There is something dark brewing in the startup community. I want to talk about it openly because I think staying silent has become part of the problem.

Every week I sit across from founders in our community, in coffee shops, at events, on calls after our open mics. And in the last few months especially, a pattern has been surfacing in the conversations I'm having that I don't think I can keep to myself any longer. It's not new. It's not surprising to most female founders reading this. But it's getting worse, not better, and the same handful of stories keep appearing in different founders' mouths.

I want to write about it carefully. I'm not naming anyone. I'm not sharing details that could identify anyone. What I want to do is talk about the structure of the problem, share what the data actually says, share something of my own experience, and point people towards the organisations that actually exist to help.

Because the culture of silence is the thing that keeps this alive.

See below to continue…

£10,000 Patent Funding for UK Startups

Are you developing something innovative? If your business has patentable technology or products, funding shouldn't be the reason you delay protecting it.

SH&P's Pitch & Protect competition gives one innovative business £10,000 in patent funding to help secure its intellectual property.

Strong IP can help attract investment, strengthen your competitive position and support long-term growth.

Applications close Friday 24 July, so don't miss your opportunity.

Find out more and apply today on the SH&P website.

Apply here

The founders who close rounds fastest aren't just the ones with the best pitch; they're the ones who show up prepared. Carta Launch gives early-stage founders a clean, investor-ready cap table for free, so when the conversation gets serious, you're already serious. 

Manage equity, issue shares, and track dilution, then instantly share it with a built-in data room that gives investors exactly what they need, exactly when they ask.

The best time to get your cap table right is before you need to.

Learn more about Carta Launch and get started for free.

Continue…

The startup ecosystem sits on a specific kind of power imbalance. On one side you have founders, mostly early in their careers, often stretched thin, often building something they've bet everything on. On the other side you have investors, controlling the money, the introductions, the reputation channels, and effectively the future of every business that walks into their office.

There's a saying I've heard repeated in different forms: if you want to see who someone really is, give them money and power. Most people in the investor community are decent, thoughtful, and hold themselves to a high standard. But the ones who don't - the ones who use that power imbalance for their own gratification, or worse - have historically operated in an environment where nobody talks, nobody reports, and nothing changes.

The reason nobody talks is not mysterious. Founders are terrified of being blacklisted. Female founders in particular are terrified of being seen as "difficult," of losing pipeline access, of being quietly frozen out of the small circles that actually decide who gets funded. And that fear is real. It is genuinely dangerous to your career to speak up, and everyone in the ecosystem knows it.

That's how you get an entire industry in which almost everyone has heard something, but almost no one has said anything.

I want to be really clear about the scale of this because I think a lot of people, particularly outside female founder circles, underestimate it.

Y Combinator, in partnership with a non-profit called Callisto, surveyed 88 of their female founders in 2018 about their experiences with angel and VC investors. The results:

That was YC's own founder network. Not a random sample. Not internet respondents. Portfolio founders of one of the world's most well-resourced accelerators, saying that a fifth of them had experienced coercion, harassment, or assault from the very people whose job it was to back them.

A larger Women Who Tech survey of over 1,000 tech founders and employees found that 44% of female founders reported having been harassed in the tech industry, and 40% of those said the harassment came specifically from an investor - with many describing being explicitly propositioned for sex in exchange for funding.

In the UK the picture is not better. A 2023 Independent poll of female entrepreneurs found that 85% had either "definitely or probably" experienced sexism during their business journey, and two thirds had "certainly" been subjected to sexist behaviour. And this is against a backdrop where all-female founder teams still receive around 1-2% of UK VC deal flow, meaning the power imbalance in the room is stark before anyone has said a word.

These aren't fringe numbers. They describe an industry-wide pattern.

I think a lot of people in the UK startup community heard about #MeToo when it broke in the US and quietly assumed it was an American problem. Hollywood. Silicon Valley. Something happening somewhere else, to someone else, in a culture more extreme than ours.

I want to say clearly: it happens here. It happens a lot.

