This past Friday, Code2College introduced nearly 100 Black and Latina high school girls (ages 14 – 17) to the venture capital industry during the 2nd Annual Vision 2024 Summit powered by Atlassian.
At this year’s Vision 2024 Summit, girls explored a case study about a venture-backed startup (Dermala), developed a thoughtful go-to-market (GTM) strategy and pitched in successive rounds (first to their peers, then to a panel of woman executives).
Kerry Rupp, General Partner of True Wealth Ventures (a woman-led and woman-focused venture capital firm) developed and led an incredible case study. Girls learned about the various funding sources, vc funding tranches and a great deal about how these rounds are differentiated.
Kerry then introduced several business frameworks to the girls including SWOT and competitive analyses to help them think about how to build their own pitches.
Following Kerry’s session, girls broke into small teams and gained a “Board Member” – one of the thirty women volunteering as a mentor – to support them as they analyzed the case.
Teams researched Dermala, explored publicly available data, leveraged their Board members and constructed pitch briefs.
After a round of delivering these pitches to other teams and voting, the top four teams (out of twenty) advanced to the final round.
At the close of the event, teams had the opportunity to pitch to a panel of executives to determine the most sound GTM strategy for Dermala.
This year’s panel was comprised of:
Catherine Nissley, Senior Manager, Communications, Favor Delivery
Denise Garcia, Product Manager, Atlassian
Holly Tachovsky, Founding Partner, Sabine River Partners LLC
Elisa Sepulveda, Partner, Angel Ventures
Teams presented impactful 3-minute pitches and had to contend with a Q&A that pushed the girls to defend their recommended strategies.
This year’s event impacted over 4x the number of girls as last year and connected them with many more executives, woman in STEM and prospective hiring managers from Atlassian and other Code2College partners across several industries.
Kudos to the young ladies who invested in themselves on a Friday and shout out to all of the women who supported them!
About Vision 2024
In 2020, Code2College launched the Vision 2024 Initiative in response to the need for our program to pivot to virtual programming amidst the pandemic. At the time, Black and Latina girls represented the greatest proportion of the Code2College program.
To ensure that these girls did not experience a high degree of attrition due to inequitable access to broadband, digital tools and proximity, we launched the Vision 2024 Initiative to support, develop and place 200 Black and Latina girls into STEM roles by 2024.