They dive into the challenges faced by female founders in securing venture capital funding, the importance of diverse representation in investment, and the need to reshape the conditioning around risk and failure for women in the entrepreneurship space.
This episode provides a captivating insight into the world of angel investing and the invaluable work being done by Emmeline Ventures to support underrepresented founders. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by female founders and the vital role of investors in driving equity and inclusion in the startup landscape, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and fostering diversity and inclusion in business.
To get the latest from Naseem Sayani, you can follow her below!
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsayani/
https://www.emmelineventures.vc/
Sign up for Marcia's newsletter to receive tips and the latest on Angel Investing!
Website: www.marciadawood.com
And don't forget to follow us wherever you are!
Apple Podcasts: https://pod.link/1586445642.apple
Spotify: https://pod.link/1586445642.spotify
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/angel-next-door-podcast/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theangelnextdoorpodcast/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marciadawood
Marcia Dawood
Well, hi, Naseem, welcome to the show.
Naseem Sayani
Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Marcia Dawood
Well, I am super excited to have you today. Talk to us all about Emmeline Ventures. You and I are both involved in the show her the money movie. So you can tell us a little bit about how you got involved with that, since you are one of the big stars. So why don't you just start off though, is a podcast about how anybody can be an angel investor. And I always love to hear how people found out about it and what their journey is. So tell us a little bit about your journey.
Naseem Sayani
Yeah, absolutely. So I started angel investing about, I would say about ten years ago, and it really picked up steam, I think around 2017, 2018. And for me, there were two big drivers. One. So I grew up in management consulting, been at two of the four large firms, and was doing a lot of digital strategy and innovation work when I was there. It's what I've done for the last 20 years. And we were shifting from being core strategy only to also building product. And then eventually I was part of the incubator that's now part of BCG, where we were also now building startups at scale.
And so we're going from strategy on paper to testing and revving prototypes to then actually launching the business that's going to take that prototype to market and scale it. And it was so much fun and learned so much and have been in every part of getting a business off the ground, which is tremendous. But a lot of what we were doing was very core B two B SaaS. It wasn't really touching on women's health. It wasn't really touching on wealth generation, financial inclusion, wealth equity, or things around climate change and sustainability. There just wasn't enough momentum to build products in those spaces with the construct and the clients we were working with. So I went out looking. I went looking for founders that were building things that were in topic spaces that mattered to me kind of beyond what my day job was giving me access to.
I also very keenly experienced diversity problems in my day job where there's not enough women, there weren't enough people of color, there's not enough women who represent people of color. And so a lot of the voices that you often need in innovation to really get the best out of what you're building, we just didn't have in the room. And so I went looking for female founders that were building things in health and building things of financial inclusion and changing the game for audiences that typically are underserved and that's what got me into it. That, and then the second big thing was, and I feel like this happens to women for whatever reason, in their late 30s, early forty s. You have a moment where you go, wait a minute. I could be doing more with my capital that I'm just not doing right now. I have a savings account, I've got cds. I'm holding some public market stocks, but isn't there more? And so I just started researching what it meant to get involved with startups and angel invest and understand what kind of check sizes are required.
And it was just my curiosity that led me down the path. And then those two things converged in writing what became ultimately, I've got ten companies in my angel portfolio and I love all of them. I know the founders well. I've been able to help in good ways across them, and it's been a ton of fun because they're important to me and I love being a part of what they're doing.
Marcia Dawood
That's great. How did you find those ten companies when you, were you investing by yourself as a solo angel, or were you in an angel group or how did you find them?
Naseem Sayani
So initially I was investing by myself and all of those investments are me by myself. And two things happened. One, I started to get involved in local meetup events here I'm in Los Angeles and was joining events and just wanted to get into the ecosystem and meet some founders. And so some of them I met in person just by way of meetup events. Some of them, one of them, I'll name one of the companies, it's called August, it's sustainable period care. And I think they were the first check I wrote, and I met them by way of someone I used to work with ten years ago. She was my client back in my consulting days and she was working with them as a fractional CFO, and she pinged me and said, hey, they could really use some good strategy help. Would love to see if you want to meet them and maybe you can help them.
