What in the Tech

You’ve started your business, you’re starting to pitch your idea to investors and potential future team members, and you’re thinking about how to tell your story to the world. You don’t need to wait until you’ve raised your seed round to begin laying the groundwork for your future PR strategy.

Terms like social responsibility and social impact have been labelled as jargon. Once something becomes jargon in an already polarized society, creating consensus around the definitions of the terms becomes challenging. Covering the fundamentals always helps. Before we outline the four fundamentals, you need to understand, as a founder or leader of a business, how to bake in social responsibility from the start.

As a queer, fully tattooed woman, I've always stood out like a sore thumb in the entrepreneur and VC world. At first, this made me uneasy, and I attempted to conceal my true self. But soon, I realized that by hiding my authenticity, I wasn't just betraying myself—I was undermining my mission. It dawned on me that embracing my uniqueness was the key to my success.

The old adage, “What gets measured gets done,'' has never been truer than it is today. In this fast-paced digital world, everything can be and is being measured. For founders and leaders of a business, data can be an internal compass – whether it’s analyzing customer feedback or tracking user engagement metrics, data offers startups a clear understanding of your target audience, competitive landscape, and growth trajectory.

To start, let’s talk through what bootstrapping truly means. Bootstrapping a startup means scaling your business with little to no venture capital or outside investment. It means relying on your own personal savings, alongside any revenue the company is able to generate, to operate and grow the business.

All this to say that early stage investing can often be a lot more of an art than a science. There is rarely a concrete “perfect time” to start engaging with these investors, and you are way more likely to feel that you waited too long to start approaching VCs than the other way around. So, where to start? OFFICE HOURS My first recommendation for talking to VC’s before fundraising is to do so by signing up for open office hours of someone within the firm.

Today marks a grim milestone in history: a convicted and legally defined sexual predator returns to the most powerful office in the world. For many, this feels like a nightmare ripped straight from the 1950s. But it’s 2025, and the world of tech isn’t far behind in its own retrograde slide - where power excuses cruelty and justice rarely serves the marginalized.