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XWatch: Fundraising for Female Founders, in Partnership with Bank of America
Breanna de Vera is dot.LA's editorial intern. She is currently a senior at the University of Southern California, studying journalism and English literature. She previously reported for the campus publications The Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media.

Female founder and funders explored how female founders and investors are navigating the landscape during dot.LA's recent strategy session. Watch the full video, and read our takeaways here:
Watch: Fundraising for Female Founders
Five Tips for Women Entrepreneurs Raising Money
Female founders are gaining ground in venture capital, but the funding gap between genders remains broad. ILIA founder Sasha Plavsic, Rael CEO and co-founder Yanghee Paik, Bank of America Senior Vice President and Market Manager Grace Kangdani and Upfront Ventures Partner Aditi Maliwal explored how female founders and investors are navigating the landscape during dot.LA's recent strategy session.
One of the biggest initial challenges for women entrepreneurs with female-focused products is convincing investors of their value.
Yanghee Paik, founder of Rael, said that because her company's products are centered around feminine care and feminine health, it could be difficult to explain to male investors why Rael was so necessary.
"There have been a lot of big companies who have been pushing some new innovations, but none of them has been really focused on the need or the natural aspect of feminine care products," said Paik. "That took a lot of effort for us — to really do a lot of pitching with a lot of education about the products' industry itself."
But when founders — not just female founders — know their markets, their value proposition and build their network, they have the tools for success.
Grace Kangdani, senior vice president at Bank of America shared key characteristics of successful presentations, products and companies.
"A lot of the people with the checkbook, let's be honest, it's still male dominated," said Kangdani. "Have (a) network of people and different kinds of people. If you're selling a women-specific targeted product, have men in the mix to bounce off ideas, [to see if] it's resonating with them too. Know your product. Know your value proposition ... build your network and build your tribe."
Relationships are key when building a team.
Rael's founding team is a group of three women, including Paik, and she shared how they support each other through the ups and downs of running a company.
"Being an entrepreneur is a very lonely journey, and sometimes you need the support from your team or co-founders or investors. It's always the easiest [when you] have co-founders to talk about the challenges," said Paik.
Sasha Plavsic, founder of the makeup brand ILIA shared that because she started very grassroots, surrounding herself with a strong network was key to expanding her company.
"In business, it's ultimately about relationships and building that trust, and it doesn't matter what stage you're at," Plavsic said. "But definitely in the earlier stages it is more of a challenge, and [if] you do need some people skills and if you don't have it, you need a partner that will need to bring it."
Access, successfully presenting your company and your value and confidence are key for female founders to break into male-dominated spaces.
Upfront Ventures partner Aditi Maliwal has an extensive background in fintech, a space that is still extremely male dominated, and finds value in seeking out other women in the industry.
"There aren't enough opportunities for female founders to get in front of a whole variety of other people," Maliwal said. "I relate very well with [female founders] and so I want to be able to help my demographic. That being said, that's not to say that I don't want to spend time with other demographics — I absolutely do. I just want to find ways to have alignment in my values and hopefully their values."
Genuinely listening to groups outside your own demographic is key to promoting gender parity and supporting minority entrepreneurs.
That goes beyond just finding individuals from other backgrounds — it means truly listening to people and their motivations, even when it doesn't directly benefit you.
"It's pretty important to ensure that you're sort of giving space to these people, giving space to female founders giving them space to speak, to come in and be able to pitch, even if it's not necessarily a space that you would invest in," Maliwal said. "Ensure that you're spending time actually, getting to know the founder and not just … because you're a woman or you're such and such demographic, but [asking] 'what's your story?'"
