Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Michelle Kwok, Co-founder of FLIK, a platform & community hub for female founders and learners based in Canada.
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Here’s what FLIK is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Female founders are underresourced and many didn't have any female mentors when they were starting their journey and are now looking to give back to the next generation of female founders. Likewise, young women today don't have a lot of access to mentorship or career-relevant experience in the industries they are interested in.
The Solution:
FLIK (Female Laboratory of Innovative Knowledge) is a platform and community hub that connects female founders and leaders with learners and career transitioners from around the world through meaningful apprenticeships. Thus, underresourced female founders get the additional support they need while students and anyone who is looking to learn can get meaningful experience and mentorship from these leaders.
The Team:
I'm the co-founder and CEO of FLIK. I studied Medical Sciences at University. My co-founder is Ravina Anand, she did her undergrad degree in Cell Biology. We both went through the same issues, struggling to find mentors as women in STEM. We met at Next 36, one of the top entrepreneurship programs for young founders in Canada, and just really connected. We're now a team of 9 people.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
We started FLIK as a media company in the beginning. We started reaching out to female founders and just wanted to talk to them and showcase them on our website. Founders kept mentioning how underresourced and undercapitalised they were and how much they lacked mentorship from women they could resonate with.
As a result of the interviews, many young women started reaching out to us saying they would love to meet some of these women, or that they didn't know such female founders existed, especially in certain industries such as STEM and tech.
So, we thought about how we could make these two sides meet each other, and that's how the apprenticeship model came to be. Since then our community has grown to over 8000 women in 55 countries across the world.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
In the last 10 years, female-founded global startups have doubled, but venture capital funding to female founders is still at a low. This discourages not only current female founders but also future female founders.
More than ever our world is shifting toward changing social issues, with a focus on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and one of those SDGs is gender equality. The entire world is currently looking at how to create equality for women.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We celebrate small successes all the time. Something that really stands out to me though is being able to hire people and pay them and ourselves full-time salaries. This has been a huge win for us.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Mental health has been a big challenge recently. Balancing work and life can be a real struggle. As the CEO, I feel like I need to be available for people to contact me 24/7, so this is definitely something I am working on more. We have talked to our team about this too and are all going to start working on improving our work-life balance.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I wish I had known that Legal and Accounting are real and important things! We spent so much time and money sorting out legal and accounting issues retroactively, so I wish I had dedicated the resources from the very start to do the incorporation with a lawyer and set up our accounts with an actual accountant.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
People don't care about your business as much as you do. You will always be the one who cares the most. This is why you might feel like everyone is watching you, and therefore you must be on and ready 24/7. But people likely aren't and people are very understanding. So it's okay to take a small step back sometimes and maybe not answer that email for a day.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Find a co-founder, somebody who has complementary skills as you, maybe someone you've worked well with before, or a close friend whose working style you know. If you're serious about it, make sure to set up everything correctly at the beginning, such as setting up the Shareholders' Agreement. This will avoid issues later on if you start generating revenue. This is a small investment to make to protect you in the future if your company does grow big.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Hire for soft skills over hard skills. People might be the best at a certain skill, but if they don't fit your team culture, they don't truly believe in your missions, and they don't align with your personal and business values, they're going to be a bad hire. People can improve on the relevant hard skills later.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
My friends inspire me all the time. They have supported me through everything, helped me get over the imposter syndrome and I definitely wouldn't be here without them.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett