Melinda Hu
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Internship at Endeavor

The day after I returned from China, I started my summer 2018 internship at Endeavor, an organization that has enabled high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets since 1997.

Endeavor has a 5-step model , including an extensive search and selection process, to spread high-impact entrepreneurship around the world. It supports 1,000+ companies, providing ~1,700 Endeavor Entrepreneurs (EEs) access to capital, access to ta

Endeavor has a 5-step model, including an extensive search and selection process, to spread high-impact entrepreneurship around the world. It supports 1,000+ companies, providing ~1,700 Endeavor Entrepreneurs (EEs) access to capital, access to talent, and access to new markets.

As an intern on the Entrepreneur Selection & Growth team, I worked on launching Endeavor’s Women in High Impact Entrepreneurship (WHIE) Initiative. Through my research, my goal was to understand how to better encourage and support female entrepreneurship within Endeavor’s network.

I began my research with an assumption: those who work at Endeavor’s 100 top-performing companies are uniquely positioned to be high-tech founders themselves. If this is true, Endeavor should look at past Endeavor company employees when building

I began my research with an assumption: those who work at Endeavor’s 100 top-performing companies are uniquely positioned to be high-tech founders themselves. If this is true, Endeavor should look at past Endeavor company employees when building pipeline of female entrepreneurs.

A full 2.5 weeks of profile reading on Salesforce & searching/stalking on LinkedIn, company websites, and Crunchbase led to the above big spreadsheet of data on 533 C-Level Executives, both male and female.

Above are some of the overall stats from my data set. Digging further into this information, I focused on executives-turned-founders and disparities between male and female executives. I then visualized findings with Tableau.

Above are some of the overall stats from my data set. Digging further into this information, I focused on executives-turned-founders and disparities between male and female executives. I then visualized findings with Tableau.

Above is one of several dashboards I created to analyze the data I collected. I looked into several interesting variables, including geography, skill type, having a post-graduate degree, female-founded vs. non-female founded companies, industry vert

Above is one of several dashboards I created to analyze the data I collected. I looked into several interesting variables, including geography, skill type, having a post-graduate degree, female-founded vs. non-female founded companies, industry vertical, average age for founders (male vs. female), average age for non-founder executives (male vs. female), company size, company age, and company CAGR.

Here are just some of interesting findings after I fiddled with Tableau and Google Sheets:

- The Endeavor offices with the most women executives were not also the offices with the most executives working under women founders.

- The ratio of female to male executives in Retail & Consumer Tech and Education is almost 1:1, while the ratio is more 1:2 in Fintech, Enterprise Software, Smart City, Healthcare, and Data, Marketing, & Media.

- Of these 533 executives, the average age of a male executive is ~39, while that of female executive is ~37. (Male age > female age) But, if you subtract out non-founder executives, the comparison flips - the average age of a male founder is ~36, while that of a female founder is ~39. (Female age > male age)

- The proportion of women executives doesn’t increase as the size of the company gets bigger.

- There’s a statistically significant positive relationship between CAGR since selection (accepted into Endeavor) and having a female founder. (A teammate discovered this through STATA.)


As I was collecting data, I highlighted several women executives who had gone on to found their own companies or had previously founded companies. Afterwards, I was able to interview 5 of them. I wanted to understand their experiences as entreprene

As I was collecting data, I highlighted several women executives who had gone on to found their own companies or had previously founded companies.

Afterwards, I was able to interview 5 of them. I wanted to understand their experiences as entrepreneurs and what they believed was lacking in the ecosystem to increase female entrepreneurship. I summarized the insights from these conversations in a report that will be used to guide future Endeavor WHIE programming.

My other work for WHIE included creating Salesforce campaigns and reports to track the new webinar series and entrepreneur/mentor engagement.

Empowering women entrepreneurs is really important to me. (Side note: I’d love to talk to anyone about this!) Thus, I’m proud to have taken ownership of this project and have created a foundation for future WHIE efforts.