About the Speakers:
Sasha Plavsic, founder of ILIA Beauty
Sasha Plavsic, Founder of ILIA Beauty
Born in Vancouver and raised in a rural, ocean-side setting just outside the city. Sasha's interests fell into design, studying typography in London and New York. She found herself in Los Angeles in 2006 and spent several years working as a branding executive within the fashion and beauty industries. After moving home to Vancouver for a brief sabbatical, her mother encouraged her to read the ingredient list on her favorite lip balm. Sasha was shocked to discover many of the ingredients were not safe, and it's something she used daily. The challenge was set: re-create her favorite lip balm so that it would be safe, effective and natural. And so the story of ILIA began. Sasha currently resides near ILIA's headquarters in Laguna Beach, CA with her husband and two young daughters.
Yanghee Paik, ceo and co-founder of Rael
Yanghee Paik, CEO and Co-Founder of Rael
Yanghee Paik is the co-founder and CEO of Rael, an L.A.-based clean feminine care and skincare startup founded by three female entrepreneurs in 2017. As a seasoned professional with nearly 15 years of experience in corporate strategy, sales and marketing, and global expansion, Yanghee has been the driving force in growing Rael as a trusted organic feminine care brand, expanding its reach beyond digital platforms and the U.S. market. She is deeply passionate about making positive impact on women's lives and growing Rael as a holistic personal care brand for women that provides innovative, clean, and effective solutions around their hormonal cycle and life. A native of Seoul, Korea, Yanghee earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and received a B.A. degree in business from Seoul National University. Now she considers L.A. her home and loves its sunny weather, diverse culture and excellent Korean food.
Aditi Maliwal, partner at Upfront Ventures
Aditi Maliwal, Partner at Upfront Ventures
Aditi leverages her operating experience and global perspective to invest in and support the highest-potential founders and teams. Before joining Upfront, Aditi was a product manager on the Next Billion Users team at Google, in a hybrid role leading investments in and building product for companies in emerging markets. Previously she worked on the corporate development team at Google, leading acquisitions across various sectors including AI, messaging and media. Prior to Google she worked in early-stage venture at Crosslink Capital leading investments in BetterUp, Chime and PowerToFly, and before that in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, in the technology banking group. She holds a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University and has lived between India, Hong Kong, Singapore and San Francisco.
Grace Kangdani, senior vice president, market manager at Bank of America
Grace Kangdani, Senior Vice President, Market Manager at Bank of America
Grace Kangdani is Market Manager of the L.A. Metro Business Banking team, leading a team of relationship managers who work with clients to proactively provide strategic advice and integrated financial solutions. Core capabilities include credit and financing solutions, treasury management, long-term fixed rate commercial mortgage (conventional and SBA 504), equipment finance and merchant processing.
In January 2019, Grace was recognized by the Los Angeles Business Journal as one of the Top Women in Banking. In December 2020, she was named in 2020 Thriving in Their 40s, a list of Top Professionals in Los Angeles, as recognized by Los Angeles Business Journal. She currently attends Pacific Coast Banking School, at University of Washington.
Active in the community, Grace serves on the Board of Trustees of P.S. Arts, a nonprofit organization that provides high-quality arts education programs in underserved public schools and communities. She is also Board Member for Women's Leadership Council, a women networking organization built around the spirit of both professional and personal accomplishment through collaboration, inspiration and support.
Kelly O'Grady, chief host and correspondent at dot.LA
Kelly O'Grady, Chief Host & Correspondent at dot.LA
Kelly O'Grady is dot.LA's chief host & correspondent. Kelly serves as dot.LA's on-air talent, and is responsible for designing and executing all video efforts. A former management consultant for McKinsey, and TV reporter for NESN, she also served on Disney's Corporate Strategy team, focusing on M&A and the company's direct-to-consumer streaming efforts. Kelly holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. A Boston native, Kelly spent a year as Miss Massachusetts USA, and can be found supporting her beloved Patriots every Sunday come football season.