What was initially a pitch call for them to hear about me and kind of the survey because I was independently doing some independent consulting at the time, how I could help them turned into them pitching me on becoming an angel investor. And that one has been tremendous. It's been probably one of my favorites in my portfolio. The other thing that happened was I joined a group called Pipeline Angels, which is entirely focused on getting more women to the table as check writers in VC, and I joined the LA cohort in 2019 and that became very definitive step from one line to the other side and was now an angel investor because you go through a whole host of Zoom sessions and meetings with other women who are also looking to write checks and get involved. You meet founders from kind of every sector. They're all female founders. They're all building great businesses. And so it really did a nice job of creating the full loop experience of getting involved very early stages with some great founders.
Marcia Dawood
Amazing. So then what led from that to Emmeline ventures? Yeah, that's a great question.
Naseem Sayani
So pipeline Angels is where I met Lakeisha and Azine and where we all met each other. And those are my two partners at Emmeline and Ventures. And we all joined pipeline angels at the same time, kind of with the same impetus that it was about time we started to get involved in venture and write some checks. And the way they grouped the cohorts in pipeline is they group you by location. So we are all proximate to Los Angeles. So we were all in the LA cohort and teamed up really quickly. So we have very complementary backgrounds. We come from different lived experience.
Naseem Sayani
We have very similar intentions around why we're writing checks and the kind of founders that we want to invest in. And so by the end of, I think, what is a one or two week Zoom session where they get everyone together a few times? You have to team up on diligence. And we teamed up really quickly. It was a very kind of harmonious, yes, we're going to work together moment. And the rest was history. Like, we started working on diligence together for one of the founders. We met through pipeline. We got involved with, I think two other angel groups, started to meet more founders, and we kicked off our pilot fund in March of the next year, in 2020, and started writing checks together.
Naseem Sayani
And we wrote checks into 14 companies across 2000 and 22,021. That's our pilot fund. And that was testing our thesis, getting grounded in deal flow, setting up our diligence processes, and then we kicked off full fledged Emmeline in early 22. From zero to now, it's been about four years, and we're now 23 companies in the full portfolio.
Marcia Dawood
23 companies. Wow.
Naseem Sayani
Amazing. Yeah, it's really incredible. It's been really a lot of fun.
Marcia Dawood
So is Ruth Health then part of the Emmeline portfolio or your personal Emmeline .
Naseem Sayani
Part of the Emmeline portfolio? They're in our pilot fund.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, excellent. And because you're on their board, right?
Naseem Sayani
I am, yeah.
Marcia Dawood
Tell us about what they do.
Naseem Sayani
So Ruth Health is a digital clinic for maternal care. They are bringing doulas and midwives and at home sonograms and ultrasounds and lactation support and pelvic floor support to new moms during their pregnancy and then after their pregnancy, especially with lactation and pelvic floor. And they're doing all of that through telehealth solutions, so that it creates more access and more equity across the women that can use it. It's really tremendous what they're building.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I met Allison at a show her the money screening, and I was just super impressed with what?
Naseem Sayani
Oh, yeah, she's great.
Marcia Dawood
She's great. Tell us about some of the other companies that are in the.
Naseem Sayani
Current, so current fund. Two. I'll tell you about two. So there's one called Lunajoy that is, again, a telehealth clinic specific to mental health and specifically for women. So a lot of the mental health platforms out in the wild, so betterhelp headspace are not gendered at all. It's very one size fits all. And these two women come from clinical backgrounds. They're both therapists and practitioners by trade.
And what they noticed was a huge, gaping white space where women were not getting the mental support help that they needed. And so they launched a business to close that gap. And so from adolescence through to adulthood, motherhood, not motherhood, into menopause and beyond, they've built a platform that can plug in and out of your primary care and that is very tailored, in tune mental health support by women for women. We invested about 18 months ago, 1820 months ago, they were just coming out of Y combinator. That's how we met them. We also met them through Allison, because she knows them well as well, and they're growing incredibly well. They were profitable very quickly, really finding great relationships with OB clinics and very local provider groups, and it's been closing a gap for those providers in a really nice way. So they're growing in really great ways.
We're excited about them. And then the other one I'll mention is one we just wrote the check in the fall of last year. It's a company called Wealthmore. It's a fintech. And what she's building is a platform to bring wealth planning and financial management insight down to households that are sub 1 million in current assets, which represents about 70% of american households. And the big problem she wanted to solve is that when someone has wealth planning support or a wealth manager that they work with, their wealth generation options grow by two to three x. So you actually generate wealth much, much faster when you have insight and support with you. And if 70% of households don't have that access and that insight.
