Redesigning the System for Women to Make More Money, With Cindy Gallop
💪Cindy Gallop is an entrepreneur who, in her own words, is ‘the Micheal Bay of business here to blow s**t up’. As the CEO and founder of Make Love, Not Porn, she's fighting for a fairer, truer representation of sex while promoting consent and communication.
💸More broadly, she is hugely passionate about women ‘making tonnes of money’ so that we can invest more in the things we believe in, as well as changing the world to build a more female-dominated financial ecosystem that serves women better.
💥Today on The Wallet:
1️⃣Cindy shares the challenges she faces securing funding for her start-up, how she designed a business model around her beliefs and values, and the struggles involved with building an adult content business.
2️⃣We discuss the disparity in funding between men, women, women of colour and minorities and the mindset shifts we need to see in investors to get more women funded both broadly and indiscriminately.
3️⃣Cindy tells me her experience of salary negotiations, how she has learnt to know her worth, the advice she shares with women to build their confidence in asking for more and how our micro-actions compound to be real change.
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You can listen (48 min) and subscribe here:
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your business model can be anything you want it to be
“We need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one is not working for us.”
Cindy Gallop’s startup, Make Love, Not Porn, is the world's first user-generated, human-curated, social sex video-sharing platform, celebrating real-world sex.
It’s important to design a business model around your own beliefs and philosophies. In Cindy’s case, one of her beliefs is that she feels very strongly that everybody should realise the value of what they create.
When you create something — anything — that gives other people pleasure, you should get a return on it. That’s why Cindy designed a revenue-sharing business model.
A very good starting point for designing your own business model is to ask yourself the question: ‘how would I like to make money?’. Shared values + shared action = shared profit.
Make Love, Not Porn was designed to be a self-sustaining business, and in Cindy’s perfect world, she would never have to raise funding. However, due to the restrictions related to adult content — such as not being able to be banked or even hire designers.
Being the founder of an adult content platform comes with significant challenges when looking for investors, too, because there is no way to research and target investors that would potentially be interested in this idea due to its personal and sensitive nature.
2. unashamedly set out to make a tonne of money
If you have a world-changing startup, Cindy says that your focus should be around changing the world to fit it — not the other way around.
There are two solutions to the problem of a lack of funding that goes toward women entrepreneurs and especially Black women. The first is that women go ahead and unashamedly make an ‘absolute goddamn f***ing s**t tonne of money’. The reason this is so important is that when each woman makes a huge amount of money, we can then build our own financial ecosystem — because the white male one is simply not working for us.
We also need to change the cultural context around us, because white men get funded on potential, white women get funded on proof and not even then, and Black women don’t get funded.
In a white male-dominated VC world, it is very easy for white male VC to look at a white male founder and feel an affinity toward them. White women get a lot more grilling from white male VC’s — Cindy equates this to something akin to a Spanish Inquisition — and Black women don’t even get past the threshold to get rejected.
Worse yet, Limited Partners don’t pour nearly as much money into female partnered funds as they do into male partnered funds.
None of this will change until female founders and female-founded funds get funded as broadly or indiscriminately as white male founders or white male founded funds do. Unfortunately, while the pie is getting bigger, women are still getting too small a slice of it.
In this context, we need to implement emotional tactics and solutions. Rational arguments for funding female founders do not work — for decades, we’ve had a tonne of hard data and statistics that prove that diversity drives business, but sadly, these facts do not change anything.
That’s why we have to drive a massive mindset shift in the marketplace amongst investors to redirect that capital to women. It’s all about redesigning the system.
3. demand what you are worth
Cindy was not always this confident about asking for money or talking about it openly. She is all too aware that being a woman, you are faced with virtually everything conspiring against you. That’s why it’s so important to learn to negotiate and to demand what you are worth.
Always negotiate, and what you ask for from your employer is the highest amount you can say without bursting out laughing.
Remember that people value you at the value you seem to put on yourself.
If you’re an entrepreneur, remember that you also need to ask for more — when you ask for tiny amounts, it comes across as if you don’t believe in your vision.
Don’t be afraid to bulls**t your way through because that’s precisely what white men do. In fact, no matter how much you think you are bulls**tting, you will most likely never bulls**t at the level white men do. You need to finally do yourself justice!
Cindy believes that a job is not a safe option. Ask yourself whose hands would you rather place your future in? A large corporate entity, or someone who will always have your best interests at heart — i.e: you.
If you are able to, consider attending The 3 Percent Conference — because you most likely don’t understand how much our industries under-represent, undervalue, and under-compensate women until you are somewhere that does. That’s why you should go: it’s amazing to experience being somewhere that truly celebrates you.
Change happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Every single one of us, every single day, taking micro-actions to change what we want to see change, cumulatively adds up and makes an enormous impact.
RESOURCES:
You can follow and connect with Cindy at:
Website: Make love not porn
Website: www.cindygallop.com
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/cindygallop
We shared some resources in this episode, all the links are below:
The 3% Movement
Book: Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It) by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
*** Our podcast partners PensionBee are also offering you a £25 pension contribution (£20, plus £5 in tax relief) when you sign up. To claim the offer, follow this link: https://www.pensionbee.com/vestpod. Capital at risk. ***