Ladies First: Women Learn About Early-Stage Investing at Dingman Center

Currently, only 25 percent of angel investors in the United States are women. The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business is hoping to help change that. As part of its ongoing initiative to get more women involved in entrepreneurship, the Dingman Center hosted “Ladies First: Becoming a Savvy Startup Investor” with sponsor Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice on Friday, March 10, 2017, at the Smith School as part Smith Women’s Month.

The workshop was designed to teach women about early-stage investing. This inaugural workshop brought together UMD alumni (mostly graduates of the Smith School), local professionals and graduate students and was so popular that it “sold out” and had a waitlist.

Attendees learned how to evaluate startup companies and then honed their new skills by hearing pitches from local female entrepreneurs and evaluating those investment opportunities. Pam Rothenberg, office managing partner of the Washington, D.C., office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and head of the firm’s Impact Practice, was the event’s keynote speaker. Participants then heard from Elana Fine, executive director of the Dingman Center, for a session called the “6Ws of Angel Investing.”

Next was a panel—led by Liz Sara, chair of the Dingman Center Board of Advisors—on company evaluation that featured women angel investors, Melissa Bradley, Kathryn Stewart and Shannon Hynds. Then participants heard investment pitches from local female founders Shizu Okusa (Jrink juice company), Lily Yeh (Little Loving Hands kids craft kits to support a cause), and UMD alumna Amy Nichols (bThere, a virtual reality and 360-video platform). The event concluded with a networking happy hour.

The Dingman Center launched the Ladies First initiative in fall 2016 as a commitment to increase the number of women involved in entrepreneurship at UMD. The center held several student-focused events in the fall to inspire young women to think of themselves as entrepreneurs and solve problems they care about. This spring, as part of Women’s Month at Smith, the center expanded the imitative to alumni and other local professionals with this skill-building workshop.

“Drawing on our team’s expertise from our work with the Dingman Center Angels investing network, we focused the workshop on the investing side of the startup ecosystem, another area where women are underrepresented,” said Sara Herald, associate director for Social Entrepreneurship at the Dingman Center and lead of the Ladies First initiative. “Our goal was to spark an interest in angel investing among alumni and other professional women in the region and equip them with the knowledge of how to get started.”

The event sponsor, the Washington, D.C., office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, is committed to helping local entrepreneurs grow their companies and a key ally in the Dingman Center’s efforts to address the gender imbalance in the local entrepreneurship ecosystem. Other departments that helped the event succeed include the Office of Smith Events, Alumni Relations, and the Office of Diversity Initiatives.

A full list of Smith Women’s Month events is online at go.umd.edu/womensmonth.