Designing Women
Could 2018 be a watershed for women entrepreneurs? In July, Tina Sharkey, cofounder and CEO of direct-to-consumer company Brandless, announced a $240 million Series C funding round—an apparently unprecedented sum for a woman-led private company. A few days later, Aileen Lee’s Cowboy Ventures said it raised $95 million to invest in tech startups. In this month’s cover story, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton reveals that by year’s end her fund will write $1 million checks to two companies founded by black women. There’s still much work to do, of course. As Melinda Gates notes in an essay (page 42), women founders receive just 2% of venture capital dollars. And according to a new survey conducted by Fast Company and our colleagues at Inc., running one’s own company doesn’t insulate women from…