Kay Koplovitz still remembers her first negotiation. Her family was moving from one suburb of Milwaukee to another in the middle of the school year, and she wanted to finish kindergarten with her class. To cover the bus fare back to her old neighborhood, she persuaded her father to raise her allowance. “I sort of felt, well, my first one was successful,” she now says of the deal. “Why wouldn’t all the rest of them be?”
Many of them have been. In 1977, as the founder of what was later renamed USA Networks, she became the first woman in the United States to lead a television network. Over the years, Ms. Koplovitz, now 79, racked up a lot of firsts. She brought sports to cable before ESPN. She cut deals to bring Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League to cable operators for the first time, and she pioneered a new business model, persuading cable operators to pay a license fee to carry the channel, which was initially called Madison Square Garden Sports Network. In 1998, USA Networks was sold to Barry Diller for $4 billion.
Ms. Koplovitz was one of the most powerful people in cable at a time when women were barred from many of the golf courses and dinner clubs where deal-making happened. “If I thought that not going to the second-floor club at Augusta National — because I’m a woman and they didn’t allow women at that time — was going to be a barrier to me, I wouldn’t have done what I did,” she recalled.
In 1998, after Ms. Koplovitz stepped down from USA Networks following its sale to Mr. Diller, President Bill Clinton appointed her as chair of the National Women’s Business Council. Ever since, she has focused on advancing female entrepreneurs. Her start-up accelerator, Springboard Enterprises, which she co-founded 24 years ago, has admitted 930 companies, including Zipcar, the RealReal and iRobot. More than 200 of them have been acquired, 28 have gone public, and 10 have valuations of at least $1 billion.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
After the sale of USA Networks, how did you decide to transition from cable to venture capital?
When I served as the chairman of the National Women’s Business Council, I went to see one of the founders of an angel investment network, who were mostly men from the semiconductor business. They’d funded 74 companies. This was in 1999. And I said to him, “In any of these companies, were the C.E.O.s women?” And he looked at me, and he said: “Women? We don’t see any women. None of them have even applied to us. We don’t even know what women would be doing in any of these technology areas.” It was really kind of eye-opening to me. I thought to myself there’s just no connection between the early funding market and women in technology and life sciences. They don’t know each other.
How does Springboard work with companies?
We concentrate on companies that can scale to sustainability in the marketplace. So when they come through our boot camps, there are a limited number — normally around 10 people in an accelerator boot camp. But that’s just the beginning. That’s not the end. We’re not one and done. We are there all the way through liquidity and into their next company.
Our value is that we connect entrepreneurs to the right people for the right series of development for their companies, how they’re growing their stack, building their company. As they get larger, they need different advisers. They need different introductions. And this is what Springboard does for them. And we will be also raising a fund to invest behind them because we believe so strongly in their ability to succeed.
What types of companies are you betting on now?
It’s total chaos out here. Look at all these companies vying for supremacy in artificial intelligence. Every business model is challenged today. I’ve always believed that in chaos there are great opportunities.
There is a wider swatch of women out there who have been funded through what I call “micro funds” — funds that were initially $25 million, that have come back and raised $50 million, $75 million, $100 million. They’re growing. And I look at that as a marketplace that has tremendous deal flow, that not everybody is looking at, that there will be real success stories coming out of. And we want to be a part of that. We want to be a leader in it.
You’ve had a lot of success at Springboard, but there must have been some companies you bet on thinking there was a sure thing but they ended up not being as successful as you hoped.
This is not a gambling thing. There is a lot of work that goes behind our companies.
I definitely get that. But did you learn anything from that experience that you were able to use later on to make better-informed decisions?
I learned that some of your investments turn out great and some don’t. We look at ourselves as being more for growth. So we’re looking at companies that have already raised some money, have a proven model, have some customers or, if they’re in the science area, have gotten grants to propel themselves to clinical trial, etc. We look at companies that have an early track record of success.
