The secure document-sharing platform DocSend has been analyzing pitch decks — the slideshows used to convince investors to invest in a startup.
The company gathered data using an opt-in program involving hundreds of startups and thousands of investors. It analyzed how investors "read" those presentations in terms of how long they spent on each slide and whether they went back to give parts of the deck a second look.
The study, which was released Thursday, showed the decks that investors sped through were the ones most likely to get funded, DocSend said.
"A good deck is one where people are just like, 'Flip, flip, flip, makes sense, makes sense, makes sense, done. I guess we're going to do this,'" DocSend CEO Russ Heddleston told Business Insider.
But when an investor lingered on the slide about a company's financials or its team page, it was a bad sign.
And according to DocSend's data, a trigger for this behavior was when investors reached a slide revealing a startup was led entirely by women.
"They're like, 'Oh, all women?'" Heddleston said. "They'll flip back to the traction page, and they'll sit there being like, 'Do they really have this traction? What does that traction mean?'"
The difference between how all-female versus all-male teams were treated by investors is stark. Investors spent 50% more time analyzing the "transaction section" of female teams' pitch decks. They spent 24% more time reading the "product" slides of all-female teams. And they spent 30% less time on the slides of entirely female-led startups that asked for funding, the one type of slide where more time spent usually translates into getting funded.
The data was drawn from decks from over 465 startups seeking funding during a period from 2018 to 2019. Those decks were viewed by 6,248 unique visitors at investor offices and venture-capital firms. Most of the companies were seeking funding for seed and pre-seed rounds. The startups then submitted funding results as part of the study, and DocSend cross-checked that info with the funding database Crunchbase.
The results of the research resonated with Nikki and April Dominguez, two sisters who founded Handsome, an Austin-based networking app for the beauty industry. They saw men get funded for similar ideas despite having less evidence that they could be successful, they said.
"Men are really allowed to be visionaries and women are not," Nikki Dominguez told Business Insider. "Women have to have proof points, and even those proof points aren't good enough most of the time."
The sisters told Business Insider that they found it frustrating to watch their male counterparts rake in larger amounts of funding based solely on their ideas, while they had to build credibility by raising much smaller amounts, bit by bit. They also said they worried that publicly discussing what they were going through would be taken as a sign of weakness.
"You can very quickly be looked at as, 'Oh, you're just pulling a female card, or a brown-founder card because you haven't been successful fundraising,' when that's not the case," April Dominguez told Business Insider.
The sisters said they felt the challenges they've had to overcome have made them better founders but added that didn't make it acceptable.
"I'm glad we've had these challenges because it's made us more resilient," Nikki Dominguez said. "But I'm at this point now where it has to be talked about. It has to be addressed. Because our product, our platform, our team, is exceptionally good. And if it's not addressed, then we won't get the opportunities that we deserve and have created for ourselves."
Got tips about startups or venture capital? Email Max Jungreis at mjungreis@businessinsider.com, DM him on Twitter @MaxJungreis, or contact him on encrypted messaging app Signal at (907) 947-0299.
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