Women Founders are less likely to Apply to Accelerator Programmes: Head of Google Accelerator in India

By: WE Staff | Friday, 5 August 2022

According to a top executive from Google Accelerator India, women founders or co-founders with strong businesses and traction hesitate to apply for accelerator programmes because they believe they are not ready yet, but males simply apply and hope.

Speaking to news partner about the ‘Google for Startups Accelerator – India Women Founders’ programme announced in June this year, Paul Ravindranath, Head of Google Accelerator at Google India said, “Of all the women founders we selected, we went back to them and asked why didn't you apply last year, you are already having great traction, you are ready, and you probably would have been part of the cohort? And the answer is always, I don't think I was ready yet, I was still working on perfecting things. Whereas if you look at the men founders applying for accelerators, they just spray and pray.”

“If you look at the funding deals, in the last three years, only 6 percent of them went to women founders or co-founders. Startups with solo women founder, that number is 1.5 percent. There are multiple other challenges that women face. So we need to be have an equitable opportunity for them to address these issues,” he added.

400 applications were received for the first batch of Google India's three-month startup accelerator programme for female founders as of last week. In the next weeks, the top technology company will reveal the names of the 15-20 startups that made the short list.

The logistics, retail, financial, and healthcare sectors received the majority of applications.

Areas of Concern

For the majority of female entrepreneurs, finding the right staff has been a huge challenge, according to Ravindranath. When they additionally need to encourage individuals to join the company by pitching and selling the idea they are working on, the problem is made worse.

Finding the ideal mentors or even just creating a strong community of other female founders to support one another has proven difficult for women.

“Almost 42 percent of the women founders that we've surveyed, said that there's a lack of access to a mentor. They don't have people they can talk to about things as they're building or their journey…they do find it challenging that they don't have a great mentor ecosystem,” said Ravindranath.

He added, “I don't believe there are many strong women founder ecosystems and communities out there. We want to create a women founder community and an ecosystem that is there for one another. There should be a lot of peer mentoring, peer relationships, and generally creating a safe space for them to kind of freely get all their doubts answered, or just go and check in with a peer or co-founder or find your next CEO or CTO.”