Sam Adams, co-founder and ceo of dot.LA
Sam Adams, Co-Founder and CEO of dot.LA
Sam Adams serves as chief executive of dot.LA. A former financial journalist for Bloomberg and Reuters, Adams moved to the business side of media as a strategy consultant at Activate, helping legacy companies develop new digital strategies. Adams holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College and an MBA from the University of Southern California. A Santa Monica native, he can most often be found at Bay Cities deli with a Godmother sub or at McCabe's with a 12-string guitar. His favorite colors are Dodger blue and Lakers gold.
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Breanna de Vera is dot.LA's editorial intern. She is currently a senior at the University of Southern California, studying journalism and English literature. She previously reported for the campus publications The Daily Trojan and Annenberg Media.
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This Startup Wants to Make Testing for ADHD and Dyslexia as Common as Going to an Optician
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Here’s how Jack Rolo describes his childhood: He was good at chess, and bad at spelling. He was good at math, and bad at reading. Rolo went on to study physics at Durham University in his native England—and despite often struggling in his courses, it wasn’t until after he graduated that he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a common language processing disorder that affects reading.
Rolo’s experiences informed his founding of Polygon, a Santa Monica-based diagnostics startup that emerged from stealth on Friday with $4.2 million in funding, and the goal of better diagnosing dyslexia, ADHD and other learning-related disabilities. The funding includes a $3.6 million seed round led by Spark Capital, as well as $600,000 in pre-seed funding led by Pear VC.
“It really is a product I wish I'd had access to at an earlier age myself,” Rolo told dot.LA.
After moving to California to earn his MBA degree at UC Berkeley, Rolo met his co-founder Meryll Dindin, who now serves as Polygon’s chief technology officer. Together, they’ve built a platform that aims to partner with schools to test children for a myriad of disabilities that may affect academic performance. (The startup claims it’s already teamed with schools in California, but did not disclose which.) Rolo says he envisions that these assessments become as ubiquitous as vision and hearing exams: that every student, regardless of age, background or academic performance, will be tested.
As is, testing for disorders like ADHD and dyslexia often depends on parents, teachers or pediatricians observing a child, detecting something amiss and intervening. There are problems with this method; for instance, girls are chronically underdiagnosed with ADHD because it presents itself differently than it does for boys. Teachers juggling crowded classrooms may not be able to perceive why a specific child is falling behind. And Black and Latino children are often overlooked when it comes to diagnosing disabilities.
“Common roots of referral are teachers, and typically that's flagged because they'll see the student failing,” Rolo said. “That's part of the problem—that this then becomes almost a wait-to-fail approach, when ideally you want to pick these things up proactively.”
Polygon employs full-time psychologists who evaluate students through a telehealth platform. After undergoing a range of standardized assessments and interviewing their parents and teachers, a student who is diagnosed will receive an "Individualized Education Program," a schooling curriculum tailored toward their disabilities.
Assessments start at $995, which Polygon says is up to five times cheaper than traditional disability testing alternatives. The company plans on driving that cost down further by collecting a large data sample of assessments and building machine learning technology to “pre-screen” students; those who are flagged would then undergo more extensive testing.
“Ultimately, what we're trying to move toward is a model quite similar to the optician, where everyone gets the evaluation,” Rolo said. “Yes, assessments are still not accessible for all families just yet—but this is the beginning, and we hope to drive this cost down way further over time.”
Polygon said the new funding will go toward expanding beyond California and growing its network nationally.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegel on How the Job Market Has Shifted
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
On this episode of Office Hours, host Spencer Rascoff talked with ZipRecruiter CEO and founder Ian Siegel about how he built his company, the lessons he's learned along the way and how he's seen the pandemic drastically reshape the job market—probably for good.
Siegel moved to L.A. to be a writer in Hollywood. But he quickly realized he hated it. Instead, he moved into the fledgling online division at Warner Bros., From there, he found himself working at a series of VC-backed startups that became successful. As a result, he became known in the industry as an expert in taking online businesses that had plateaued and figuring out a way to help them grow. He said he hated every minute of it.
“What you are in that situation is you're an agent of change. And what I learned is you can be good at that, but no one likes you because everybody fears change.”
