01:34 Yonit talks about here first job as a figure skating instructor

04:01 Yonit discusses her journey from figure skating to being the spokesperson for the New York City Economic Development Corporation. 

 08:14 And then to  Jerusalem leading Masschallenge. 

11:12 Masschallenge introduced?

12:41  Is Israel making the right choices to use this startup ecosystem as an engine to fuel the economy in Israel

16:26 The reasons Masschallenge is not industry-focused. Why does Yonit think this is an advantage?

 19:44              How does mentorship and networking with Corporates work in Masschallenge?

21:17  The benefits corporates get out of acceleration programs. 

 26:35 How did COVID impact Masschallenge Israel's operations and model.

32:06  The reason health tech is a priority for MassChallenge in Israel and globally? Is Yonit seeing new themes emerge in the innovation space for MassChallenge such as social impact, sustainability? 

38:14  Yonit's best three tips for startups in the health tech space who want to work with a larger corporation or want to solicit relationships with them.

40:51 A potential shift in female leadership in the technology innovation space.

I did hear that your first job was as a figure skating instructor. Do you want to share that with us?

Yonit Serkin: Sure. When I was 10 years old, I saw figure skating for the very first time. I had grown up in Israel and my family moved back to the US right in time for the 1992 Olympics and I just became obsessed with figure skating. My parents said, okay, well, they thought this was going to be just another like, go try it out.  They said, okay, you can test it out, see if you enjoy it and then we'll get you lessons. I said, okay, okay, I'll get lessons I did lessons. I think they asked me to do it for a couple of months. I did it for years. I loved it. I would get up in the morning before school at 5:00 AM, be at the rink for two hours before I'd go to school. It became this really, really important thing in my life. Fast forward when I went to college and needed to figure out what I was going to do to earn me money on the side while I was studying at Johns Hopkins and there was a rink nearby. I said, okay, this is fortuitous. Yes, I became a figure skating instructor, and it was great.

How was it for your parents? My 17-year-old daughter has become a little bit crazy with the jujitsu now, and she travels two to three times a week Kfar Saba to Netanya in the morning for training and sometimes in the afternoon again. So, give me tips as a parent. How can I cope with this madness?

Yonit Serkin: It's crazy and I always tell my dad, so I’m impressed that my dad did this. For years he would wake up at 4:30 in the morning, make sure that I was getting up, take me to the ring, come back, get ready, et cetera. There is no way that I would do this for my children. I have four kids and I cannot imagine having this be such a seminal and critical appointment every morning. But they did it and God blessed them and I'm really grateful that they made this sacrifice that I could do it. It became that as my older brother got his driving license his first job was that he had to take me to the rink and take care of that. They were very happy to leave that to somebody else.

So, when you were done with the figure skating, what was next for you? I saw that you're into politics.

Yonit Serkin: Well, as Gali mentioned, I went to university and I studied international studies and economics. Actually, in the first summer after my freshman year in college, I decided to volunteer for a campaign, the campaign for mayor of New York and Michael Bloomberg was running. I did this for frankly, all of the wrong reasons. My family lives were at the time living in New York but the only thing I wanted to do was be in New York. I sort of didn't really care that much about what I was doing. I thought he was a good guy, but I didn't look into it very, very deeply. Once I started working for the campaign, I fell in love with the candidate. I fell in love with the work. The team that came around Michael Bloomberg, I think was just incredible. It was just a host of people who were really top class, really worked very, very hard, came from a huge spectrum of experience. A lot who came from business, some who came from academia. I just got to be around these thrilling conversations of people who actually believe you can make the world a better place and that you can actually work hard and think about a city as changing so dynamically. I caught this bug, and I was just really excited by that sort of motivation that you could actually go and make a significant change in a reality that so many of us take for granted. That entire experience happened to me before I was involved in technology at all.

