- We are a boutique investment bank
and private equity transaction sponsor.
We're a fundless sponsor
and we have a very large
operating executive network of CEO-level
women and board members.
So about 500 CEO-level women,
C-suite, if you will, about
70 of them are sitting CEOs
and about 150 large company
public board members,
and that's our collaborative platform.
Now, the idea when we
started Hypatia Capital
was really that we just
wanted to have female clients.
And
we were going to go out and
build a network that would
allow us to do so.
So we did, very successfully
and it's
bearing out the research that tells us
that balanced leadership outperforms.
We found situations where
these female CEOs really don't
have any coverage from the
private equity industry.
And I can assure you, if they were male,
they'd have plenty of coverage.
So that allows us this
advantage to become close
or to develop this relationship of trust
in an environment where there's
not a lot of competition,
which we love.
When we started, we knew
very few women, right?
So we didn't, we weren't
necessarily finding deals
right and left, but when
we would find somebody,
we would go and partner with
a larger private equity firm
and we still do that today.
And I think over time,
many of the firms that we
interact with on a fairly
regular basis have come to see,
like, wow, Hypatia brings
us really high quality
deal flow and executives,
and they want to know
what we have to say and it's
usually a fairly proprietary
situation because we
usually have a very early,
a very early look at a lot
of these situations, right?
It's very different to
get the sales memorandum
from Houlihan Lokey saying,
you know, and you got it
and 40 other PE firms got it,
than for a CEO to tell you,
look, I think we're going to go to market
a year before we thought we were.
What do you think?
It's a more competitive
situation on the right side.
And it is not inside
information, it's not a fact,
it's not results, it's
just, hey, you should be
thinking about this.
So this is now my theory.
One of the reasons why we
might have 3% only female CEOs
in the Fortune 500 and the
Fortune 1000 is because,
if you're on the nominating
committee of the board
and on the board itself and
you have this fiduciary duty
to your shareholders to
make the best decision,
that comes with,
by definition, you're trying
to minimize your risk.
And so the unknown is always
riskier than the known quality.
And it's just if you
have, you know, 97% or 99%
of all CEOs ever have
been male, by definition,
1% is other, right?
So the risk, whether that
would bear out with the data,
which I doubt, actually,
I know the data doesn't
bear it out, but people
don't always evaluate
risk through data.
They evaluate through, you
know, I guess the buzzword today
is implicit bias.
It's just riskier.
So our theory is that,
perhaps, we don't have the same as,
we aren't as biased implicitly as, maybe,
some of our male counterparts are
for some of these CEOs that are female.
