Closing One Chapter and Beginning the Next

After five years of research, writing, questioning, revising, and learning, I’m very happy to share that I have successfully defended my PhD.

My dissertation, “Social Capital and Fundraising Success: A Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Female Founders in Germany (2020–2025),” explored a question that grew directly out of my work with founders: what actually helps founders move through the fundraising process and gain access to capital?

I have spent more than 25 years working in finance and more than a decade working with startups and founders. Over the years, my work has increasingly moved toward founder education. I teach finance and fundraising, coach founders in accelerator programs, and work with founders as they build their businesses and prepare for capital. So my interest in this topic really started with what I was seeing in practice.

At the same time, I was seeing the startup ecosystem make a real effort to reduce the gender gap in entrepreneurship and funding, something I believe is both important and very positive. I wanted to contribute to that effort in the ways that I could. In 2023, I started the Teen Venture Lab, creating an entrepreneurship program for teenage girls, and around the same time I began this research into the fundraising experiences of female founders in Germany. They are two very different initiatives, but they came from the same motivation: to make my own small contribution to reducing the gender gap in entrepreneurship.

Why I wanted to study fundraising differently

Working so closely with founders gave me a front-row view of the fundraising journey: the preparation, the experiences, the challenges and everything that happens along the way. There were things I was seeing and questions I kept coming back to, and I wanted to understand them more systematically rather than relying only on what I was observing in my own work.

That is what ultimately led me to research the experience from the founders’ perspective. I wasn't interested only in whether a founder successfully raised capital. I wanted to understand how founders experienced the journey toward accessing capital and what role social capital played throughout that journey.

My research focused specifically on female founders in Germany between 2020 and 2025. Five years later, the findings have given me a different lens through which to look at founder fundraising and, importantly for my own work as an educator, have led me to believe that we can teach fundraising differently.

From research to impact

Finishing the dissertation closes a very big chapter for me, but it has also made me even more motivated to keep working on this topic. The research started because of things I was seeing in my work and because I wanted to make a small contribution to an ecosystem that is already working to address the gender gap. Now I have findings that I believe have practical relevance, and I want to bring those findings back into that same ecosystem.

For me, the next step has two parts. I will continue the research, building on the findings and exploring the Founder Capital Journey more deeply. At the same time, I am translating the findings into practice through teaching and workshops.

I am developing a Founder Capital Journey workshop that can be offered as an add-on to existing accelerator and founder programs or as part of a broader standalone workshop incorporating startup finance and fundraising. The goal is not to replace the finance, pitch, or fundraising education founders already receive. It is to add another lens, grounded in founders’ experiences, to how we think about preparing founders for the journey toward capital.

For me, this feels like a natural continuation of why I started the research in the first place. I wanted to better understand something I was seeing in my work and see whether I could contribute something useful. Five years later, I have some answers, many more questions, and a lot of motivation to keep going.

I may only be able to make a small impact, but that was always the point: to do the part that I can do.

More on the research, the Founder Capital Journey, and the workshops will follow.