My interest was sort of entirely around urbanism and cities and how all of these big machines work with one another. Technology or startups wasn't a big part of my framework, that wasn't what I was focused on. After graduate school, I ended up moving up to New York and joining the administration as the spokesman for the New York City Economic Development Corporation. There, I got to really see how major entities in the city work with one another and how industries work with one another. At the time it's New York circa 2005/6 focused really significantly on financial services on neighborhood regeneration, how different neighborhoods were going to grow. The financial district or Lower Manhattan was undergoing this tremendous growth and change from what it had been pre-2001 when it was really all about finance and primarily a place that people went to work. It was becoming this sort of live work, play community where you not only had of course really major institutions of, of work in financial services, but also the place where people went for shows and people lived, and people took their kids to the playground and being able to see this transformation of the city was really remarkable. That's actually where I met technology for the first time because I was in this role starting as I said, in 2005/6, and at the time we were primarily focused on the city's growth and how the city was going to be ready for what we saw as citizenship grow.

As residents, the city was getting larger, more residents were moving to the city and that's where we were when the financial services crash happened in 2007/2008 the ground feels like it's shaking underneath your feet. We don't really know where the industry is going to end up. For me at that point, I had already moved over and become the Deputy Chief of Staff for Economic Development. In that role got to see what we as a city do, as a platform do in order to, on the one hand, maintain talent here, make sure that great people continue to live, work, and play and choose New York and on the other hand partner with industry, partner with sectors that are going to grow. For me, that was my first introduction to startups, my first introduction to VC, to this whole ecosystem approach.  That's where I've spent the rest of my career, really working with elements of that ecosystem.

You’re in New York... and now you're in Jerusalem. How did that happen? 

Yonit Serkin: I spent my early years in Israel family was very, very Zionistic. That's why they choose a name like Yonit for me. I'd always kept in mind that I would want to spend my time back in Israel and had the opportunity in 2010. My husband and I decided to come to Israel for a little while and see how it felt. We gave ourselves three years. We said, we'll come for three years and then we'll reevaluate. It's been 11 years.  I think we're sticking it out. I came to Israel and I have to say that when I came, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do with my life. Obviously had a pretty significant background in economic development on the one hand and in politics on the other and wasn't quite sure exactly where I would fit in and pretty quickly found myself in the venture space working with investments specifically.  I started off at one VC, helped found a VC, and then moved onto a corporate development arm that you mentioned Moonscape. For me, this was a way to partner with entrepreneurs from the other side. In the city of New York, I was really thinking about what could we holistically as a platform, as a city do in order to create the conditions so that entrepreneurs choose this location. Now I got to partner from the other side and say, okay, as an investor, how can I be the partner of choice for entrepreneurs? What do they need in order for them to grow and to really help actualize their solutions? That's what I got to do, for several years as an investor. I found myself really navigating or helping entrepreneurs navigate the space between themselves and corporate which I think is something that certainly was something that we understood as being critically important. Corporates not only are themselves customers, but they're the most significant channel to users to users, to other customers, especially for startups.

On the other end, they operated at a totally different speed, different mechanism, different language even than most Israeli entrepreneurs are operating. I found myself really in this interesting space between the two when I was approached by MassChallenge, which lives in that space, MassChallenge, which is a nonprofit that's designed to help entrepreneurs leverage and grow their solutions by connecting with ecosystems, which include multi-nationals, investors, academia, government. For me, this was the coalition of everything that I had been working with and I got the chance to essentially speak with all of these different stakeholders in support of entrepreneurial spirit and new startups, and new solutions. After spending about five years in the investment space I've spent the last five years of my career with ass challenge Israel building and growing our engagements here in the city.

I'm sure that everybody knows but for maybe the one or two people who do not know what MassChallenge is, could you please elaborate a little bit about it?

Yonit Serkin: Sure.  MassChallenge was founded to be a tool, a platform to help entrepreneurs grow solutions in meaningful ways around the country, around the world really. So, what we do is operate either accelerator, innovation programs and all sorts of other engagements that help on the one hand entrepreneurs grow their companies and on the other hand, help innovators incorporates or in government or in academia connect with those solvers. So, we operate actually in seven different cities around the world. We were founded in Boston and Massachusetts in 2009, and since then have grown to seven other locations around the world. We've been here in Israel, in Jerusalem since 2016, and are today operating our sixth accelerator. 249 companies have already come through MassChallenge Israel, and they've gone on and raised over half a billion dollars of investment and they're creating jobs over the world, and we're a nonprofit. We're here really to just help these engagements happen, help these solvers and challenges identify one another, facilitate those introductions and we don't take anything from the startups. We are here to help facilitate that growth.

