underrepresented founders and gives our investors a return on the investment along with a myriad of other perks and benefits.
JENNIFER SCHWERT CREATOR/FOUNDER Tell everyone who you are and what you do. A. I’m Jenn and I’m an artist, engineer, inventor and founder. I take ideas from napkin sketches to prototypes to building them to launching them and build the brand and business plan around the product too. I’m also a new mother to a 4 month old baby girl we’ve nicknamed The Maximax, a stepmom to a sassy, strong 14 year old daughter we’ve nicknamed Turbo. I’m an activist for animal welfare and rights. And I’m an investor in startups, real estate, stocks and cryptocurrency. I’m adamant that everyone, every single person, is an investor with their time, attention, energy, focus, saving, spending and investing. If we all understood that, and how much power we have, things would be wildly different.
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WIB PROMOTING NETWORK
What are you most proud of in your motherhood journey? A. I love that The Maximax is happy and healthy and doing great. But I’m really proud that I’ve not succumbed to the mom guilt and comparison trap that society wants to mire us in. Building and launching STEMinists with a newborn means I’m not her only caregiver and I’m more than ok with that, I’m proud of it. When I’m not taking care of her, she gets to spend time and bond with her dad and others and I get to build something that will change our future and other people’s futures. Let’s talk about your business “STEMinists” and the motivation behind it? A. STEMinists is a combination of Kickstarter (crowdfunding), SharkTank (pitching and investing) and YCombinator (incubating and accelerating) that utilizes NFTs to fund new companies led by
The motivation: I’ve spent my career building and launching other people’s product ideas…and making them a lot of money! When I went to get my MBA I pitched my product ideas to VCs and did several business plan competitions. I’d done more work developing and refining my idea, finding the product-market fit and building the business plan and would always get really close to getting the funding but lose out in the end to a team of male founders with a less developed idea. Estimates currently have women founders getting about 3% of VC funding. That got old real fast. When I found NFT collections last year I saw a way to raise capital outside of the current VC system by using NFTs to crowdsource the funding. And immediately decided I wouldn’t just raise the capital I needed, I’d bring a whole bunch of other underrepresented founders with me and get them the capital they need too. The Nitty Gritty: STEMinists is a collection of 10,000 NFTs featuring a STEMinist character (female, non-binary, and male), a quote, 6 facial expressions that encompass the range of women’s personalities and great fashion. It was important to me that they show women in all ways - body types, mothers, pregnant, dressed down, dressed up, dressed elegantly, different cultures, different ethnicities, different emotions (angry, frustrated, “over it,” elated, intriguing, proud), etc. For too long women have been boxed into certain prescribed representations so this collection breaks through that. We have included a percentage of the characters that are male to let men know that we are not trying
