Making a compelling pitch to investors and potential clients can be tricky for any founder, however experienced. But, for Latina entrepreneurs, balancing their culture’s emphasis on humility with the confidence and self-promotion required for pitching can feel impossible.
“Humility is built into our DNA,” says Andrea Lisbona, founder and CEO of Touchland, the Miami-based company that took hand sanitizer from classroom staple to high-end luxury.
Latina founders in the U.S. operate over two million businesses and growing. Even as the demographic makes entrepreneurial strides, however, limited access to funding and resources continues to be one of the biggest challenges Latino businesswoman face when starting a business. Less than 2 percent of venture capital funds go to Latino owned businesses, and in 2022, just 1.9 percent of VC funds went to female founders of all ethnicities.
1. Read into your story
Being humble is important to Ashley Tyrner, but there’s one thing she’s unabashedly proud of: her personal story.
Tyrner is a businesswoman who founded the produce delivery service Farmbox Direct in 2014, motivated by her experience living with her parents in the middle of an Arizona food desert a few years prior. She was relying on food stamps at the time and faced a 20- to 30-minute trek to the nearest grocery store only to find less-than-ideal options. Two months later, she put that experience, and her passion for addressing food insecurity, into action in New York City.
2. Showcase your personality
Vanessa Karel’s least favorite part of her pitch deck is her accomplishments slide.
That slide, which is crowded and cluttered with logos from news outlets where she’s been featured and organizations she’s worked with, is evidence of the success Karel has found as a two-time founder. Her latest venture, a San Francisco-based travel platform called Greether, was founded in 2021 to help connect women travelers with vetted female tour guides across the globe.
When pitching greetings to Silicon Valley investors, Karel relies on her sense of humor to cut through the sense of awkwardness she feels in showcasing the accomplishments slide. Make no mistake — she’s not cracking jokes nonstop throughout her pitch. Rather, she gives herself a “jumping board” by starting her pitch with a smile and a lighthearted remark like “Here we go!”
“When I hear people laugh, it calms my nerves [enough] to let the achievements slide sink [in],” says Karel.
Karel says that keeping her personality at the center of her pitch is essential to finding investors who appreciate who she is as well as the company she’s built.
3. Embrace humility
Lisbona, who has secured over $1.8 million for Touchland since its founding in 2010, doesn’t necessarily see Latinas’ tendency toward humility as a downside. “I don’t think humbleness and success have to affect one another,” she says. “I know that humbleness will follow me wherever I go. Even if we take this company to IPO, it will be there.”
To Lisbona, the answer is not to try to quash or overcome one’s natural humility, but to embrace it and balance it with determination. Because resilience isn’t just about pride and belief in yourself, she says. It’s also about faith.
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