How the GUILD is pivoting their startup in times of global trends and COVID-19
By: The Guild
Tags: Startup Lessons, Community, Female Founders, Startup, Women In Business

How the GUILD is pivoting their startup in times of global trends and COVID-19

The GUILD is a community for female entrepreneurs, investors, innovators and leaders to connect and collaborate on new ideas and business ventures.

In later 2016 just after the US election — that did not yield the results female leaders had hoped for — the San Francisco tech startup launched its services at a brand-new WeWork co-working location in San Francisco’s hip SOMA district surrounded by companies like Twitter, Zendesk and Uber.

GUILD founder Anne Cocquyt observed that “we couldn’t find events where I saw myself represented, a “founder” was associated with a white guy; something was missing in the male-dominated startup world”. She had co-founded and sold a small consumer product startup by that time and was deeply involved in Silicon Valleys startup ecosystem through her corporate innovation role at one of the biggest biotech companies.

“We have to be the change we want to see” she concluded when she left her corporate job and shifted her focus from digital health startups to community building and started experimenting with novel techniques and match-making algorithms to support female entrepreneurs build stronger professional networks.

First results were promising and soon she secured a deal to put a round of angel investment to work. From then on Anne focused on leading a tech team and getting the word out about the new service — mainly through in-person networking events in the Bay Area.

The user base grew fast, the company pivoted a few times but in 2019 Anne saw an interesting trend: VC firms were starting to focus investments outside of Silicon Valley, Asia received unprecedented amounts of investment dollars and also other hubs in Europe started raising first female focused funds.

“That’s when I decided to add a layer to the GUILD and offer a community platform that connects the players in all these ecosystems with each other. We started to recruit ambassadors in these regions. Of course our core offering of curated 1:1 introductions still remains, however we understand that our ladies need more than one new connection each week. That’s why we decided to move to a new community engagement platform and offer very targeted services and products and open local chapters in Asia and Europe.”

This global trend presented as an opportunity for the GUILD, the business model and its tech products. “It forced us to think outside the box”, says Anne, “we started connecting our members not just at the local coffee shop, but offered virtual connections and sorted through time zone differences and complicated rules matrixes to understand which times we should suggest for our members to connect when it’s 9am in San Francisco and 6pm in London.”

The GUILD going global and connecting multiple innovation hubs as a result of global trends

The startup also had to go back to the drawing board and follow its own credo of asking its new users what was most important to them.

Webinars with thought leaders from innovation hubs, practical advice and connecting in more intimate settings with more than two people but not more than 20 was another priority for the users.

The team also learnt about accelerator programs and realized that many were not built by women or for women and that the typical accelerator program accepted 80% male-founded startup teams at a stage when startups already showed some traction. While many didn’t charge any fee, they took large junks of equity from the startups. The question remained where to gain entrepreneurship skills before getting to prototype stage and how to do this for women who are bound to one geography due to family or a job they couldn’t leave.

“A big step in the right direction was our recent launch of an online academy- it’s a 12-week program that guides female entrepreneurs from all over the world through the steps to launch a successful business before investing a lot of time and money. All from the comfort of your own living room or home office. We ensure that the entrepreneurs are building something users actually want,” says Anne.

That program just launched its second cohort amidst COVID-19 quarantine all over the world. “Scholarship applications skyrocketed” says Anne. But she decided to fund a large portion in order to keep supporting women build businesses. “In crisis like these, the underrepresented get hit the hardest and we will see the negative effects years from now if we don’t continue the support now. Changing the odds for female entrepreneurs is a long-term effort. We can’t stop in the face of adversity”.

This was the general attitude when COVID-19 hit. Anne recalls that she was meant to go to Germany to teach a startup diversity workshop at the German Accelerator Alumni Summit and closely monitored news from Italy and Europe in late February early March.

“As an entrepreneur you always have to be on the outlook for threads or opportunities, if you are not vigilant, a new trend or the competition will come out of seemingly nowhere and swoop you away or you miss a pivot that could propel you forward. There is very little margin for error as you are operating with such small budgets as a startup.”

At the same time, “An entrepreneur does more than anyone thinks possible, with less than anyone thinks possible,” as a famous investor in Silicon Valley — John Doerr — remarks.

When Anne realized that this pandemic (weeks before it was called a pandemic) was a thread to the GUILD’s business model of in-person events, she called her network of advisors and got a meeting on calendar for March 19th to discuss the possibilities for the GUILD without in-person events for the next 12 months at a minimum.

Anne recalls: “Some people said to me that I was crazy when I started working from home on February 26th. I remember vividly how I turned around when I set my foot on the Muni and decided I didn’t want to take the risk any longer to be on public transportation. That was the day when I started thinking about the pieces in my business that still made sense and what I should focus on to keep my business alive.”

Reconnecting with the WHY and the purpose of the startup was a big eye opening lesson — Anne didn’t build her company and the community for years to let it die. Navigating ups and downs of finding product market fit, hiring teams, letting teams go, and pivoting had already taught her to steer the ship through high seas.

“I believe a lot of entrepreneurs have a pretty well trained muscle when it comes to ambiguity and placing bets on the future and that’s exactly what is asked of us now — look ahead, place your bets, don’t forget to ask your customer what they want and then steer the course.”

The global economic impact of COVID-19 is still to be determined, however Anne believes it will be a massive global correction and that correction will also make space for good companies to grow and defend market share.