{"id":43960,"date":"2023-10-20T15:32:24","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/rebekah-campbell-gets-frank-on-diversity-in-startups\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:32:24","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:32:24","slug":"rebekah-campbell-gets-frank-on-diversity-in-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/rebekah-campbell-gets-frank-on-diversity-in-startups\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebekah Campbell gets frank on diversity in startups"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rebekah<\/div>\n

There’s an elephant in the Australian startup ecosystem that needs to be acknowledged, serial entrepreneur Rebekah Campbell says.<\/p>\n

Of the 122 various investors in Campbell’s startup, Hey You<\/a>, she says not one is a woman.<\/p>\n

And when she pitched to about 150 investors to try to secure a $5 million capital raise, only one was a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really need to start addressing the lack of female investors,\u201d Campbell tells StartupSmart.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThese are the people that are making the decisions about which people and ideas get backed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diversity in this part of the startup ecosystem is necessary because its effects trickle out to other areas, she says.<\/p>\n

With investors playing long-term strategic roles in startups as advisers and mentors, she wants more women leaders for up-and-coming female founders to reach out to.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, I have managed to get a couple of really great female mentors but they took me a long time to find,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The challenge of leading non-diverse teams<\/h3>\n

Campbell says her efforts to integrate gender diversity in her tech team has been hard because of a lack of women in STEM education.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to hire female engineers in Australia,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Campbell even attended a university directly to find female engineers and found that from a class of 200 there were only two.<\/p>\n

Hey You now has a team of 16 engineers, but none are women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s not through lack of trying, we\u2019ve tried really hard to recruit female engineers,\u201d Campbell says.<\/p>\n

Leading a team of male engineers as a woman with relatively limited experience in coding and engineering has had its own consequential challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that you\u2019re female probably exasperates the obviousness that you\u2019re not experienced,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Having worked side by side with male leaders who share the same experience as she does, Campbell feels that they get away with it because they can relate better with the male-dominated team.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy style is always going to be different, I think,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cPartially, that\u2019s gender; partially, it\u2019s me.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a startup founder Campbell says she finds there are certain social nuances that make it uniquely challenging for her as a woman.<\/p>\n

Many times she says she has been weary of being perceived as a \u201cbitch\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always conscious of whether I\u2019m coming across as being aggressive whereas I think if I was a man, I probably wouldn\u2019t be as conscious of that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on her journey<\/h3>\n

As most entrepreneurs do when starting out, Campbell learned a lot through trial and failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was not a tech founder,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Despite having a physics background and technical thinking, she didn\u2019t know how to write code or build a strong engineering team.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made lots of mistakes and I hired the wrong people,\u201d Campbell says.<\/p>\n

She believes making mistakes early on when there is time for it can be incredibly useful and productive.<\/p>\n

\u201cAge is not a barrier and experience is certainly not a barrier,\u201d Campbell says.<\/p>\n

After recently closing a $5 million funding round led by Westpac<\/a> and seeing Hey You continually grow month-on-month, Campbell has created a new addition to her list of achievements – she has welcomed a baby girl into the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor International Women\u2019s Day, I\u2019ll be looking after my young, one week old daughter,” she says.<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em> <\/em>Facebook,<\/em> <\/em>Twitter,<\/em> <\/em>LinkedIn<\/em> <\/em>and<\/em> <\/em>Soundcloud.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an elephant in the Australian startup ecosystem that needs to be acknowledged, serial entrepreneur Rebekah Campbell says. Of the 122<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}