Ex-Purency founder Valerie Hengl is now joining the Female Founders team. Together with Carina Klaffl, she takes on dual leadership roles and wants to work particularly closely with startups in the early development phase. In the interview, Hengl talks about what she learned from her startup time with Purency, where she sees great potential for female founders and why female investors are so important.
Valerie Hengl on the difficult farewell to startup “Purency”
Trending Topics: You posted on LinkedIn that 2023 was an emotional rollercoaster for you as you stepped down from your role as Managing Director at Purency. Why did you make this decision?
Hengl: Exactly. We founded Purency four years ago and had four shareholders: two male and two female founders. I ran our startup as co-managing director for three years and then unfortunately shareholder difficulties arose. This means that I personally no longer agreed with how the company was run and therefore I made the difficult decision to withdraw. Unfortunately, this meant that Purency had to be liquidated at the end of the year.
So the reasons why the startup ultimately had to be liquidated weren’t because your business model didn’t work?
No, these were purely team reasons and conflicts of values.
What did Purency’s business model look like?
We built data analysis software for automated analysis of microplastic measurements, which was sold to laboratories worldwide – for example to Australia, the USA, but also Switzerland or Spain. These included research laboratories, contract analytics and industrial laboratories, but also universities that were interested in detecting microplastics in products or substances. We collected a lot of data, which was then processed through automated data analysis using our plug-in software. The data allowed us to determine what size, number and type of polymers are contained in a sample.
What was the biggest learning effect you learned from dissolving the startup?
My biggest learning effect was definitely to always listen to my gut feeling and to stand behind myself and my own principles, especially when making such tough decisions. Another concerns the team. When setting up a startup, you always have to choose your team carefully and make sure that there is enough trust in each other, even in tough phases. And you can feel that in your stomach too. My third learning is about designing the social contracts well and not complicating them. You should be very precise with the founding documents so that contractual content cannot be interpreted in different ways – this particularly applies to the dissolution of a startup and the distribution of the percentages.
As female founders, can you support us in drawing up partnership agreements?
We definitely have people in our network who are very knowledgeable about this subject and can also share their own experiences – even if corporate law is not our expertise. And we interact pan-European – that means we as Female Founders are part of a very large network. In addition to Austrian startups, we also work with founders from Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, where each country has its own corporate law. In these cases, too, we see it as our task to network startups with international experts.
The startup market, its problem areas and how female founders support
We all know that the startup market has changed a lot in the last 24 months. In your opinion, what were the main drivers for this change?
We are all aware that the startup market has changed significantly in the last 24 months, with raising capital becoming a significant challenge. These were various economic crises, both in Europe and worldwide. On the one hand, these crises were caused by the pandemic, and on the other hand by a war and the resulting energy crisis. This is particularly critical for the founding phase of startups, now that investments are generally declining in the market.
What new tasks will you face in your new role as part of the management at Female Founders and where will your focus be?
My focus is on startups in their early development phase, i.e. in the pre-seed and seed phase. As Female Founders, we will also strengthen our offerings for early-term startup teams. And that’s where I come in because I worked in a startup like this and know firsthand how difficult it is to set up fundraising and investments, especially in a gender diverse team. Here I will contribute my expertise in order to continually adapt our programs to the market.
Why so many startups will get stuck in the seed phase in 2024
The Female Founders no longer offer their own programs in the area of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, but instead work with partners such as the European Innovation Council. Why did you decide to take this step?
Because it was precisely through these economic crises that we noticed that companies were the first to cut talent budgets. Unfortunately, the first thing to be cut is often the diversity program. In this respect, this has also had an impact on us and we now only organize leadership programs with large partners and no longer for the general public.
Of the leadership offerings, events and acceleration programs you offer as Female Founders, what would you highlight?
I think we have two core parts. On the one hand, there is our “Lead Today, Shape Tomorrow Conference” (LTST), which I have also attended for the last two years. This year it will take place for two days as part of “Vienna Up” in June. There will be very cool speakers again, such as Viki Schnaderberck, an Austrian ex-footballer, and Gloria Baeuerlein, who herself raised 21.5 million euros for Puzzle Ventures. At “LTST” it is particularly important to us to support female entrepreneurs right from the start. From the first points of contact with the start-up scene to founding a startup as part of our Accelerate program “Grow-F” – registration for this is currently open and is possible until February 23, 2024. And then there is the venture capital fund “Fund F”, which supports the founders with capital and at the same time contributes its market expertise. Fund F operates separately from the Female Founders, but there is a really good collaboration that we will deepen even further this year. It helps that we sit in the office together with the fund team. From a legal point of view, they are different companies: At Fund F, Lisa-Marie Fassl and Nina Wöss are the managing directors and female founder Carina Klaffl and I are the managing directors.
Which start-ups have you invested in or which are already included in the “Fund F” portfolio?
For example, the ClimateTech startup “Sirius”, which became aware of the Grow F program through our newsletter. A few months later, “Fund F” invested in the Dutch startup as lead investor. The whole thing was created in close collaboration. But investments were also made in the Austrian startup “Ada”, the app that specializes in promoting women and their talents within companies, and in “Senvo” from Germany, where the focus is on data centralization.
“When investing, the vibe has to be right”
Finally, let’s talk about your personal perspective on the gender issue. If you read somewhere that an investor has invested, do you also feel addressed? Or is it important to speak explicitly about “female investors”?
Gender is very important to me. There are simply far too few female investors and this fact causes a whole lot of problems. Keyword “Gender Pay Gap”: Women earn less money, which means their income is lower in the long term and they have less knowledge or interest in investing their money. On the one hand, there are more male investors. When it comes to startup investments, it is important that you “vibe” with the investor. This means that male investors are also inclined to invest in male startup teams – simply because they can identify with them better. This is how it goes and there is less funding for female startups. The topic is very important to me because I have experienced the dilemma myself. It’s also about supporting other women on how they can become investors or business angels. In my new role, I would like to highlight that there are also female investors who are investing more in gender-diverse startups and thus creating more female role models for new green people. So I will always speak of “women investors”.
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