You know, people will tell you one of 10 companies you invest in will really be successful, two or three of them will be moderate successes, and the rest of them will fail. And that’s true in the venture market.
“I’ve always believed that in chaos there are great opportunities.” — Kay Koplovitz
How different are the challenges facing women-led companies today than they were 24 years ago, when you started Springboard?
In our first class, we needed to create an entire ecosystem: advisers, industry experts, legal teams. You could see that other companies in the marketplace had that access, but they did not include women. Women were just not sourced or recognized, nor did they know who to pitch. And they were worried about things like if investors would force them out of their companies.
Today, women understand the game of venture capital and how they have to compete in the marketplace. They come with a lot more knowledge. And I see how competitive they are.
About 3 percent of the companies that have gone through Springboard have gone public. What is the industry average? One percent. One percent of companies coming to market go to I.P.O. That is a huge difference. Some of these data points for Springboard, when women get the support, give me great confidence that more women are going to come to market and be extremely successful.
I hear what you’re saying — that you see Springboard as a proof point for how competitive women are when they get support any company needs to succeed. Do you think it’s still harder for women to get that support than it is for men?
Yes. But when I say yes, it’s because it’s a growing marketplace. The early venture capitalists were eschewed by Wall Street. They were outliers. They were renegades. And they built the ecosystem that they felt comfortable in. They were not in retail, for example, until recently. Women brought retail to the forefront.
Almost 50 percent of angel investors in the United States are women. When we started, it was 1 percent. So there is more early investment for areas where women want to innovate. Like beauty. In our first class, the company that sold extremely quickly was a beauty company. But beauty was unknown in the market. Nobody even thought about it. Today, beauty and retail companies are highly desired by investors who are both women and men.
Earlier, you mentioned the opportunity offered by A.I. Do you think enough women-led companies are embracing that opportunity, or do you think they should be doing more in that space?
There are women leading in artificial intelligence, especially in how it’s applied to advancing their companies in other sectors. But I’m concerned that only about 20 percent of those working directly with artificial intelligence are women. Women are extremely competitive in the market — it’s just that the number of women competing in the market is fewer than the number of men. The data that we have today is still dominated by a male thinking process. The industry also has more of a male perspective on what is relevant to develop.
There’s a backlash against D.E.I. right now, with some business leaders very loudly suggesting that programs targeted at boosting women or other groups are putting less qualified people ahead. How do you respond when you come across that perspective?
All of the time I was in the cable industry, I was never thinking: Look at me, I’m a woman, I’m different. No. I always thought I was a leader of people. Not just women. And I thought these women deserve to look at themselves this way. I want to see them have the opportunity to get into this market.
Recently you wrote an article in Fast Company arguing that the track record of women-led start-ups has been significantly underestimated. Can you explain why you think that is?
There still is this repeated factor that women only raise 2 percent of venture capital, which is not actually the truth. Women founders and co-founders actually raised 20 percent of the venture capital, and about 25 percent of people seeking venture capital are women. But if a woman co-founder has at least one male co-founder, the woman somehow does not get credit for raising the capital. Just in the way it’s perceived in the marketplace, the way it’s reported in the marketplace.
We like male co-founders. I have no objection at all. But I object to women not getting credit for raising a capital. And that sort of puts women in a small box of saying we’re defining you as a founder and you raise 2 percent of venture capital, when in fact that’s not true. You can’t tell me that somebody like Melanie Perkins from Canva — whose company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital — doesn’t raise capital. Or Helen Greiner from iRobot didn’t raise the capital to launch the Roomba into the marketplace. Or that Sheila Mikhail from AskBio, who also has a co-founder who is male, wasn’t the C.E.O. who raised the capital to take the gene therapy company to market.
I mean, it’s just the perception is wrong. This is a myth about women that has to be dispelled today in the marketplace. Women are much stronger than the market wants to give women credit for.
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