The stats were pretty startling. Sitting in the audience at the Amazon Women’s Entrepreneurship Conference in 2016, seventh grader Ariel Beck listened to her mom—Bluemercury CEO and co-founder, Marla Beck—rattle off numbers about female entrepreneurship from the stage.
“My whole life I’ve been surrounded by female entrepreneurs and I never really considered how female leadership would affect me,” says Ariel—until her mom took her to that Seattle conference. “[My mom] was sharing all these numbers about female leadership and they were horrible. She said that only 5% of partners at venture capital firms are women. That means when someone is trying to raise money for their great idea, most likely they’re asking men for money. And then she said in 2017, only 2% of venture capital money went to women, meaning that 98% of all funding went to men.”
Those numbers hit a nerve for Ariel and she returned to the DC region determined to do something.
“I started by inviting female entrepreneurs to come to talk to my friends and I, and inspire girls my age,” recalls the Sidwell Friends student, who will be a junior in the fall. “When I was in seventh grade, we invited our first speaker, Sarah Happ, to speak to a group of girls from different schools, and that was basically the beginning of Girls Who Start.”
What started as a small gathering with a beauty entrepreneur—Sarah Happ is the founder of an eponymous line of lip scrubs—this past April culminated in the organization’s inaugural summit at Halcyon House in Georgetown, featuring a powerhouse lineup of female leaders and entrepreneurs—including keynote speaker, Elle Macpherson.
The Girls Who Start mission, says Ariel, “is to inspire girls to be entrepreneurs. We do this by creating events that showcase female entrepreneurs and leaders. We create workshops to teach girls how to come up with ideas, how to pitch, how to take an idea and make it into a reality.”
The April conference attracted 200 middle school and high school girls to listen to the inspiring stories of Macpherson, as well as young entrepreneurs like Claire Sliney, a still-in-college Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker; Lauren and Carrie Dunne, the mother-daughter duo behind the local nail salon Varnish Lane; and Elizabeth Galbut, founding partner of Sogal Ventures and a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree.
While the conference was the fledgling organization’s largest event to date, Ariel says the local chapters—there are seven in DC and Maryland so far and it has its sights set on adding Northern Virginia chapters—are a great opportunity to inspire the next generation of leaders.
Her advice for young entrepreneurs just starting out? It mirrors the organization’s name. “Just start,” she advises. “With Girls Who Start, we started with one event in seventh grade and only 10 girls came … and each event got slightly bigger until we had the summit this year with over 200 girls. You start and you can build and build until you have something huge. We started in seventh grade and now we’re going into junior year with something bigger than we could have imagined.”
This post originally appeared in our August 2019 print issue. For more profiles on change-makers in the Northern Virginia region, subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
