Women ready to take larger role in investing

Women need not be afraid of diving into the investment world

At the webinar themed “Startup Investing and Ecosystem Building: The Position of Women in the Future of Investing” today (May 12), Christy Trang Le, CFO and president of Vietnam Operation for Arevo, stated that women are cut out to be entrepreneurs.

“It is pretty natural for women to do multiple things and do it very well. That is pretty much what an entrepreneur is,” she said, adding that women can participate in any sector of business and investing.

Le highlighted that if people look at the number of companies in the world and define leaders as those who hold the roles, they might get a biased reading. However, if people look at the executive team behind these leaders, women are quite well represented and have great impacts on those companies.

Commenting on this trend, Randi Zuckerberg, CEO of Zuckerberg Media, also spurred women to start and manage business. She thought that the only way to get more women into investing is channelling more investment capital into women-lead companies.

“I also really hope that more women will start investing because I have found that when you invest in a company, you have a voice at the table. Even if it's a male entrepreneur and an all-male team, they have to listen to you as an investor, and they have to take your input,” she said.

Sharing her investment experiences, Zuckerberg said that she realised she would never create generational wealth in life just from having a salary. “I need to own equity and things, invest, and own pieces of companies.”

“The other thing that I quickly learned is that we can speak very loudly with our dollars,” she said.

Based on her experiences, Le said that investing is a wholly different world. It is not about running the investors’ own show but about watching other amazing people running their shows.

“I find that experience very satisfying and rewarding. It grows me as a person not only in the technical expertise that I try to improve day by day, but it is also about the outlook about life and how these amazing women and entrepreneurs handle red lines, juggle with so many balls up in the air – sometimes they miss a couple of balls but most of the time they don’t,” she shared.

She claimed that it is not that common to have women at a startup, especially tech companies. It is mainly because people are not open to the idea rather than there being anything different about women.

“I got to know somebody from a tech company saying that women are not into tech companies, mainly because there are not many female engineers, and it is not natural for them to stay in the factory for the night shifts. That’s the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard,” she added.

Likewise, Zuckerberg also agreed that women should be investing in everything. “I actually think that putting your money into something is the best way to make sure that you learn about it,” she said and added that women can also jump into AI, crypto, or blockchain, although these new emerging industries, known as male-dominated industries, will take women a long time to catch up in.

“But there are industries that we can get in on the ground floor. We can know as much as the men and be there just as early as the men. I don’t want us to miss out on those opportunities because we’re so busy thinking about how to catch up to them,” she stated.