Howard Stevenson’s simplest description of entrepreneurship is that he can handle capital with the simplest principles. But, as Stevenson tells us if anyone has experience with the uncontrollable, it’s entrepreneurs.
Nobody controlled anything back in 2020. The uncontrollable has exploded at a global level and filtered down to the insignificant specifics of everyday life, whether it’s a pandemic, government-mandated company shutdowns, or unheard-of forest fires.
Entrepreneurs continue to do what they do best amid the challenges and that is to improvise, adapt, and make something out of nothing.
How to do just that is demonstrated by the women on Inc.’s annual Female Founders 100 list. These are the women whose names keep reappearing, as our team reports on startups and
small businesses throughout the year. In entrepreneurship, they are the most inspiring, the most innovative, and the most tenacious role models, and thus, the ones we are most willing to celebrate.
And like Stevenson, a lot of teaching is done by these effective entrepreneurs. In reality, in five main areas, we asked them to give us their best advice for business building from vetting the idea, finding the people and financing, winning customers, and developing a community.
The following are some of the top female entrepreneurs around the world.
Rebekah Neumann – co-founder of WeWork and The We Company
The truth is that every state in the U.S. is host to successful companies, even if states such as California and New York receive the most coverage for being hubs of top startups.
Using Crunchbase data, by funding in all 50 states (plus Washington, D.C.), Business Financing assembled a list of the top female founders. Despite data showing that female founders surpass male founders, they face criticism when it comes to raising funds.
In New York state, Rebekah Neumann, co-founder of WeWork and The We Company, is the founder who raised $19.5 billion in funding, amid a failed IPO and bizarre stories that forced her and husband Adam Neumann to step down from their public-facing WeWork positions last year. Kathryn Petralia of Georgia, whose fintech firm Kabbage has raised $2.5 billion from investors.
Iman Abuzeid – Co Founder and CEO of Incredible Health
COVID-19 may not have been seen coming by Iman Abuzeid, but she had found an inefficiency in nurse staffing. Trained as a doctor with a Wharton MBA, she launched Amazing Health in 2017 to make it three to four times easier to hire nurses, on average for just 15 days. The platform vets nurses, hospitals pay for subscriptions, and the best matches for each job are found by algorithms. Incredible Health continues to search for bias, a phenomenon that has plagued Abuzeid, who is Sudanese and grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Maha Haq – Founder of Cannaclub
It changed her life forever when Maha Haq’s mother caught her smoking weed as a child. “Haq says, “My mom’s a clinical researcher, an educator, so she told me I had to defend why I was smoking. She found her passion as she studied her report. I think my mother saw in me a sign of a commitment to science.” Haq has since finished her undergraduate studies at UCLA and is currently working on her master’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences with a focus on medical cannabis.” She also heads Cannaclub, a student group that she founded at UCLA that now has branches nationally spanning 11 campuses. Education, activism, and opportunity are the priority of the organization. “My goal is to nurture the next generation of space leaders,” she says. For all Cannaclub branches, she is now in the process of establishing a governing body that will assist campuses to connect and exchange resources. “We can make a difference and transform this into a better company.”
Cassie Nielsen – Cofounder and executive director of Women on Boards Project, Talent partner of VMG Partners
Calls have reached a fever pitch for various company boards, which is why the Women on Boards Initiative was launched earlier this year by Cassie Nielsen, a private equity executive, and other female leaders in PE and consumer goods. The purpose of the non-profit is to partner with consumer firms to position women on their boards. “70 to 80 percent of household purchasing decisions are driven by women,” Nielsen says. “Case studies demonstrate that goods are not thoughtfully produced when women are not in the room.
Jennifer Campbell- Cofounder of Tagomi
Record numbers of people are looking at alternative investments as the stock market has been rocked by 2020. “Recently, there has been so much cash printing,” says Jennifer Campbell, co-founder of the crypto trading business Tagomi, which was launched in 2018. We had clients interested in the gold thesis. There is a small supply of gold, so they think it might be a safe bet to hedge against.,Yet Bitcoin has been applied to a related thesis. That’s the audience Tagomi’s model is intended for, up to 2 million for individuals and organizations that make