Before we jump into digital health and health tech and based on what we were talking about earlier and your experience. We just aired an interview with Yoav Fisher, and he also comes from the economic stimulus angle of the ecosystem. I think you have a wider view of the use of startup ecosystems and that type of activity to create economic stimulus on an international level. Do you think that the way it's being used in Israel is different from other locations and are you seeing that specifically around health tech and digital health? Is Israel making the right choices to use this startup ecosystem as an engine to fuel the economy in Israel?

Yonit Serkin: So, I think there are two elements to it. A really great question there. The first is that we see startups as a really important engine for job creation. We know that ultimately the jobs of the future are going to be created not only by major companies that add one more seat to their table. If anything, we're seeing frankly, the opposite trend happening, where companies are becoming more efficient using fewer people to do the same sort of work. On the other hand, we do know that job creation is largely going to come from somebody who has an idea that's been sitting in their drawer for so long, or what would today be a small business that experiences some sort of exponential growth and that's the way that we create new jobs for the future. So, we do see startups as being a critical element of that sort of economic development.

In Israel what we see as being a unique opportunity and challenge is a connection to the market. So, we in Israel are hyper-focused as Israelis, not just MassChallenge. We are hyper-focused on markets that are outside of here. That's actually a very unique thing. It's something that we might not even give ourselves sufficient credit for how unique and how special that is because of the ability to sit in one place, recognize the needs of people who are not yourself and try to understand how you can actually go to market in a different place and recognize that that's a critical thing from the first moment and have to build your company around it. That's a really unique and special skill. We see actually at MassChallenge that a lot of companies who come from outside of Israel to Israel to accelerate are doing it for that purpose. They understand that Israelis have cracked the nut around going to market in other places and they want to be part of that.

In the health tech space specifically, there's an added element because it's not just about having great technology or great innovation or having figured out the most perfect molecule for a specific type of solution because there's a whole other business to understand. If you go to market in the US based on an Israeli technology in the healthcare space, there's a whole host of regulations that you have to now grapple with. If you're doing that and go into the market in China or in Europe or elsewhere in Asia, there's a whole other host of regulations to deal with. I think that's where we have a lot of work definitely where we've been focusing, but it's also a place where we have a lot of work and opportunity to improve. If we can shorten the distance, shorten the learning curve for entrepreneurs in the space so that they can more quickly get to market without the sort of challenges of having to readjust and change and think again of their innovation for specific markets in the health tech regulatory environment specifically, I think there's a great opportunity for us to do even more and even better in the years ahead.

MassChallenge is very different to any other accelerator. Unlike most accelerators it is not  industry-focused. It's a beautiful mix of getting the 500 or so applicants down to 50 in a given cohort (plus or minus and) they're all from different walks of life. Why are you doing this and why do you think this is a plus?

Yonit Serkin: That's exactly right. So, we have a call for applications that's quite broad. We're really looking for people who are making an impact and solving major challenges around the world. Essentially every year, what we're allowing the market to do is to tell us where the innovation is coming from. So, there'll be some years where we'll see lots of companies that are solving challenges in cyberspace, and then we'll see lots of companies that are solving challenges in digital health space or in the pharma space or in education technologies, or in a whole host of different things. It allows us to be quite nimble about what we're focused on in terms of the startups, but there's something incredible that happens when you see entrepreneurs who are tackling problems from totally different perspectives that end up engaging with one another and seeing how each other's working.

Part of what we believe is that in that meeting of entrepreneurs, you can actually find really, really incredible solutions. It might be from a use case perspective like, oh, I had no idea that that technology could be relevant for this other use case. We've seen that happen where digital health companies are actually relevant for defense companies because they didn't necessarily see that match was happening. We'll even just see entrepreneurs who open each other's eyes to innovation that's happening in their sector. That they're just not aware of. I will say that as companies get more advanced MassChallenge does have some programs that are more sector-focused.