And many of those households are diverse. We are further exacerbating, right, the wealthy stay wealthy and the ones that aren't wealthy don't have the access to it. And she wants to close that gap. And so precede raise. Right now we're leading that precede raise. She's launching the platform, I think, in about two weeks and she's after it. She's going to close that gap and she's got 25 years of financial services experience, she's got a great team and she's done a ton of research on the audience. And so we're really excited that she's going to do something pretty great.
Marcia Dawood
That sounds amazing. We definitely need a lot of different avenues and different ways that we can try to close this wealth gap.
Naseem Sayani
Yeah.
Marcia Dawood
What are your thoughts on the reasons why women get so little of the venture capital funding that's out there?
Naseem Sayani
Oh, I love that question. So there's a couple of problems. One is pattern recognition at scale is a problem. And so if you look at the profile of who's running VC funds and who's writing those checks, they're 85% white and male and went to Harvard and Stanford. And so it's a very narrow, very specific profile. And they have been historically building the startups, capturing the wealth, and then redeploying it back into people that look like them. Pattern recognition and tribalism are very strong human qualities and it's just the nature of how we've built community and grown up. But in this context, it actually goes awry for female founders because a lot of the lived experience that female founders are building around, a lot of it, women's health, a lot of it wealth inclusion, financial inclusion, a lot of it around climate and sustainability, it affects us more directly, ends up not being in the lived experience of the historical VC check writing profile.
So what ends up happening is that female founders will get more prevention questions versus promotion questions, so they get asked more risk based questions rather than more vision based questions. They often can't get the meeting in the first place because they say they're working on something around virtual maternal health. And that fund doesn't do women's health or doesn't understand maternal care, so they won't take the meeting. And so it can take a lot longer for female founders to raise money because of that pattern recognition problem. The other problem, and this is getting a little bit better, is that there's a good number of us, not as many as there should be, but writing checks at seed into female founders and into sectors that are becoming much bigger opportunities. We don't yet have enough diverse check writers at the series A. And so even if we put a ton of capital into seed and get these companies off the ground and help them grow and get to the one, two, 3 million in ARR, when they need to get to that series A, it can often be a start from zero conversation because again, pattern recognition isn't there. They're walking into a room of profiles who don't understand what they're building or why.
And especially in women's health, they can end up. It can feel like they're teaching biology for 25 minutes of a 30 minutes meeting and they don't get very far. So we're trying a lot as Emmeline to build bridges and build relationships into those series a check writers so that we can do warm handoffs and make sure that they can go get that.
Marcia Dawood
Next round of capital that's so needed. It's amazing. I love what you're doing now. Is Emmeline's thesis to just do precede and seed or will you go up to the series A also?
Naseem Sayani
Yeah. So our first check is focused on precede and seed, but we will write series A checks into current portfolio companies with this fund. When we get to fund two, fund three. We're fully expecting to be writing series A checks as a first check as well. So we're going to grow into it.
Marcia Dawood
That's awesome. And then what specific industries are you looking for? Is it just healthcare or are you in other things too?
Naseem Sayani
Yeah, we have three primary sectors, so women's health, financial services and sustainability. So we do everything under the sun when it comes to women's health. Maybe not devices as much, but pretty much everything else is fair game. And we'll look at it in financial services. It's all tech and platform solutions that are focused on financial inclusion and wealth generation. And then in sustainability, we put things like food tech, ag tech, clean supply chains, clean apparel, things that are affecting what she eats, what she reads, what she wears. Right. So we can wrap environment around her lived experience in a good way.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. Wow. That's also important. And is it also a requirement that they have a diverse team?
Naseem Sayani
Yes. So we are over rotating on really writing checks into female founded teams and female ceos so that in whatever small part we can help expand that 2% that's going to female founders right now. So we love mixed gender teams. We absolutely need to make sure we're living by the same diversity rules and having that at the table with the teams we invest in. But we are absolutely writing checks into female ceos because when that company grows up and gets its exit and does great, we want her face on Forbes. And we want to make sure that also the equity percentages are in a good place when there's multiple founders on a team.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that's so important. I totally agree with you. I mean, it has to be diversity of almost everything you want, horse, gender, race. But how about just where people lived, where they grew up, what schools they went to?
