Wonder Women: Female Entrepreneurship Today with Ita Ekpoudom
Ita Ekpoudom is currently a partner at Gingerbread Capital. Her mission is to engage, educate, and elevate the next generation of successful women business leaders and investors. As the Founder & CEO of Tigress Ventures, an advisory and consulting firm she started in 2014, Ita tapped her considerable network to bring together visionary entrepreneurs with seasoned pro’s to help women scale their businesses and hone their leadership skills. Tigress Ventures hosted a monthly speakers series featuring thought leaders and industry experts, and provided private consultations with individual clients. Ita holds an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, with a certificate in Finance, from Princeton University.
For those who consider female entrepreneurship to be a niche market making gradual progress, Ita Ekpoudom has a counter response: “Women are leaving and starting over 1,200 businesses a day… we’re not going to wait 100 years [for change].” As the founder of Tigress Ventures, a management consulting firm connecting women with the proper expertise and resources to succeed in startup ventures, Ekpoudom was addressing gender inequality in the C-Suite long before the discussion entered the spotlight. The inspiration came to her as she was pursuing the “traditional Princeton path” of becoming a Wall Street analyst, where she witnessed firsthand the lack of females in the business world. For Ekpoudom, the goal of starting Tigress was to “change the narrative of reading the stories that women didn’t want to build big companies, that women weren’t out there investing.” In the past few years, that narrative has shifted dramatically due to the surge in discussions of empowerment precipitated by #MeToo and related movements. As she aptly put it, the “disparate” murmurs about female entrepreneurship have coalesced into a “chorus” that no longer can be ignored.
However, Ekpoudom acknowledges that there are still gaps in the discussion that need to be filled, especially when it comes to making good use of opportunity. While corporations have made a greater effort to take in more women, they have done less to ensure their success once they are in the system. This is part of a greater dilemma that has eluded the mainstream conversation, the issue of the “diversity checkbox” in which companies hire minorities simply to appease the masses and evade further scrutiny from the public. Ekpoudom believes this passivity towards meaningful diversity will not be tolerated in a society built upon the essence of carpe diem: “The U.S. is not a place where quotas will fly.”
In Ekpoudom’s opinion, in order for substantial progress to occur, women must become an investment - not just a token - that companies sincerely care about. For Ekpoudom, this entails breaking down the business culture barriers and encouraging women to speak up and socialize so that their voices are heard and valued: “When we bring people in from underrepresented groups, we have to make sure that getting them in there isn’t enough. If we really want people to come from different areas, we’re going to have to do the work of making sure they understand the language and unspoken cues once they enter the room.” This has become a central focus for Ekpoudom in her current work at Gingerbread Capital, where she guides aspiring female entrepreneurs through the intricacies of the business language to improve their prospects of receiving access to the capital necessary to kickstart their ventures. Her key tips are simple yet powerful: “Speak to somebody in the way they want to be heard if you want to be heard… one story is not fit-all when it comes to pitching a company; you’ll have to have multiple versions that will reflect the audience which you are pitching to.”
While the majority of advice is geared towards what women can or should do to ascend the ranks in the corporate hierarchy, Ekpoudom believes that men also can, and should, be active participants in the conversation. Within her personal experience, she has found that those with daughters have been more empathetic to the cause because they have a personal investment in the future of women. However, Ekpoudom affirms that this is by no means a prerequisite for being respectful towards female executives. In fact, the elimination of the stereotype that a woman at a board meeting serves a subordinate role requires but a simple choice of words: saying nothing at all. “I would hope that more men step up and don’t assume that she is the secretary or junior person in the room and assume that everyone in the room should be there.” The gesture may appear trivial in nature, but Ekpoudom would likely reply that the move would be “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“Women are leaving and starting over 1,200 businesses a day… we’re not going to wait 100 years [for change].”