So, for example, in Boston, we do run a health tech accelerator that is hyper-focused on health tech and connecting between specific health companies and the types of startups and can support their gaps. But as we are in the early stages, we absolutely believe that there are more synergies that happen amongst the entrepreneurs than we could expect, and it is really beautiful to see the way these founders work with one another and teach one another. That's something that we don't believe we could have in the same sort of capacity and engagement level if we were solely focused on a specific sector but rather the fact that we can open things up, allows for much more of this engagement.

We interviewed Talia Cohen-Salal a few weeks ago. She was lovely, and we asked her what was the benefit you received out of the program? I thought a little bit about it and if you think about the spheres of knowledge, there are things that “you know, you know”, there are things that, “you know you don't know”, and finally, there are things that “you don't know, you don't know”, which is the largest of them all. That was the main help (the interaction, the mentorship, etc. that you deliver to these companies is where the main benefit exists.

Yonit Serkin: Yeah, I think because we operate first of all, and we have this ecosystem approach. So, obviously, we're working with entrepreneurs and startups, but in that work, we're actually bringing to the table a host of stakeholders and some of them were stakeholders that they would not know to look for. So, if I'm in the digital health space, I probably know that I should talk to the HMO's and I should talk to researchers and I should talk to hospitals and perhaps pharmaceuticals, but I may not know that there's actually a really relevant use case for food and beverage companies or for companies that are outside of my supposed geographic focus.

It's that I think the perspective that can be really, really impactful for how startups grow and frankly, how corporates connect entrepreneurs. Again, they too are very focused on specific sectors, and sometimes the ability to look an extra 15 degrees to the sides can really help open up a whole new revenue stream or partnership opportunity and that's something that we're really excited to see happen.

I'm going to ask specifically about the accelerator model because I grew up within the accelerator space and it was a few years back, but it's come to, a situation where there are hundreds and thousands of acceleration programs, challenges, bridge programs, pilot programs. They're everywhere. I think it's quite obvious what the startups get out of it and you've named a few of those, but what do the corporates get out of these programs? When is it the right choice to run an accelerator program?

Yonit Serkin: Such a great question and I think even at MassChallenge, we've seen an evolution of our work. As I mentioned, when we first launched in 2009, the idea of being a nonprofit that takes no equity from the startups and has an ecosystem approach. These were all incredibly new ideas to bring to market. Then there are in fact some geographic locations where when we come in and we're a nonprofit accelerator, that's engaged with startups who are tackling a whole host of diverse challenges and we work at the scale that we do. You mentioned before we were talking about 40 to 50 companies every single time. All of those things were incredibly unique ideas and new ones to bring to market. So, I think on the one hand we are seeing that has been a unique component that we brought, and we've seen over the course of the last decade that, that keeps changing.

There are lots more accelerators out there. The notion of non-profit accelerators is not wholly unique to us. We see that from all other places. I think for us, what we've seen and what I'm trying to do here in Israel is to be very, very focused on what we do specifically well. We're operating an international accelerator in Israel. So, when you come here, you are in fact, amongst an international audience, 30% of our startups are not residents of Israel. They're not here, they're not building their companies here. They're connecting through Israel, but they're not physically here. Normally they are physically here, but they are not domiciled here. I think that that's a unique element of ours. The other is that we are also very, very focused on building your bridges to market. We're not the place to go as you're trying to build out your first use case or your first element of product development. We're the place to go once you understand how your solution serves markets outside of Israel.

That's the sort of focus and clear picture that I want the startups to have when they come in because that can help them actually achieve much better results. For the corporates what we're seeing is that engaging with accelerators allows them not only to access startup. We know that corporates can get to startups and startups want to get to corporates but the two don't necessarily speak the same language nor do they have necessarily an agreed-upon framework in which they can operate together. That's what we do. We come in and we set expectations fairly between the two of them. We help facilitate the relationship, which doesn't mean let me introduce you and then call me one year celebrating the joint venture, but rather help them actually meet KPIs that they've agreed upon together.

