A new business incubator is aiming to address the tech sector's long-standing diversity problem.
The Electrify Accelerator, founded by Marian Johnson, bills itself as New Zealand's first women-only business accelerator.
Housed within Johnson's "Ministry of Awesome" - an innovation space in Christchurch that houses around 20 early-stage companies - Electrify Accelerator is offering a 12-week programme for women-founded or women-led startups.
A 12-month bootcamp will kick off on May 9. The deadline for applications is April 3. The programme promises mentorship, networking, plus the chance to pitch at a demo day.
Johnson has recruited a number of financial backers and partners for the new accelerator, including Australasia's largest venture capital firm, Blackbird Ventures - which is itself doing its bit to break the glass ceiling with Tesla's Sydney-based chairwoman, Robyn Denholm, onboard as an operating partner and an NZ operation run by general partner Samantha Wong.
Six other venture capital firms, including GD1, Lance Wiggs' Punakaiki Fund, Sir Stephen Tindal's K1W1 and the Crown-backed venture capital agency NZ Growth Capital Partners (NZGCP).
Other backers include AWS, MYOB and the council-funded ChristchurchNZ.
Johnson says getting the venture capital firms onboard first was a key part of her plan. She wanted them in on the action early, not coming cold to Electrify Accelerator participants as they enter the Dragons' Den environment of the demo day, planned for August. She says that's all the better to foster the next Janine Grainger (the Auckland-based founder of Easy Crypto) or Whitney Wolfe Herd (the US founder of dating app Bumble, who recently became a billionaire).
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Advertise with NZME.An MBIE-backed report released in July last year said, "The tech industry suffers from a significant diversity problem, with low numbers of women and atrocious stats on Māori and Pasifika involvement".
It also said the industry was doing little to encourage those with physical or other disabilities. It said those who fall into one of these groups - and there are those who cut across two or all three - often find the industry intimidating.
The report said the lack of diversity was a poor showing in itself and exacerbated a tech skills shortage that was already being intensified by border restrictions.
Immediate wins needed
Last month, Digital Economy and Communications Minister David Clark released a strategy document called the Digital Technologies Draft Industry Transformation Plan 2022-2032.
The document has been criticised for being long on describing well-known problems, and short on specific action plans to address them.
In terms of gender diversity, one of Electrify Accelerator's backers noted the 64-page document only uses the word "women" five times and "female" only once - and that's in the context of statistics that confirm the lousy status quo. Specifically, girls account for only 39 per cent of those taking technology at NCEA level at school (which itself was only a third of students) and women only make up 27 per cent of the tech sector workforce. Only 4 per cent of the IT workforce is Maori and only 2.9 per cent Pacific peoples.
While the poor representation of women in startups is well documented, Johnson says efforts to bring about genuine change have, until now, been too limited.
She supports the Government's broad aim to top up the funnel, over the next decade, with various initiatives to get more girls engaged in stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects at school. But she also sees a role for the private sector to hustle things along.
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Advertise with NZME."Yes, the quality of our stem educational offering and lack of participation in stem by girls and young women is an important factor for why we're not seeing them coming through in volume to startup and innovation," she says.
"But it is also important for us to look for more immediate wins."
In everybody's interest
"Electrify Accelerator is a chance to build community, mentorship, and a clearer path toward success for Aotearoa's wahine founders. Being a startup founder is hard. Doing it in isolation is impossible," Johnson says.
New NZGCP chief executive Rob Everett says the support for Electrify Accelerator from venture capital firms illustrates how seriously the industry is about changing things up.
"As investors we're seeing far too few women-led startups in a position to take on investment for scale. Central to that problem is the lack of support for the pipeline of up and coming startup talent," Everett says.
"It's promising that so many different firms are willing to put competition aside for the collective good of our industry's future. It's in everyone's best interests to see more women building startups, so we need to do something about it."
