When Breen met Katrin de Haën, a serial entrepreneur, she realized women entrepreneurs could really benefit from well-connected and skilled advisors like Breen and her colleagues. Right away, Breen and Kat started helping women-led startups find advisors and funding which led them to aggregate women-led startup board opportunities into a board seat exchange accessible to qualified women. In 2021 Kat and Breen realized two things:  they had created a marketplace for under the radar board and investment opportunities and they were slowly but surely changing the demographics of the pipeline of ‘board-ready candidates’ by getting women on to the boards and cap tables of women-led startups. They were hacking the system when it came to launching a for-profit board career, and it was great, but they wanted to do more.

Women need to be on boards, but they also need funding, and they need to be writing checks. So The Fourth Effect created a ‘Back Room’ for founders, women-led funds, angels and limited partners to encourage women to invest in each other and open up their boards and cap tables as a way to further level the playing field.

Although the community was thriving and women were securing board and investment opportunities, Breen and Kat knew there was potential to drive systemic change on a much larger scale and make a dent in the gender wealth and funding gap if they could incentivize the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem- regardless of gender- to commit to tangible steps that would make diversity at the board level a reality and ensure a steady stream of board opportunities and qualified candidates.

Recent moves by NASDAQ (diversify or delist), the Securities and Exchange Commission and players like Goldman Sachs, not to mention the legislation in California requiring board diversity, all suggest we need an efficient, transparent ‘Market Network’ for diverse board candidates sooner rather than later. The Fourth Effect believes that it can be a resource and help to accelerate the change that is already in the air.