
Why Women Founders Get 2.3% of VC Funding and the Tactical Playbook to Change It with Anna Mazarsky
From The She Leads® Podcast - Wealth Building & Business Growth by Adrienne Garland | Business Growth & Wealth Advisor
May 1, 2026 · 1h 3m · Episode 205
About this episode
In this episode, Adrienne Garland interviews Anna Mazarsky about the challenges women founders face in securing VC funding and the solutions being developed to address these issues.
Women founders get 2.3% of VC funding. Not because they lack vision, grit, or ideas, but because the playbook they've been handed was built for men. In this episode, I sit down with Anna Mazarsky, founder of PinkX PowerCore, the first tactical platform built to close the funding gap from the inside out. Anna spent nearly two decades inside the fundraising world. When she pulled the data, she didn't find a confidence problem. She found a systems problem, a bias problem, and a pattern-matching problem no amount of mindset coaching was ever going to fix. So she stopped coaching and started building. We get into why female-led VC funds aren't moving the needle, why women consistently ask for less than they've earned the right to raise, and why 80% of something will always beat 100% of nothing. The system wasn't built for us. Anna is building the one that is. Chapters : 🌍 01:34 Meet Anna Mazarsky: two decades, 500+ startups, and the 2.3% gap that broke her 🇰🇿 04:37 From Kazakhstan to Greece: from bartender to fundraising powerhouse 📊 08:46 The article that changed everything and the data that made her stop coaching 🚫 11:04 "Not another women's program": the pushback that pushed…
People in this episode
Host: Adrienne Garland
Guest: Anna Mazarsky
Topics covered
- VC funding
- women founders
- fundraising
- gender bias
- entrepreneurship
- business growth
Keywords
- VC funding
- women entrepreneurs
- funding gap
- gender bias
- business growth
- PinkX PowerCore
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: PinkX PowerCore
Places: Kazakhstan, Greece
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