When Eva and I were on stage yesterday at Entrepreneurship Week at the University of Toronto, moderator Bianca Bharti from BetaKit asked us:

“Given we are celebrating women and raising awareness about related issues this week, what do you want to tell the audience here today?”

Here is what I said. When I was Wattpad’s CEO, we didn’t just talk about diversity or run flashy programs just to make us look good. Instead, we invested in it. We allocated real resources, dollars, and people’s time to create a truly diverse and inclusive culture at Wattpad.

The business reason was simple – half the world’s population is female. If we want to properly capture this market, do you really think a bunch of male guys in the room can figure this out?

The end result is that we achieved gender parity at BOTH the employee level and the leadership team level. However, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Anyone who worked for Wattpad can testify that we have created a truly inclusive culture.

Personally, I would consider this one of our biggest achievements.

But that was only the first chapter of the story. At Two Small Fish Ventures, we carry the same DNA. It was mostly Eva’s work, as I only started to be more involved in recent years. Through inspiration, advocacy, and mentorship, we achieved 50% female founders in our portfolio. In fact, many of our rocket ships are female-led.

Our job is not done yet. Together, we can change how the world operates.

P.S. This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given.