Part 1: Louise McCarthy at Athena Ventures on holistically supporting female founders

Watch the video episode: https://bit.ly/3M24aCO. Louise McCarthy, Managing Director of Female Entrepreneurship at Evrensel Capital Partners, dives into the valuable work she does to support female founders. Discover how Louise is dedicating her time to improving the dire reality that only 2% of females get investment vs. their male counterparts. 

Transcript

Emma: Greetings listeners, I have an absolutely brilliant guest with me. It's my absolute pleasure to talk with Louise McCarthy, a digital transformation director with decades of experience in C-level roles, largely in finance. Louise is an absolute driving force for women founders as a Managing Director of female entrepreneurship firm Evrensel Capital Partners. On LinkedIn I counted a total of 11 current positions, so it's impossible to capture your day-to-day in just a line or two! 

Louise, you've directed numerous huge complex and successful digital transformations largely for the financial sector. At HMRC, the tax authority in the UK, you were a key contributor in reducing IT costs from over 1 billion to 7 million per annum. At HSBC you created a strategy and you delivered on that transformation which resulted in a 170 million revenue a year. Astounding results. At Tricentis we've been so lucky to have you as a Growth Advisory Board member since back in 2008.  

Towards the end of last year you took up two pretty significant roles to advance the careers of female entrepreneurs in finance and beyond, and when you announced one of these roles at your company Athena Ventures, you shared that a major incentive was knowing just how hard it can be for female founders to get that investment.  

Can you share some of your experience that inspired you to start Athena Ventures, and how you are helping female founders? 

Louise: I'm actually really lucky being at this point of my career. I've been in business now for over 35 years and in that time I've been a lonesome female in many senior roles; I know how difficult it is for females to get their voice heard.  

I've come to the end of my career and I wanted to take a portfolio role rather than being in corporate, and wanted to do something to give something back to females. After having spent quite a bit of time in my role mentoring and supporting females in the last 35 years, I thought: what can I do that's going to give back to females? I realized how difficult it is for incredible females with great ideas to get investment.  

I met this incredible guy, Anthony Moore, the founder of Evrensel Capital Partners who is ex Goldman Sachs, and I was just telling him my story and he said: let's partner together. Together we've created Athena Ventures. It's all about giving back, so it's not a VC or an angel investment; it’s about taking females with the great ideas and making them a success. It's not giving them a bit of money, it's giving them all the money they need, wrapping our arms around them, and providing them with mentorships, support, coaching and everything they need to make their business a success. 

I wake up every morning and it feels like I'm in a big dream. I'm doing something wonderful, incredible, and something I absolutely love, and hopefully it's going to make a difference. Only 2% of females get investment, that means 98% of the money goes to men, and it's just so sad in 2022 that that’s the number. It’s not getting any better; it's getting worse. Last year it was 2.7% and now it's only 2%, so I am so lucky and so proud we have this opportunity to make a difference. 

Emma: That's phenomenal. You have a gut feeling about these things when you know that females are set back—at 2% and decreasing with the likes of the pandemic meaning that male counterparts are further ahead—so it’s great to see you doing this. It’s quite a U-turn for you to go from the more corporate space to like this; not just providing a money channel but the whole support network, emotional and financial. It's quite early on in this venture, and I'm so excited to see the stories that come out of this.   

You've been mentoring supporting females prior to this, for instance as part of the Microsoft startup Growth X program.  

What is it that keeps you coming back and mentoring different women and individuals that you know across the industry? 

Louise: It's my own personal experience.  

I've had 35 years really struggling to actually get my voice heard, so I want to do something to help more females. I'm a facts-based person, and the facts say 63% of females make better CEOs than males, but only 2% get investment. I've seen all the way through my career why it's so hard and how difficult it is for females to get a step on the ladder, so I want to do something to give back to make that happen.  

