We’re incredibly proud to see Alberts investment manager, Lisa Fedorenko, named on Fortune’s 9th annual Change the World list, which recognises companies making a positive impact across key areas of measurable social impact, business results, degree of innovation, and corporate integration.
Lisa is being acknowledged alongside Scale Investors’ co-CEO, Samar McHeileh, and Giant Leap partner, Rachel Yang, for collaboratively spearheading Equity Clear, a 2022 initiative to create a standard of reporting on gender across deal flow among portfolio companies, with the aim of closing the gender parity gap in the Australian VC industry.
“I’m so proud of this initiative,” Lisa said of taking the first step towards data disclosure on female-led startup investment and screening. It is a crucial step, with reports that just 0.7% of funding secured by startups went to solely women-founded companies in FY22, despite 22% of startups being founded by women.
“Samar and I realised that so many of us were having the same conversations about improving transparency on equality in the VC industry. These conversations led to a roundtable of a dozen firms committed to raising the bar and improving the data gap,” Lisa said. “Where I’ve landed is you can’t change what you don’t measure.”
Alberts is proud to be promoting transparency on gender equality for founders. With over half the Alberts Impact Ventures portfolio companies having at least one female founder, including Baymatob, AirRobe, Conserving Beauty, Verve Super, Pivot, Samphire Neuroscience and RapidAIM, we recognise the opportunity to help level the playing field by investing our capital to create and support change.
“We’re proud to be reimagining and supporting a more equitable playing field,” Lisa said, noting nearly 50 VC firms have signed on to their initiative since the initial 12 – including Alberts – committing to publicly disclose data on how many female-led businesses they screened, vetted and, ultimately, funded. “I’m so pleased with how quickly the Australian VC landscape has gotten on board with standardising how we’re reporting seeing gender in the funnel,” Lisa added.
“Transparency is a known tool for equality … A united industry with clear gender reporting is a great step forward for equality in venture capital in Australia. More diverse founders mean more diversity of thought, more diverse problems being solved, and is correlated with higher commercial returns.”
