“Pipeline Angels made it a more robust offering than if it were just me investing alone in Pocket Palette,” said the Dallas-based Taylor, who works as a marketing executive by day.
In addition to investment dollars for entrepreneurs, Pipeline Angels offers mentoring, guidance, advice and legal services to newly minted angel investors like Taylor.
“I'm a novice in the angel investing world, so there’s been late night phone calls to help me get up to speed as well as tons of resources to ensure that I can then in turn support the entrepreneurs that I would like to invest in,” Taylor said.
Even when women, women of color and femme entrepreneurs do manage to establish a financial foundation with ground level capital strong enough to arrive at the first round, they often don't secure as much first-round funding as their white male counterparts.
“It's where we see the biggest gap,” says Taylor. “Pipeline Angels provides funding, introductions and advocacy and serves as a badge of honor that communicates to other investors that this woman or femme entrepreneur is a serious candidate for the first and second round of funding.”
In addition to initial start-up costs used for product, overhead or patents, the challenges specific to women and femmes of all colors include a lack of mentorship in how to run a business and little knowledge of branding and marketing.
“They often don’t know when it's time to start hiring people or how much to pay employees,” Taylor says. “It's a question of understanding entrepreneurship, for example, and how do you stand out in a saturated market?”
Women financial advisors located in Heartland cities interested in supplementing their advisory practice with angel investor training are encouraged to apply for Pipeline Angels’ upcoming finance and investing boot camp.