So, we escort the relationship throughout and that can be tremendously helpful. That can be the difference between success and failure. So, that's something that we're seeing much, much more of. If you ask about the trends that we're seeing we are on the one hand seeing more focus. We talked about the health tech accelerator, which we're operating for later stage companies. That's really much more, as I said hyper-focused on a specific challenge and a specific startup that can fit that. We're also seeing a lot of interest from what I'd say is non-traditional players. So, in the US we work with the air force. Had you told me two years ago that the air force was going to be launching a lab at MassChallenge it would have seemed perhaps really new, really out there, but we're seeing government entities that recognize that their ability to access innovation is crucial.

We're seeing that here as well. We have interest from government ministries. We already work with government players. We see it from academia. People who recognize that they want to help the professors actually be able to build more companies out of their IP and putting together not just the match between, we know obviously of tech transfer offices and the likes over the course of many years. It's not just about matching IP with CEOs, but rather building a whole framework that can help create companies and recognizing that that takes a few extra steps. So, we are seeing what I would say is a maturation of the acceleration model being much clearer about what both startup companies and corporates need to do in order to get the most out of this relationship and recognizing that having an entity that can help support the relationships between these two players is something that doesn't end. That's something that needs to be all throughout the engagement and not something that just ends at hello essentially.

Chen: Making sure that everybody speaks the same language is a challenge, isn't It?

I must ask you a question about COVID because it's a COVID area. MassChallenge Jerusalem is based in a beautiful building just outside of Machane Yehuda. I was lucky enough to visit a few times and to give some talks there. Then some of it is around the atmosphere of people coming in, sharing ideas et cetera. What happened this year?

Yonit Serkin: Yeah. So, this was really a tough one, and it also met us in really crucial moments. So, we were selecting our startups for the 2020 cohort the very same week that Israel entered its first serious lockdown. So, literally every hour I would listen to the news, and then I'd have to, okay, so we're going to have the startups in this sort of format. We're going to have the judges and this sort of format. Okay, we're going to have to change it up. We're going to do it in a different sort of setting. We're going to have bigger rooms. We had to work on the fly. We ended up moving the entire selection process and accelerator online for the very first time as we were growing and moving and making decisions. I have to say that it is remarkable in a very positive sense how the entrepreneurs were able to take this opportunity by both hands and move forward and I've been so impressed by the entrepreneurs. So, on the one hand, we moved the entire accelerator to be online, which was new for MassChallenge as an entity, and now all of the MassChallenges are doing that now for the second time in 2021.

It actually enabled us to really leverage new relationships. So, for once we didn't have to deal with dimensions like time and space. I keep saying, we came to the future where we didn't know, we no longer had to deal with the dimensions of time and space. In previous years, what we would do is bring our winners to the East Coast, to New York, and to Boston. There was a lot of content we had to leave for only those 10 winners and only to be done in New York or in Boston because everything was physical. Now, we were actually able to introduce experts from truly all over the world and world-class leaders who suddenly were able to make time for early-stage companies and who could connect in this much more organic way than they ever had before. So, that was, I think, a real unique benefit to this, to this time. The others that we saw, we developed community in a new way.

If in the past community meant the people that you drank coffee with on your way to and from the shuk or the people you ran into on the train and then walk together to our building. Now, community was something we could be really thoughtful about. We created these, we call them pods, these engagements were six or seven startups meet every week together for an hour and it's the let down your hair. It's the complaint in a way that you don't have other people to complain to. It's get to the real challenges, the things that you feel in your gut, the things that make you worried at night, and to have other people that are going through the same thing that you can share that with. It's pretty unique and special and we've seen that these relationships that we started amongst the entrepreneurs online have continued now and it's been eight months. So, that's actually, I think, a real remarkable and great way to move forward. The other thing that we're seeing and we're seeing this year because, in 2021, we're again doing the accelerator virtually is the difference in the pace at which we're experiencing COVID in Israel versus in other places.

We have 30% of our entrepreneurs who are living in countries that are simply not open to travel. The vaccine, if it's been started to be deployed, has not been deployed anywhere near the percentages that we're seeing here in Israel. For me, it's a real learning experience and a real testament to what has gone right about vaccine distribution here in Israel versus other places I talked to the other Managing Directors of MassChallenges all over the world. We're in Switzerland, we're in the US, we're in Mexico and the gravity of the situation in different places is really one that, but for those relationships, I'm not sure I would have felt as intimately as I do now. I think that that's something that's also pretty special and unique about COVID. Then the final thing that I think we need to also remember is that a lot of the corporates to whom Israeli entrepreneurs are looking to reach out are going through COVID at a different pace than we are.