I've been doing some research and asking the question: why is it that these stats are so bad, but females make such good founders or CEOs? One conclusion many have come to is that females aren't necessarily as confident as males, meaning when females apply for a job, if there's one thing on a job spec they can't do, they won't apply for it. If a man applies for a job, if there's one thing on the spec they can do, they will apply for it. I think it's just about confidence. 

If I can bring together a community of like-minded females that have been in corporate like myself, that have been around the houses for a while at lots of companies—and also bring together groups of females all going through the same thing or have startup companies, provide a network, plus be giving them support—I really believe that we can make a difference. 

On of our top areas is supporting African female founders and that's probably one of the worst areas in the world for investment for females, but they're the ones that have got the ideas. For example, we've got a business in Evrensel Capital Partners focused on wastewater, and it’s the females in Africa who are carrying the water around on their shoulders or that have the great ideas in terms of how technology can improve the world, but they don't get their investment. 

If we can give that lucky break to an incredible female with an incredible idea—give them the investment, mentoring, and support—maybe we can actually change that 2% and make the world a better place. 

Emma:  A lot of what you say is really relatable, and as a woman in the same space it's interesting. You mentioned Africa; I spent some time in Zambia working at a woman-led SME—a PR agency—and it was such an incredible experience. What you say in terms of women maybe being less able to see the horizon and seeing ‘if this isn't something that I have now that I can aspire to be that way’ is worth noting. As you said, providing that camaraderie between women is super important, and the more examples we have of women taking the charge and getting that backing, then those figures should increase. 

It's interesting to note too that you are obviously very data-driven, so you've come away from that corporate world applying this same skillset there. 

Louise: I think what's so good about Athena is that we've got 38 female founders from all over the globe at the moment, at various stages of their lifecycle. We've got WhatsApp groups running and weekly drop-ins, and we have guest speakers. For example, we had Alex, the CEO of Secret Escapes with us last week, which was absolutely incredible.  

Every week we bring people in who are actually telling their stories, both females and males. You hear stories, founders are asking questions, and they're networking with each other and sharing ideas and templates. That's why a lot of people want to come to Athena because you're getting more than just the money. 

Emma: That support network is phenomenal.  

Now, it would be remiss not to talk about your experience with digital transformation. You've had resounding success across the board as a transformation director across a lot of big-name companies: HSBC, Specsavers, Aviva, the list goes on. 

Do you have any [digital transformation] common practices that you've applied to achieve consistently at these places at scale, especially as a woman in this male-dominated field? 

Louise: I've been lucky with 35 years of experience, back to my first ever role when I was 17. I didn't go to university unfortunately; I came from a poor background and I had to push myself through the ranks.  

I was doing digital transformation even 35 years ago. You won't believe it but that was in the early days of SAP when computers first came in! One thing that was in my foundations back then which I still carry in my toolkit when I'm doing a digital transformation, is what I call process mapping. That is looking at the 9-box grid, which is all of the processes across the whole organization—front office, middle office, and back office—taking those and mapping the as-is and to-be processes, and then identifying the pain points in those processes. 

A key thing here is bringing in the process owners; the people that run those processes on a daily basis. Often they’re the people that are at transactional level and never really get their voice heard. They never speak up. They're the ones that ‘just run the processes’, but they are closest to the processes and so are aware of things that are going wrong. 

Once you've identified the pain points, it's key to understand how you would automate those processes, and what technology would you use to automate them. They're the common things that I've always taken along with me. It's about identifying the pain points as a measure of success.  

One more common thing that I've introduced the last few digital transformations is adding an ESG agenda in those processes. What’s the carbon footprint? How is diversity considered? What's the societal impact of what you're doing? So, not just measuring the process improvements in terms of cost savings or revenue generation or KPI improvements, but actually then overlay other ESG factors. That's one thing that I think lots of digital transformations can learn from today, is adding those layers. 

They're the key things in my kit bag, and across 35 years I'm still using them. 

Emma: There we go tried and tested and haven't failed you.