01 The Lie In Business
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01 The Lie In business
There is a myth that follows women in business like a shadow.
That you need to be better prepared. More credentialed. More certain. More ready.
Because the founders who “make it” have something you don't - better timing, the right connections, more confidence.
But the actual data tells a completely different story.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth's landmark research at the University of Pennsylvania studied every high-performance domain she could find: West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists,
rookie teachers in the toughest schools in America. In every single one,
grit predicted success more reliably than IQ, talent, or socioeconomic advantage. Not marginally. Decisively.
A Harvard Business School study tracking entrepreneurs over a decade found that the founders who ultimately built something weren't the ones who started with the best idea. They were the
ones who stayed in the game long enough to find the right one.
The Kauffman Foundation's longitudinal research found that the average successful founder had attempted 2.8 ventures before building the one that worked. Read that again.
The business you are running right now might be the one that works. Or it might be the one that teaches you everything you need for the one that does. Either way it counts.
The new currency isn't intelligence. It isn't who you know, how much you've raised, or how polished your pitch deck is.
It is persistence. And persistence is the one advantage no one can gate keep.
Anyone can keep going. Not everyone chooses to.
The founders F5 backs are the ones who kept rebuilding when the path disappeared.
F5 Collective backs women-owned businesses across Services, Health, and Consumer with growth capital, and the community infrastructure to scale.