So, if you're a major corporate with hundreds of thousands of employees based in the US for example, you're seeing vaccine distribution happened at a totally different rate. You're seeing the work from home becoming a much more significant element of your future. You may be choosing not to ever come back or you may be choosing to come back and very, very minor ways. That affects the way you do business. That affects the way you engage with potential customers as well as potential suppliers and having our entrepreneurs or being able to teach our entrepreneurs how to engage with that changing reality is one of the things that we're really, really focused on, because we think that there's going to be ramifications of that for years to come.

I think that kind of international world that you live in gives you a very different perspective. I'm going to direct us in a bit of a different direction and focus really on health tech. Why is health tech a priority for MassChallenge? Where did that come from generally and specifically in Israel? In addition, are there any verticals MassChallenge is paying more attention to for the future such as social impact, sustainability?

Yonit Serkin: Great question. I think the first the first question about health tech I want to even it's like a happy accident, but it's not actually an accident at all. Our home base, the place that we were launched is Boston and Boston has a unique center of excellence in gravity around health tech, whether it's from the hospitals or from the universities that are based there. We're just seeing incredible energy, engine around health technologies. I think that's something that we were able to capitalize on and really gravitate towards as MassChallenge all through the years, I've seen tremendous innovation in that space. We saw similar things happening in Israel. So, once we started launching in Israel in 2016, every year, we've consistently gotten about 25% of our applicants to come from the broad health space from pharma, from assistive technologies, from digital health.

So, we are absolutely seeing that Jerusalem is become, or has become this center of gravity in the health tech space. I think that has something to do with the incredible hospitals that are here. It has something to do with the universities that are here. There's just, again, this sort of energy or center of gravity around health tech that is also here in Jerusalem. I think for us, the ability to connect between these two centers is a unique asset, So, if you were in the health tech space and you come to MassChallenge Jerusalem, and then you're starting to do your work in the US there's a natural home for you then in Boston, and you walk through an open door. People understand what you've come from. People understand the sort of quality assurance that a MassChallenge can stamp for you and that can be a really important entry point

In terms of where we're seeing the future go, I think over the course of the last several years the word impact has played at MassChallenge significantly. We've always said that what we're looking to see are companies that are affecting a meaningful impact as they define it themselves. I always joke that whenever I talk about impact at MassChallenge making buttloads of money is impact. If you're going off and you're going to create a company that is going to revolutionize something and be able to return to its investor’s significant amounts, that's an impact. However, we're also looking for solutions that are themselves impactful. I think that we're actually meeting something that is a trend and, and Chen getting back to your question maybe it's actually energized or leveraged by the COVID era. I don't know if we're post-COVID, but this COVID era where people are looking for, meaning people are looking for impact, not in the fluffy, fuzzy nice way, but to really feel like they're part of something that's doing good, that's solving a challenge, that's making the world better, making our communities better and that is something that we are focused on now in a much more deliberative way than perhaps we have in the past.

We, this year launched along with our friends at Arc Impact Foundation, launched the impact series. So, we're actually trying to give our 42 startups in 2021 a set of tools that help them (a) understand their own impact. How to tell that narrative, how to evaluate your impact. What's the story behind that? How to connect with the types of players be they institutions, because we do see that there's at least a foundation in government funds that are available for startups who look at impact specifically and can measure it as well as traditional investors who added this as one of their meaningful mechanisms of trying to understand how the startups are meeting an SDG goal, for example, making the world a better place, helping people access healthcare, helping people access education and the like. Then the final element of that which is one that we're focused on as well is around making stronger, more sustainable companies through a better understanding of ESGs.

We know that in the world or outside of Israel, ESGs have been a topic of conversation particularly in the public markets for almost a decade, but it's not a conversation that has yet gotten to startups here in Israel. We're really interested and committed to making sure that our entrepreneurs better understand the way that these sorts of decisions that they take around their own governance, around their environmental impact, around sustainability, that these are the types of decisions that they can make now when they are a small company that will ultimately affect the way that they grow, that affects the way that they recruit team members, that affects the types of customers that will want to work with them and ultimately affect the type of funders who are going to come into play with them. So, that's also a focus of ours for the future.

