FLM: Describe your journey as serial entrepreneur navigating the challenges of being a female and Latina.
DVW: I never intended to be a startup founder, let alone a repeat startup founder. As an immigrant and child to a single mother, it was simply not on my radar of how one builds a life of stability.
I started my career in philanthropy and fully intended on going to business school and then hopefully then to lead corporate social responsibility at a major corporation serving Latin America. But the universe had different plans for me. In the early 2000’s I ended up becoming obsessed with the problem that there was no easy way for people to give online to loved ones or neighbors in need. I ended up building the first crowdfunding platform, called GiveForward, which is now part of GoFundMe.
That experience gave me the confidence to tackle big problems and to find solutions, stakeholders, and investors that meaningfully create change. I feel so lucky to now have had the opportunity to build that muscle with Pearachute, a kids’ activity marketplace, The Josephine Collective, an angel investment group, and TechRise, an initiative to support BIPOC and women founders in Chicago.
As a Latina and as a woman building in Chicago, it has not been easy, I’ll admit. Investors, who are typically affluent older men, don’t often have the perspective to understand why someone would need a fundraiser for a cancer diagnosis or why a first-time mom would need help finding community.
And so, I built TechRise at P33 to help overlooked founders, including my fellow Latinos and my peers in our Black community to better access the capital, networks, and knowledge they need to launch and grow their businesses.
Despite these challenges I was able to raise nearly $20M for these businesses and projects.
I also think that being a white presenting Latina, from humble beginnings, who had the earned privilege of attending Yale and working at the Kauffman Foundation has given me a unique perspective of both scarcity and abundance and how to move from one to the other.
FLM: Your passion appears to lie in building businesses that matter, explain how your experiences growing up had an impact on your desire to give back.
DV: My family is deeply generous, even when we have had very little. As a child, I remember my single mom, who made no money, bringing suitcases of donated clothes, shoes, eyeglasses, and candies to distribute to the cramped, tin-roofed cabins of our Costa Rican neighbors. At the same time, I remember being bothered by our own poverty, as a child with subsidized lunch cards and occasionally on food stamps.
My sister and I cultivated a spirit of giving despite not having, through our volunteer work and early jobs, and I think we’ve both been constantly shown how to love our community and our neighbors and to give generously of the gifts we’ve been given. In my adult life that presents as my commitment of my time and energy to solving big problems that can have scaled impact. I just hope I am teaching my children the same great lessons I was shown.