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Lisa Wang spent four years building SheWorx, a female entrepreneur networking group and community that helped nearly 20,000 women entrepreneurs build and scale their companies. Now, the company has been acquired by the equity crowdfunding platform, Republic, with the goal of expanding their reach even further.

While SheWorx focused primarily on addressing the gender gap in venture capital funding, Republic has traditionally focused on equity crowdfunding. But Lisa tells Startups.com that her thinking about “what it actually takes to close the funding gap” for “diverse entrepreneurs” has changed during her time running SheWorx.

“If you’re going to create any significant change, you can’t keep going down the same old path you’ve always been ...

The startup world is all about moving fast — but at what expense?

We've built this narrative for ourselves within startups that we're constantly under the gun to move quickly or else. If we don't move quickly, we won't attract more funding, we'll lose ground to all of our competitors, and we'll be perceived as being "slow," which is considered the death knell for any respectable startup.

But what if all of that is bullshit?

What if there are real costs to moving too quickly that will far outweigh whatever perceived benefits we're told we're getting? We stand to lose a lot if we invent a false notion of urgency that prevents us from making good decisions for the long term.

Pleasing the Wrong Party

Let's start with who we're moving fast for. ...

Few people’s careers have intersected with as many media legends as Susan Lyne. From Jane Fonda and Martha Stewart to Shonda Rhimes and Patty Hearst. These days, Lyne has a fund called BBG Ventures — which stands for “Built By Girls” — and is focused on funding female entrepreneurs.

This puts Lyne in a prime position to share everything she has learned about gender in a variety of businesses with up and comers — and at a crucial time for both Silicon Valley and Hollywood. In particular, getting fired from ABC despite an epic run of programming and promises made to give her more power. She said in a recent podcast that “it was a really good lesson that you can’t sit back, and be passive, and assume that by being the good girl, you’re going t...

For those of us who have never raised capital or built a startup before, there's a commonly-held myth that startups get funded with great ideas.

If the idea is so wonderful, an anxious investor will jump at the idea to get rich with an early investment. It must be true — we saw it on Shark Tank!

The truth is, startups get funded at all different stages, from the initial idea all the way up through proven traction. The problem is that the uninitiated don't quite understand what the difference is.

What if we had the idea 9 seconds ago?

If the idea is just that — an idea — and there's no other development or traction to the business, the only likely funding sources are going to be our credit cards and perhaps an incredibly supportive relative....