Coco Brown is the Founder and CEO of Athena Alliance and a driving force in advancing women to the highest levels of corporate leadership.
On the latest episode of Talk PR, Brown breaks down the gender gap in corporate governance, why only 1% of VC funding goes to women, and what it really takes to land a board seat today. She also shares why traditional career paths like MBAs may not hold the same weight in today’s business world and how executives can take control of their financial influence to drive lasting change.
Click the image above for the full interview.
TALK PR:
Tracy Williams: With us today is Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of Athena Alliance. So this alliance exists to put women in C suites or support them in C suites and to get them on corporate boards, which she’s done about 500 times. She’s a five-time entrepreneur herself enlisted among the 100 most powerful women in Silicon Valley. So, Athena was great goddess for both wisdom and war. I just looked it up. So, Coco is that what it’s going to take?
Coco Brown: She’s also the goddess of strategy. And, you know, I think, in fact, even in the sense of war, it’s more about strategy and how do you strategically get to where you’re going and protect what you care about and protect those you care about? You know, she has a lot to do with community and family and the arts and all sorts of those things. So I think, yes, collectively, it is about all of that when there’s an entrenched system that doesn’t work, it usually takes a lot of different angles to move that entrenched system.
Tracy Williams: Well, you know, help me understand something. So from 2020 to 2024 the share of women directors in the SMP 500 increased from 27% to 34%, How good is that?
Coco Brown: It’s not very good. You know it, it, it depends on how you look at it. It’s certainly a huge win on progress. It’s not stagnation, it’s movement, but it’s not 50% and we are 50% of the population, and so I don’t think that we should see it as good enough. But the bigger problem is not, it’s not that tip of the spear. It’s not the biggest companies. It’s not the public. You know, it’s not the Russell 3000 or the SMP 500. It’s everything that comes before that. So, 90% of innovation that comes to the market comes through venture backed companies. 43% of companies that become public companies start as venture backed companies. Now, if you look at that, and also 40% of CEOs when a company goes public, 40% of those CEOs are the founding CEO, and it’s because of that part of the ecosystem that we don’t see the movement that we should see in in the later part of the ecosystem, right? So if you look at the private company landscape, 17% of board seats are held by women. And actually, 30% of boards of boards have no women on them at all. And so what? Where the real rub is, where the real challenge is, is that system that brings all of the innovation to the market, the next generation companies and the next generation companies and the next generation companies women are not represented there, because we’re not funded. We’re not given, you know, as founders, we’re not given the opportunity to scale businesses. So happy to talk about that a little bit more, too.
Tracy Williams: And no, I mean, it’s interesting, because I just was reading an ink article that just came out about venture funding for women, and that’s hit an all time low. So it’s 1% of VC funding, and 2024 went to women. You know all about this. It was that pitch book report that came out, which seems surprising now, as we enter, you know, this cloudy time with DEI under attack and alpha males running wild. Where are our openings?
Coco Brown: Well, the openings are huge if we look to ourselves. So what I mean by that, the venture ecosystem that exists today. It started around 1970 between 1969 1971 that venture ecosystem, 1974 was the first year that a woman could open a bank account without a male cosigner, right? So if you think about that parallel, my mom, when she got in a scholarship to go study, to go get her master’s degree at Oxford University, she had to take that scholarship money, give it to her, then fiance, my dad, and say, Here, Honey, what are we going to do with this? And he opened the bank account and decided what to do with it, right? That’s no shame on that. That was the structure back then and 1988 was the first year where women could actually get a business loan without a male co signer. I was already 18 by. That point. That’s only 37 years ago. So if you think about like, why does the why is this system so entrenched and so not giving anything to women? Well, because it, it’s only been 37 years that this system even thought women could do anything in the business world in this way, right? And, and there’s a bigger, I mean, I’m happy to tell you sort of the whole lineage of that story, but, but that’s why, you know, what’s important for women to internalize is, look that system that we’re up against that only gives us 1% that system was created, you know, and reinforced and reinforced and reinforced and reinforced over these last 50 years through a model that we weren’t a part of right from the very beginning. We weren’t we weren’t even allowed to be a part of from the very beginning, which is why it’s 80% male, 70% white, and 40% from Stanford and Harvard. So if we want to change that, we have to look to ourselves. $30 trillion is on the move. $30 trillion of inheritance is coming, mostly to women, mostly so. Bank of America did a study and showed you know, 96% 94% of us, believe we will be in charge of the money at some point. I don’t know what the other 6% think, because if you’re single and you you know you’re running your household, or yourself, you know you’re in charge of the money, plus we live longer so so 94% of us know that we’re going to be running the money. 48% of us feel comfortable managing the finances on a bookkeeping kind of level, right? Like my grandmother, who was born in 1902 she she and my other grand, both my grandmothers, ran the books. My my one grandma, rather grandmother, was a bookkeeper for a company. My other grandmother balanced the checkbook in the home, right? We’re comfortable with that, but only 28% of us, 28% of us, which include, include myself, among are comfortable making money. Make Money knowing what to do with the money does, like this portion of it go under the mattress and that portion of it go into a checking and that portion of the savings account, but we’re very most of that 28% is still very limited to thinking about mutual funds and 401 ks and ETFs and bonds and checking and savings accounts, right? What we’re not comfortable with is that whole private market system, and yet, that’s where all the wealth is created. So to circle back to your question, like, what will it take to do this? It takes us getting really comfortable with money and starting to spread it around with each other into things we care about.