Naseem Sayani
Absolutely. We're being very deliberate about it because it would be very easy to write a lot of checks into Stanford and Harvard grads or UCLA and USC grads. But we're being very deliberate about making sure we're meeting founders from Wealthmore, the wealth tech we're leading the race for. She's based out of Philly. Black female founder based out of Philly. And we're so excited about it because it gives us a really nice now touch point with Philly and other founders that are based in that market that we otherwise maybe wouldn't have met or wouldn't have seen. But now we're connected there as well. And so we're looking in Texas, we're looking in Atlanta, we're looking in every part of the country to meet founders.
Naseem Sayani
And we're capturing, whether they've been in an accelerator or not been in an accelerator, what kind of existing access do they have to networks or to privilege or to relationships to help them grow? Because we're big believers that talent is everywhere and opportunity is not. And if we can help close that gap on the opportunity with great talent, we want to be part of doing that.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. Oh, gosh, that's so great. So what are some of the things that you think we could do to help women get in the game as investors?
Naseem Sayani
Oh, that's a great question. So one of the things that we spend some good time on and that we can all spend some time on is unlearning some of the conditioning that we grow up with. And so we're taught as women, and a lot of it is implicit, to not take up as much space, to kind of be small, to smile and be nice and all these things that come with the world we live in, and we have to unlearn all of that. We have to take up more space. We have to say the things that are on our minds. We have to have a point of view, and we have to not worry about people liking us. And we have to learn that early. These things get ingrained into young girls, like at five, six, seven years old.
And we have to very consciously not teach that right and not reinforce it. And it's how we raise our daughters, it's how we raise our sons. I have a five year old little boy, and I'm making sure that he understands and he's not learning, I would say not learning some of the same conditioning that my father grew up with or that some of our brothers may have grown up with, because he's watching me run a fund and he's watching my husband and I both handle the household. And there's no real difference in whose job is who's in the house. It's just work that needs to get done. And we're being really deliberate about that. I think we have to think about that with how we're writing checks into founders. Also, what women can do as a byproduct of that conditioning is almost overanalyze.
And especially as angel investors, like, look at every single detail, want to dig through financials, like, what about this number on page ten? And it's all totally appropriate and good questions, but it's a seed stage investment, so the numbers are not going to be perfect, right? Like, this is really still a little bit more art than science. And so do you believe the opportunity? Do you think the founder can build it? Do they have the team they need to do it? Have they thought about what they need? And can you help? Right? And if you can answer those questions and you can bang the table, believe they're after something big, write the check, the numbers will come, right. You cannot hang your hat on perfect financials at seed, and I've seen a lot of women that I've spoken to really get hung up on minutiae details, and it can become analysis paralysis. And you just can't get stuck in that because they don't want to fail and they don't want to be wrong. Because we've been told we can't fail and can't be wrong. And so we have to break that mentality and take some risk. The other thing is we as women, can often leave the finances to our partners. And especially if you have a male partner, there's kind of a tendency to be like, oh, he handles that.
And we just have to lean in and ask more questions. We have to be part of the financial decision making for our homes. We have to think about portfolios with our partners and understand where the money is going, because the more problematic scenario is where actually a lot of these women are making more money than their husbands, but still leaving the finances to their husbands. And we just have to stop doing that. And it's not a matter of one is better than the other at doing it. It's just. It's a partnership, and so let's lean in and be full partners on that also.
Marcia Dawood
I completely agree.
Naseem Sayani
Yeah.
Marcia Dawood
The word investing, it has so many connotations. And I think sometimes, like you were saying, people think, oh, well, if I make an investment, then I'm required to think that there's going to be a financial outcome that's going to be very good. And if there isn't, then I'm going to look like I didn't make a very good decision and that I'm not very bright.
Naseem Sayani
Right? That is the implication. But that mentality sits in women's hands, not in men's heads.
Marcia Dawood
That's so true.
Naseem Sayani
They take the risk, they write the check. I lost the money. I lost the money. But I learned something, and I can write a better check the next time. And we get caught up in failure, and then we don't write that.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, yeah. Yes. We need to pound the sand. That, yes, we need to write the check.
Naseem Sayani
Write the check. Write the. Absolutely.
Marcia Dawood
Well, Naseem, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and telling us all about Emmeline ventures and all of the wonderful things you're doing to support diverse teams.
Naseem Sayani
Us. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. I loved being here.