The companies who do not join MassChallenge cannot benefit from your liaison capabilities, but many want to work with corporations. What are your best three tips for startups in the health tech space who want to work with a larger corporation or want to solicit relationships with them?

Yonit Serkin: Yeah, so I think the first is around understanding the regulatory environment in which they want to be operating. So, there are certainly some companies who won't have to engage with us, but the vast majority of healthcare-related companies will need to, at some point answer what regulatory environment or regulatory solutions they have to come into play with. So, I'd say number one is, do your research and understand what are you stepping into in terms of the regulations that fall on your company? I think number two is to recognize the longevity or the length that you're walking into. Corporates of every kind operated at a different speed than startups do. It can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be the death now for startups.

So, to understand that you have the capacity to work with someone over a long period of time, and even to understand that it's going to take a long period of time to get to decisions. The final thing is to really be thoughtful about the language that you use. I think ultimately, we say it in jest that corporate-speak a different language, but every corporate has its own personality that is told through their own language and to be really thoughtful and sensitive to how language plays at any given corporate. To be able to tell your story within the lens of that language is one that's really important I think to help the recipient, the receiver of that information categorize you properly and fit you into the buckets that they understand. It's very challenging for a corporate who's being inundated by information, being inundated by requests to then have to do the work of translating that which you start up have said into that which they need to then sell to the corporate behind them. If you help them do that work, then you are already 10 steps ahead of any other entity that's reaching out.

All starts with a good story. We've been interviewing a lot of female CEOs, but I think that you're in a position that looks at female leadership in technology generally not just in health but in other technology sectors. I want to believe that there's a change and that we are seeing more female leaders within the technology space. Are you seeing a change?

Yonit Serkin: I think there's something shifting, but it's happening very slowly. I wish that I could come out with a much more positive or forceful yes. I think over the course of what we've seen. So, over the course of the last six years we've seen somewhere between around 30-ish percent of the startups that apply to MassChallenge have a female co-founder. That number moves a little bit, but it has stayed largely static during that time. I'd say this year, we actually have more. This year, we have about 40% of the startups that have actually made it into MassChallenge are led by women and have at least one female co-founder. But as I said, we're not seeing huge changes in the numbers. I think COVID is has impacted female leadership in an outsized way not only because I think we all hear sort of the stresses of the COVID changes has fallen primarily to women. But I think because we see, and this we know outside of MassChallenge as well, we know that women have a more challenging time raising capital after they've been through one of these programs like ours and others.

It's not just about when they raise capital, but that the time it takes as much, much longer, and often the valuations are lower. In a time like COVID when investors want to be perhaps less risk, they might be more risk-averse, less willing to take risk then investing in women becomes a much more challenging step because it involves being thoughtful about it. So, on the one hand, we are seeing more investors who are out there who are looking for these opportunities and on the other hand, we are seeing forces that make it challenging to actually see capital come to women-led initiatives. I'm absolutely committed to making sure that that doesn't continue. We have seen, and we've seen from investors with whom we worked very, very closely that the investments that they make in female-led startups are incredibly strong. The companies are growing well. They are going out there and they're actually selling very significantly. So, we know that this is a good decision.

I see our role as being able to introduce more investors who are looking for vetted quality investments to our startups and our role is to help our entrepreneurs be as ready as is humanly possible for those engagements with the investors so that we're taking out as many obstacles as we can to make sure that investors are meeting the types of startups. That they can actually and actively invest in and that entrepreneurs are better prepared than ever before so that they can take those investments and translate those into meaningful growing successful companies. We're doing as much as we can around that. We've been focusing at MassChallenge on not only attracting more entrepreneurs who happen to be female but more mentors and experts who are women and more investors who are women. As the numbers grow, we just, see that there are more and more synergy, more and more success fewer times than anybody has to walk into the room and be the only fill in your blank in the space. So, that's something that we are absolutely focused on.

Yonit Serkin's Profile on LInkedIn

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