Over the last few years running Rare Founders, I have heard variations of the same stories more times than I can count. Investors making inappropriate comments to female founders in professional settings. Founders finding their drinks tampered with at events. Being touched in that specific "grey zone" way where the victim has to decide in real time whether to make a scene, embarrass the investor, and possibly damage their fundraise, or to grit their teeth and pretend it didn't happen. Being propositioned by an investor after a professional interaction, in ways that make the transactional expectation unmistakably clear.

I have heard all of these stories. Not once. Repeatedly. From different founders. Sometimes involving overlapping profiles of perpetrator, which is when a pattern stops being anecdote and starts being a warning sign for an ecosystem.

I want to share this carefully, because I think one of the reasons more people don't speak up is because those of us with platforms don't lead by example.

Over the years of running events in this community, I have personally been touched inappropriately, on more than one occasion, by a founder attending them. At the time I made the same calculation most women in these situations make. I chose not to make a scene, not to escalate, not to risk creating a story that would follow me around instead of him. I told a few close people. I didn't report it. I didn't name him. And I have since regretted that silence, because it was the same silence that lets this behaviour flourish.

Something similar happened to a female volunteer at one of our events, when a founder attending decided to "help" her with an intimate part of her clothing without being asked. It happened openly enough that it was witnessed. Again, at the time, we handled it internally and did not report.

I am not sharing this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I am sharing it because I want other women in this community to know that if you have stayed quiet about something, you are not alone, you are not weak, and the silence is not your fault. It is the entirely rational response to an industry that has spent decades punishing the people who speak up more harshly than the people who do the harm.

I am not writing this to name individuals. That is not what this piece is for, and it is not something I would ever do in a public post without the direct consent, involvement, and legal support of the people who've experienced the specific incidents. Public naming without that scaffolding almost always ends up hurting the survivor more than the perpetrator, and I refuse to be part of that pattern.

But I do want to say this openly to the small number of people in this ecosystem who know exactly who they are and what they've been doing: you are not as untouchable as you think you are. The industry has changed. The women you've dismissed as too junior, too scared, or too dependent on your goodwill to speak have been talking to each other for years. They know each other's stories. They compare notes. And every incident you think you got away with is sitting in someone's memory, waiting for the moment the culture shifts enough to make speaking safe.

That moment is coming faster than you think.

If you have been harassed, coerced, or assaulted by an investor, a fellow founder, an accelerator lead, or anyone else in the startup ecosystem, and you want to talk to someone about your options, please do not carry it alone.

The organisations best placed to actually help you - with trained staff, legal support, safeguarding structures, and confidentiality frameworks that a single email address like mine simply cannot provide - are these:

If you want to talk to me directly first, my inbox is always open. But please know that I am one person with no formal training, and the people above are much better placed to actually help you take the next step, whatever that step turns out to be.

The final thing I want to say is directed at the majority of investors, founders, accelerator leads, and community builders in this ecosystem who are decent, thoughtful, and would never behave this way. That is most of you. And I don't want anyone in that group to feel implicated in a problem you are not part of.

But you are the ecosystem too. And every time you hear a rumour, notice a pattern, see a colleague make a female founder visibly uncomfortable at an event and choose not to intervene, you become part of the environment that lets this continue. You are the people who can actually change this, because you have the standing and the credibility that survivors don't have.

If you're an investor, sign the Diversity VC Standard if you haven't already. Put a real code of conduct in your firm and enforce it. Make it clear to your portfolio founders that they can report inappropriate behaviour to you safely.

If you're a fellow founder, believe the women who tell you their stories. Don't ask them why they didn't report. Ask them how you can help.

If you run events, community, or accelerators, model what accountability looks like. We have a strict code of conduct at every Rare Founders event and I say clearly, every single time, that we are here for business, not for dating.

None of this fixes the problem. But it starts closing the space in which the problem lives. That's the work.

The culture of silence has protected the wrong people for too long. I am done being one of the silent.

✅ Know a founder, an investor, or a community builder who needs to hear this? Share it with them. The louder we get about this, the harder it becomes for the small number of people abusing their power to keep doing it.

(👉 Vote now - we’ll share the results in next week’s issue. All votes are anonymous.)

(Last week’s poll results)

Access here and please share it with others.