Tracy Williams: So you’re tapping into women being risk averse, and that’s true. I mean, that’s how we’ve kept families afloat and children alive, right? So, is that risk aversion something that can be is it an educational process? Is it, you know, women working, investing all of the things they’ve had. Men got men have guided a lot of other men. So is that what you’re trying to do is guide women to the next level of wealth by getting them as a part of deals
Coco Brown: 100% I mean, if we if we want to see the things we care about in the world. We have to fund them, and we have the money to fund them. And that’s what I’m saying, is women have the ability. There’s a lot of people who will tell me on the investor side, women don’t write the checks. You know, they might have a lot of wealth, but then they turn to a male counterpart somewhere in the family and say, well, should I write this check? Or they’ll write small checks and men institutionalized as a society, that sort of genetic memory has been being built. I’ll take you further back. The first bank in the United States was opened in 1781. Women weren’t allowed to bank until 1974 right? So, so the and the first stock exchange in the United States was opened in 1791 and women weren’t allowed to open business loans until 1988. The reason isn’t just because we’re not risk takers, like, if we you know, its institutionalized and so there’s that piece that we’re working against. And so what we have to do is we have to, in order to overcome that, we do have to challenge the risk mitigator in our own mind and say, You know what? I’m going to throw some money at that idea. I might not see it back, but I don’t see it back when I throw money at philanthropic ideas either. You know, when I write a check to charity, I’m not going to see that back. Sure, I’ll get some savings on taxes, but it’s kind of not different, different and businesses these days. You know, if you want to see next-generation women’s health care, you don’t put it necessarily behind nonprofits. You put it into you. M-tech that needs, you know, $10 million to get off the ground.
Tracy Williams: No, it’s a really interesting time, because I think, in terms of working with men, which are, I feel like we’re doing a bad PR job, and not because we’re in PR, but there’s stories, you know, we read Inc., we read all of the, you know, online, and all of the stories of men making a killing in a VC deal, I don’t see those same stories for women. Very rarely, very rarely do we see the women who have done exceptionally well in that investment category. Why is that?
Coco Brown: Well? Part of it is because. Part of it is because the the nature of the system you have to get, you kind of have to start winning in order to keep winning. And what I what I mean by that is like, I have a buddy who is in the system where he gets good deals that come to him, and he gets deals that would never come to just random, average people, because he’s in a system that says, oh, Lloyd makes good investments. We’re going to bring him good investment, right? So Lloyd, my buddy, you know, he tapped me and said, Coco, I’m getting involved in a good investment. You want to put some money behind this? And then I’m like, oh, Lloyd’s doing it, and it’s a good investment. Yeah, I’ll do it. So then I put my money in there. Then, and it gets to its series A it’s killing it. It’s doing really well. Then, when I’m out in the other ecosystem, I say, I’m invested in this company. They go, Oh, Coco invested in that company. She’s a good investor. Let’s bring her some other good ideas, right? That’s how it happens. But you have to start by just saying I want in so bright young candidates come to you.
Tracy Williams: You’re meeting because I know you’re trying to bring women along to serve and see C suite positions or attract investors, so they come along. What are the attributes that instantly recommend?
Coco Brown: So, Athena, you know, I would say on an on an age bell curve, our membership skews like in that center of the bell curve, we’re in our 40s and 50s. We have members in their, you know, 60s and 70s. Our two oldest members are in their 80s. And then on the other side of the bell curve, we have women in their 30s and, you know, a couple in their 20s. What brings us the reason that we skew into our 40s and 50s is because the average age of the female leader is 45 so that’s when you’ve got a lot behind you already. And now you’re thinking about, you know, you’re thinking, I want to join boards. Or you’re thinking, Gosh, I’ve got 25-30 years behind me. What am I going to do for the next 25-30 years? I want to still be professionally relevant, but I want it to be on my terms. I want to do a variety of things. I want to write books and do podcasts and be an advisor, and and, and then the other thing that women are coming to us with is, I’m going to start a company, and I’m going to raise funds. You know, two of my buddies here at this conference that I’m at, you know, raised $6 million plus for their entrepreneurial endeavors. And the thing about women entrepreneurs is the there’s two models for women entrepreneurs, the young woman that is sort of like the counterpart to the young guy entrepreneur, and then there’s the woman in her 50s who’s like, you know what? I can build a product for that. And they want to go build a company, right? So, I would say the people attracted to Athena run in the circles of entrepreneurs, building a company to scale, investors, caring about next-generation companies, and wanting to be part of that ecosystem. And then people in the corporate realm who are called senior director, through board director. That’s the three segments. And then, just generally speaking, the bell curve is as it is because of the experience that it often requires to be in one of those three rounds.
Tracy Williams: And do you want them all? Do you recommend people go to business school, you know, engineering, if they’re engineering oriented, do you say really, you got to go do that training?
Coco Brown: Or, I think, particularly in the MBA space or, I mean, AI is disrupting everything. So I would not hang hundreds of 1000s of dollars on a on something that may or may not need that kind of investment for education.
Tracy Williams: Boy, that’s interesting. So, B school is not kind of a standard like it was even just 10 years ago, right?
Coco Brown: I don’t think so. Everything moves so fast. Yeah, School of Hard Knocks is really, really good, but think about Athena, is kind of like a university. You know, a university has a Career Services Center, and sometimes they know the outcome of jobs that they, that their people got, but most of the time they don’t. And that’s actually my sort of counter to the B-school thing. We’re replacing B-school. It’s, it’s all the time, you know, constant learning together, at Athena University.
Tracy Williams: Well, everything you just said is now going to be cut and put at the front of this interview, because that’s perfect. It’s actually a perfect wrap up. Okay, well, Coco, thank you so much. Thank you, and I’m looking forward to hearing about the 1000 mark on your board seats. Thank you. Have a great day.
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