Robyn Exton: Building dating apps for queer women

We talk about Robyn's journey as a startup founder, first starting her business in the UK and moving the company to the United States to participate in YCombinator. She also talks about how women can get more support in the startup community and provides valuable advice to female founders launching a startup.

Greg Miaskiewicz: How can women get more support in the startup community? How can we have VCs investing more of their dollars into female led companies, building products, targeting a female audience?

Robyn Exton: Yeah. I think a really big shift does come from having more women in the venture community itself. I actually often found it a harder conversation with women. And at the time I was quite judgmental about it and I didn't really understand what was happening.

My read on it now is that there, especially then, there were so few women with money and putting money in, almost like the pressure and the expectation of what to do with that money was so much greater that there were just lower odds of closing money from a female VC because they had a much more intense lens on them and just much higher pressure on the decisions that they were making.

So it wasn't necessarily that it was about me. It was just, they had much greater expectations. So I think level one is more capital being distributed by women takes that pressure off to quite the same extent. It means there's more sources of funding from different people that have the bandwidth to either take the riskier ones or they do understand, but they've got to sell into partnership and they have the conviction to be able to do that.

That's not just another enterprise, SAS product, that kind of makes sense because that's what everyone else would've said yes to anyway.