How Women Founders Would Change VC

Morning Report: Here’s what dozens of women would do if they could change the venture world for founders.

Out today is a survey of 94 women founders and investors, detailing how the group would “address the challenging gender dynamics in the founder-VC relationship.” The data comes after the technology world has been rocked by successive sexual harassment scandals, where the perpetrators were often venture capitalists.

Positive change, and quickly, is needed.

Which is why the survey’s data — compiled by the startup Baloonr, a tool that helps groups source information from themselves, sans bias — seemed worth our time.

The following chart of responses details the group’s answer from the question we highlighted above, broken down by percentages:

The survey grouped given answers into the above categories so that we can better parse. Notably, two answers picked up over 55 percent: “Feedback & Community,” and “Leadership Roles For Women,” which the report goes on to detail.

For the first category, responses advocated that venture groups hire a “community manager” who could speak regularly with founders “at every stage of the engagement.”

And, for the latter set of answers, the shared response argued that limited partners, the people that provide capital to venture investors, “are sexists too” and that it would help to “invest in female VC fund managers so that women founders don’t have to go to male VCs only.”

What I take from the above is that there is no shortage of ideas from women about how to change the venture-founder setup to make it fairer. And that means that if the industry doesn’t improve, it will have no excuse.

From the Crunchbase Daily:

ForeScout IPO raises $116M for IoT

• ForeScout Technologies, an Internet of Things security technology provider, priced shares for its initial public offering at $22 each, the top of the proposed range. The IPO raised about $116 million for the unprofitable, San Jose-based company… Meanwhile, in other IPO news, cybersecurity software provider Zscaler has also confidentially filed for an offering, TechCrunch reports.

VC backing for legal tech falls

• VCs have long been drawn to startups aiming to modernize the practice of law, putting $1.5 billion into over 600 legal tech deals since 2010. Yet investment in the space hit a hard peak in 2015, with both deal counts and investment totals on the decline since, according to a Crunchase News analysis.

Carousell closes big Series C

• Carousell, which operates a mobile listing service for secondhand goods, has raised up to $80 million in a Series C funding round, according to media reports. The five-year-old, Singapore-based company closed a $35 million Series B round a little over a year ago.