Woman Makes Waves in the C-Suite
I beamed with a stupid grin on my face while holding the giant cardboard check for $1,500. It was the first startup competition I had won for our seaweed farming business idea. I would go on to win three more (and counting) in the coming years.
Wow, I thought. I do have what it takes to start my own business.
But as I began to push my idea forward, two experiences brought my enthusiasm to an abrupt end:
- First, I entered an all-male conference room where every single person spoke down to me and my female partner as if we knew nothing about our own field. We had more experience than most in the room.
- Then, I took a Corporate Finance course and learned that women-led startups received just 2.2% of venture capital funding in 2021. (Sure there are other ways to fund a business, but venture capital shapes our economy and where that money goes matters.)
“Well shit,” I muttered. A crashing storm of doubt blew over me. I started telling myself how stupid I was to think I could actually be an entrepreneur, how I don’t belong in these spaces.
While I was drowning in despair, a woman named Briana Warner pulled me back to shore.
“You hear a lot about women having a difficult time getting funding,” Warner said. “You can go into it thinking it will be hard, but tell yourself ‘I’ll just kick ass anyway.’”
Briana Warner is the CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms. I learned about her and her New England-based company while I was researching for my own seaweed startup in Belize. In just a few short years, Briana took Atlantic Sea Farms from the first commercially viable seaweed farm in the country to a retail product company that is winning food industry awards.
Her 2022 kelp season harvested well over 1 million pounds of kelp, representing a 3,000+% growth since August 2018 when the company brought on Briana as the new CEO.
“We need to be looking not just at our bottom line next year, but also about what this industry could do for our company, our coast, and consumers ten or twenty years down the line,” Briana told her female-led investing firm. “You get that forethought with women at the table.”
Women at the table are significantly better financial investments too. For every dollar of funding, women-led startups generated 78 cents, while male-founded startups generated less than half that—just 31 cents.
After hearing Briana’s story, I entered another startup competition and attended Boston Startup Week to build on my idea. Her success and grit has inspired me to continue to fight for what I believe in, even when the odds are stacked against me as a woman. If Briana can do it, why can't you or I?
You can learn more about how to support women-led businesses here. And bolster Briana’s incredible work by buying yourself some sea-chi, kelp-based kimchi, or other seaweed snacks from Atlantic Sea Farms.
