What does it actually look like when a community decides to stop talking about change and starts building the infrastructure for it? That’s the question at the heart of this episode of Founder Shares, recorded live at the Strength in Numbers mixer on the eve of Venture Connect — the Triangle’s premier gathering of founders, investors, and ecosystem builders. The guests here aren’t theorizing about the funding gap for female founders. They’re the ones running pitch scrubs, convening investor roundtables, navigating FDA meetings, and cutting checks. Together, they offer something rare: a ground-level view of what an innovation ecosystem looks like when it gets intentional.

The statistics on female founder funding have been stubborn for years — and no one on this episode pretends otherwise. Elizabeth Kelly, Managing Director at Pappas Capital and a co-architect of the Strength in Numbers initiative, puts a number on it: venture capital funding raised by female founders hovered around 2% not long ago, a figure that has begun to move, though from a painfully small base. Kelly’s diagnosis is direct — the loneliness of being the only woman in the room isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s a structural drag on career development, and it compounds. What started as a conversation between Kelly and CED about where their sponsorship dollars could do the most good became a mixer that, two years later, is turning people away at the door. The demand, it turns out, was always there.

Zakiya Alta Lee, Principal at Idea Fund Partners, adds a more systemic lens to the funding conversation. Her argument isn’t that venture capitalists are systematically discriminating — it’s that their sourcing pipelines are built for efficiency, and efficiency tends to recycle the same networks. “A lot of times VCs source in ways that save them time,” she explains, pointing to patterns like leaning on LP networks and prior portfolio founders for deal flow. The fix, in her view, isn’t moral pressure — it’s mechanics. More events in spaces that attract female founders. More outreach to women’s colleges. More intentionality about where the top of the funnel begins. And critically, more women as LPs, because limited partners shape not just the capital available but the culture of how it gets deployed.

The episode is grounded, too, in the texture of what early-stage founding actually feels like from the inside. Seema Nandi, Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder of SelSym Biotech, is building in the blood trauma and hemorrhage space — a niche with few clear regulatory precedents and a complex technical path through FDA. Her biggest milestone of the past year: a first formal meeting with the FDA, which went well, and a team that finally feels complete. What caught her off guard about the CEO role wasn’t the science or the fundraising — it was the weight of knowing that her decisions directly shape the livelihoods of the people around her. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up in the job description, and she says it took real adjustment. Anna Tharrington, Partner at Hutchison PLLC, rounds out the picture from the legal and professional services side, noting that young attorneys and young founders alike need what this community offers — not just mentors, but peers who are figuring it out at the same time, in the same rooms.

The most memorable piece of advice in the episode comes from Zakiya Alta Lee, and it lands like a reframe rather than a pep talk. When a female founder walks into a pitch room as the only woman — a scenario that remains common — the instinct can be to manage that visibility, to minimize it. Her counsel runs in the opposite direction entirely: own it. The unicorn in the room is who everyone is looking for. The different perspective, the unique outlook — these aren’t liabilities to be explained away, they’re the point. “I don’t care what question you get asked,” she says. “You answer with confidence.” For any founder — female or otherwise — navigating rooms that weren’t built with them in mind, it’s the most actionable thing in the episode.