Female Founders & Funders

Hi Everyone! In this episode of the Female Founders and Funders podcast I speak with Felicia Curcuru, the founder and CEO of Binti, a company that is reinventing the foster care and adoption process.  She started the company in 2014 after seeing firsthand how hard it was for her sister to adopt and has experienced the ups and downs of building a company, finding product marketing fit, dealing with co-founders and employees, and so much more. In the episode we explore topics such as:

• Felicia's background and how she came to start Binti
• In an early blog post that Felicia wrote she mentioned some crazy statistics on foster care and adpoption: each year 6 million children are orphaned worldwide, 3 million families express an interest in adoption, 1 million families take steps to adopt but only 250,000 parents end up adopting. We discuss what she uncovered about why this process is so broken?
• The hardest part of getting Binti off the ground
• Being a first time founder
• Who the end customers of Binti’s technology are and how that has evolved over time and with learnings
• How to go about finding a co-founder and what to do if things don't work out
• Working with the government and in a somewhat regulated space
• Getting the first customers and happy users
• How adoptions and foster programs have evolved (or not) since she began in this space in 2014 
• Felicia's experience with All Raise, a non profit supporting women venture investors and entrepreneurs and how she came to help start Female Founder Office Hours
• Practices to help stay sane as you manage starting a company, fundraising, juggling life etc
• The best piece of advice she's been given in her career or life 

To learn more about Binti or get in touch you can go to the website at https://binti.com/ and to learn more about All Raise go to https://www.allraise.org/

In this interview, Elaine speaks with Allison Robinson, founder and CEO of The Mom Project. After having her son Asher in 2015, Allison identified how universally challenging it can be for American mothers to juggle the demands of motherhood with a full-time career and decided to tackle the issue on a national scale. Prior to founding The Mom Project, Allison spent 8 years at Procter and Gamble working on go to market strategies for leading household brands with a special focus on moms during her tenure on the Pampers brand. 

As CEO, Allison is responsible for delivering on the company's mission of building a better workplace for women while supporting our customers through innovative talent solutions that help them attract and retain the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives they need to propel their businesses forward.

They discuss:

• The demands of starting a company and balancing family, mental health and other responsibilities
• The macro trends around diversity & inclusion and remote / distributed work
• Building up the supply and demand sides of a marketplace
• What it feels like to get your first customer
• Whether Allison sees a world where an equal number of men drop out of the workforce to care for children
• The best piece of advice she's been given in her career or life

Female Founders & Funders is created and produced by Elaine Zelby, investor at SignalFire. To get in contact, reach out on twitter @ezelby or visit www.signalfire.com. If you're an early stage entrepreneur, we'd love to hear from you!