“If you have to succeed, you have to learn the games men play. Crucial decisions are not made in official meetings that are blocked on the calendar. They are made in beer parties, saunas, and golf courses – where men hang out with other men”. Lenka Michalska, a good friend and founder/CEO of Wise Porter, one of Czechia’s most promising startups, told me over an informal coffee, her humility and nonchalance totally belying her startup’s achievements.
“Society holds different expectations for women…”
I was in Prague, invited to moderate a panel on why the presence of women thins out the higher you rise a corporate ladder. Is it due to men teaming up on women and preventing their rise? Or, some lack of assertiveness and ambition on the part of the women-folk?
Frivolously, I posed a question to the all-women’s panel: In the 21st century, it should be easier to find your passion and chart your own course than to elbow your way up a 20th century hierarchy?
Well, as it turned out, the answer isn’t so simple. You need a woman’s perspective to understand why, in reality, you see so few women entrepreneurs. My experience of having worked with 100s of entrepreneurs, only 5% of whom are women, attests to that.
Those who do strike out and achieve success do so despite the factors that start building up against you quite early on in life, each one making sure that you never become an entrepreneur.
“Society holds different expectations of women, they are supposed to marry and have children by a certain age; there is a lot of pressure from other women to lead life a certain way and conform” says Olga Grillova, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Leeaf, a Biotech deep-tech startup building a women’s fertility product.
Then, when you enter the professional workspace, you realize that the power corridors are dominated by the more extroverted men and the women are more held back, more so due to their own lack of confidence.
So, how do women like Olga make it despite being constantly stymied by society?
Passion for the cause
“Pure passion”. It was her own motherhood and a deep empathy towards falling European birth rates, a problem exacerbated by women’s fertility issues, that made Olga passionate for the cause, leave the comfortable CEO’s chair in a large real estate company and take the plunge into co-founding Leeaf.
“I had to stop caring about what other people think and start doing what mattered to me most”, Olga says.
Indeed, passion turns you into an entrepreneur; you figure out things as you start chasing your passion, thinking, doing, and learning on your feet. “Passion makes you different from your competition and clients perceive that. Passion makes you do things [i.e., build a business] even if you didn’t believe you had the skills for it,” says Karolina Bosáková, who became passionate about two different causes at two different stages of her life.
Karolina became a professional model in Paris at 16. She learnt almost all the skills necessary to become a successful entrepreneur quite early in life: absolute professionalism, business development, fighting for yourself, facing your innermost fears head-on.
But, most importantly: investing in strong relationships with people.
With her own modelling success – at just 21 years of age – came the desire to help other Czech and Slovakian girls navigate the unforgiving world of professional modeling. Out of this passion was born the Unique One Modelling Agency that, till date, has helped more than 800 girls achieve modeling career success on the runways of Paris, Milan, and New York.
Much later in life, a tragedy that befell her best friend took her to Thailand, where she observed firsthand the after effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami on children. Out of that emotionally overwhelming experience was born her second passion project that she spends 90% of her time currently on: the Happy Hearts Foundation, an organization that has raised € 3M so far and has built – together with partners – 362 schools in 26 developing countries, impacting the lives of 123,000 children till date.
Veteran experience
So, is passion the golden goose every woman should look for before becoming an entrepreneur? Should you wait until passion strikes you, and then you jump in? Not necessarily if you take Lenka’s and Kamila’s examples.
For Lenka, whom we have discussed earlier, starting her own company came as a natural progression in her career. Having worked for over 15 years in the telecom domain for large corporates, she had already reached the senior management level, leading teams of 50+ people.
By now, she had built a solid network of hundreds of clients and knew their pain points like the back of her hand. And, so, she thought to herself, “I know the clients’ typical problems, the solutions, and how to deliver them end to end.
So, why not build a business out of such solutions for myself, instead of making a corporation richer?”.
Good decision! However, before jumping in right away, Lenka did something very wise. She mapped out her skillsets and what she was missing to build a high-impact team. She found two co-founders whose complementary skillsets nicely dovetailed into her skill gaps and set up Wise Porter! Currently the company serves 15 clients with the help of 35 employees across Europe.
Rapid prototyping
Kamila Zahradnickova’s case is even more extreme and remarkable, even eye-opening. For me, particularly. Kamila, the extremely young founder & CEO of Lakmoos, an Angel-funded high-growth Czech startup, who runs a fully remote team of 25 people, surprised me the most and challenged my deeply held beliefs, I admit.
Kamila advocates starting young and discovering your hidden talent for entrepreneurship through deliberate experimentation – calling it “rapid prototyping”. Placing micro-bets on ideas and initiatives in your 20s when you have time on your hands.
“You find something interesting; something catches your fancy? Place a micro-bet, try it for a few months, and see how it goes. Create a club, freelance your skills, do a fundraiser for a charity organization, start a podcast or even open a café!
You don’t have to launch a formal startup to figure out if entrepreneurship is for you or not. Even if you eventually fail, you become more valued in the job market”.
She did that all her life, in fact since her teenage years. And, then, within three years of working as a freelance Behavioural Science Consultant for large corporates, a startup idea struck! She sensed a market gap nobody was addressing, envisioned a solution, and – with some serendipity, found a techie co-founder as CTO to build the product. And, Lakmoos was born! Kamila adds:
“Freelance business doesn’t scale. If you are happy with the work-life balance it gives you, great! But, I was looking to take on a bigger challenge”.
What patterns emerge from all these stories?
Are there clear lessons to be drawn by future women (even men) entrepreneurs? Maybe even recipes for success?
1) Entrepreneurship is not a skill set. It is a lifestyle; a way of ordering your life for years together.
You don’t attend University or Coding School to learn how to become an entrepreneur. Once you decide to take the plunge, specific business skills are picked up on the way. So, when Kamila joined Czech Crunch with her co-founder for 3 months, she did that to learn skills of building and scaling a startup; not to learn entrepreneurship. Karolina, meanwhile, simply jumped headlong into entrepreneurship out of passion and acquired business skills on the way.
2) Focus on building the right networks.
As Olga says – start networking and investing in your relationships early on, even on LinkedIn. Right now, the people you connect with could be your friends. But, over time, they might occupy decision maker positions or have their own useful networks. So, 10 years down the line, instead of cold-calling potential customers, you could reach out to your network of influential friends to make the connections. Karolina did just that. She learnt the importance of relationships in her teens and cashed in on that network when she built a Modelling Agency business in her twenties.
3) Now, the third and most contentious one: get comfortable socializing with workmates up in the hierarchy, potential clients and investors.
A lot of whom happen to be men… In my experience of organizing social activities with work colleagues, I have seen some teammates treat them as optional. They would rather spend that time on “more productive” activities. Big mistake! Because she studied Physics and Maths at the university, Lenka says that she was the only woman in a class of 300. That made her extremely comfortable in the company of men, and she had no problems socializing with them in non-work informal settings. That helped her rise up the corporate hierarchy and attract co-founders, clients, and investors, crucial ingredients that eventually made her startup successful.
4) Lastly, I was repeatedly warned – by all four ladies I interviewed: entrepreneurship is not for everyone.
Don’t take it as this cool red pill that instantly catapults you into the professional world’s stratosphere. So, this article is not a doctor’s prescription for women to find meaning in their careers only via entrepreneurship. Not everyone even wants to become an entrepreneur, much less a startup founder. For some, work-life balance is a priority. For others who want complete autonomy and agency at the workplace, freelancing or starting a food business or café is the way to go. But, if you tread the startup path, then weekends and holidays are not for you. For years to come.