Instead, Siegel worked up the courage to start his own business.
“Why do I let people pay me such a small amount of money to turn around these businesses?,” he asked himself. “If I'm so good at this, why don't I just start my own and build it right from the very beginning. And that's what ultimately gave me the conviction to go launch ZipRecruiter.”
His time working at young startups too small to have their own HR departments gave Siegel the idea. After posting the same job position across multiple websites and printing out every single resume submitted, he realized he was facing a problem technology is built to solve.
“I just wanted a magic button that I could push. And it would send a job to all job boards at once, and then all the candidates from all those different sites would go into one easy to review list. That's exactly what we built with the first version of ZipRecruiter,” said Siegel.
Over time, ZipRecruiter’s mission has changed, he said, from a company aimed at solving a single pain point to a company trying to reinvent how the labor market functions. That, he added, is orders of magnitude more difficult, because “you are retraining America or potentially the world on a new way to do something.”
“And now you are knife fighting in the jungle, you are trailblazing,” he added. “I don't worry about how anybody in the current ecosystem operates. I'm truly fundamentally trying to change the labor market in the United States right now.”
Siegel said he’s seen the job market drastically change over the past couple years, as the pandemic accelerated the move to remote work and hybrid and remote positions surged. Fewer than 2% of jobs on ZipRecruiter had the words “remote” in them before COVID-19 stuck. Now, 60% of applicants say they’re seeking remote or hybrid work, and 12% of the jobs listed on the site offer a remote option—and that number is growing.
That reality has changed how he runs his own business.
“What I've done at ZipRecruiter is accept change,” Siegel said. “We are fully embracing remote. I believe remote is not only here to stay, it's a huge benefit.”
That, he says, is because employees and employers both save time on driving and grooming. They save money on gas and parking. The office, he added, will still have a purpose, but it will probably be more for building culture, and less for work.
"It'll be a much smaller space entirely designed around fun," he said. "No one will ever go in there every day purely for the purpose of doing their job, probably ever again."
One of the lessons Siegel said he’s learned as a serial entrepreneur is to make sure the work you pick is meaningful to you.
“It turns out every business takes the same amount of time, which is all your time,” he said. “So be thoughtful about how you spend it. Pick work that's meaningful for you. Pick work that has scale opportunity to it and that you're going to be excited to go into every day,”
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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
Riot Games Doubles Down on Mobile With ‘Aim Lab’ Investment
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Riot Games has invested in virtual shooting range developer Statespace, accelerating the Los Angeles video game publisher’s efforts to dominate the mobile gaming space.
Riot did not disclose terms of the investment but told dot.LA it took a “minority stake” in New York-based Statespace.
Statespace’s main product is a platform called Aim Lab, a free-to-play virtual shooting range that first-person shooter gamers can use to warm up their skills before heading into a competitive match. Statespace CEO Wayne Mackey told the Washington Post that the plan is to leverage its relationship with Riot to bring Aim Lab onto mobile platforms—a transition that he said is “imminent” and could happen as soon as next month.
Riot, in turn, wants to integrate Aim Lab as part of its growing base of titles with hardcore fan bases, like its first-person shooter game “Valorant” or its multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game “League of Legends: Wild Rift.” The idea is that esports players could use Aim Lab to warm up with weapons used in the actual games, and also for a postmortem on a match that they lost by giving them a chance to review footage of their defeat and figure out how to improve, Mackey said.
“We look forward to collaborating with Statespace on developing innovative training and coaching tools for Valorant and MOBA players around the world to improve their skills at every level,” Jake Perlman-Garr, Riot’s global head of corporate development, said in a statement Thursday.
Riot has been doubling down on mobile gaming in recent years. The publisher has released three mobile games in the last two years—including “Wild Rift,” its most popular mobile title—and has invested in mobile gaming companies like Double Loop Games and Bunch. That focus has come as mobile gaming has emerged as one of the industry’s fastest-growing sectors.
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Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him