‘You are not defined by your past’ and ‘never stop fighting’.
That was the rallying call from serial entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow after being announced as the co-chair of the Department for Business and Trade’s Invest in Women Taskforce.
The group’s primary aim is to make the UK the best place in the world to be a female founder.
Currently businesses with all-female founders receive just two per cent of all venture capital funding.
The taskforce is focussed on creating the world’s largest funding pot totalling £250m for female founders and is committed to:
- Boost angel investment for female-led businesses;
- Enable more women to become angel investors;
- Increase access to finance for women; and
- Boost micro-funding.
Wosskow, who is the co-chair alongside Barclay’s Hannah Bernard, is the co-founder of the leading career network for women, AllBright, which she exited in September 2022.
She vowed to ‘break down barriers’ and opened up about her own journey on LinkedIn.
She wrote: “I’ve been a single mum of two little kids. I’ve been sick in the hospital for weeks. I’ve been labelled as so many things as a female leader. None of these things define me.
“Feel stuck and like you’ll never get out of where you are right now? You’re wrong. You will.
“What worked for me?
- I stopped giving any power to my past.
- I focused on working ridiculously hard and made that my primary goal.
- I couldn’t control the result but I could always control how much I put in.
- I focused on where I wanted to go, what I wanted to build, and who I wanted to work with.
“All the rest: the awards, the exits, the friendships, the money, and so on, just followed as a by-product.
“You are not defined by your past. You’re defined by what you choose to do today.
“Your comeback story will be an epic tale of rising from the ashes.
“Once you deal with the emotions of whatever happened to you, keep that aside and move on.
“Focus ahead. Never stop fighting.”