VC Backed Moms founders Nicole Wee (MBA 2018), Lisa Marrone (MBA 2017), and Amelia Lin (MBA 2016)
Illustration by John Ritter

Early in her first pregnancy, having just launched the venture she cofounded, Lisa Marrone (MBA 2017) wondered how she could take maternity leave while managing a four-person business and her responsibilities to investors. “There was no playbook for that,” recalls Marrone, now an investor at Pivotal Ventures. “I wasn't quite sure who to turn to.”

Amelia Lin (MBA 2016) and Nicole Wee (MBA 2018) faced similar challenges when a pregnant Wee joined Lin in founding Honeycomb, an AI image-generation platform recently acquired by an edtech company. Lin recalls thinking, “Surely it won't be hard to find women who've gone through this before and can share their experiences with us.” It was quite hard, actually—until the pair connected with Marrone, who offered maternity leave advice she received from another entrepreneur during her own pregnancy. The trio soon decided that others would benefit from a supportive community for women founders navigating motherhood and entrepreneurship, and VC Backed Moms was born.

Members of VC Backed Moms and some of their investors attended the group's first gathering in 2022 in San Francisco at Precursor Ventures.
Courtesy photo VC Backed Moms

Established in 2021, the nonprofit is the world's largest community of venture-capital-backed founders at all stages of motherhood, with 500 active members across six continents who have collectively raised $5B in funding to date. It offers educational and networking events, as well as a safe space to discuss the challenges members might encounter.

Wee says the group helps women entrepreneurs understand that they don’t have to choose between work and family—they can have both. She adds that after her first daughter was born, “I felt even more inspired and motivated to show her I can do this. I think it's going to make for a much more equitable future for our kids.”

Besides sharing practical business and parenting advice and connecting members to resources, VC Backed Moms has the potential, Lin says, to play a greater role in society by encouraging more women to pursue entrepreneurship—knowing that roughly 86 percent of women in the US will become mothers. “What if more people believed that they could build the companies of tomorrow—what kinds of problems would those companies solve? You play that out and I think that this is something that can change the world.”

Post a Comment