Data analysis
| Illustrative quotes | Second-order themes | Aggregate dimensions |
|---|---|---|
| Personal factors | ||
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for approaching innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| I knew what I could do and that I could think analytically. I know the problem and I […] can also deal well with defeat. That was also a very important aspect for me. I knew that it was possible. (E17:40) | Self-efficacy | Confidence |
| It really came out of necessity. […] there was nothing at all at that time. (E9:20) | Opportunity recognition | |
| I already have a certain amount of experience and a track record that works in my favor, because I said to myself, even if it doesn’t work out, if you come back to the company in two years, well, okay, you can still do it. […] And I think having that comfort or knowing what you can do and knowing that you can bounce back in a lot of areas has at least made this a little bit more comfortable for me from a risk perspective. (E2:38) | Sense of security | |
| We just wrote a business plan, went to the [pitch], ended up in the interim awards and thought “yeah, it’s kind of cool and it’s fun”. (E19:16) | Intrinsic motivation | Inner drive |
| I think the very first phase was mainly driven by curiosity. I just wanted to try something out. (E7:28) | Risk taking | |
| I was very passionate about the subject. (E6:156) | Passion | |
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for consistently pursuing innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| Yes, of course it has grown a lot. I have more experience now and I think I’m in a good position at the moment. (E5:54) | Increased self-efficacy | Confidence |
| I enjoy it. I’ve been doing it for a few years now. I think it’s great. (E13:72) | Intrinsic motivation | Inner drive |
| Sometimes you just have to wait. […] And then sometimes you just have to keep going before it gets better again. Even if you didn’t think it would, somehow it always gets better. (E3:78) | Perseverance | |
| That’s what kept us going: Maybe the hope that it would work out, or the belief that it would work out in the end. (E18:46) | Hope for success | |
| No, I think I can really say that I don’t see any other alternative at the moment. (E14:80) | Lack of alternatives | Constraint |
| And then the fear of failure […]. Of course, as an achiever, it just drives you to keep going. (E1:42) | Fear of failure | |
| What has always held me back is my sense of responsibility to the investors. I have always felt that they gave me their money and told me they trusted me […]. Then I said: “This is their money and this is my jobto try everything to make it work”. (E2:50) | Entrepreneurial commitment | |
| Cognitive factors | ||
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for approaching innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| I have to honestly say that my two bosses, who were both male, often made decisions that I couldn’t really understand and I really saw all the potential in this area of industrial AI. (E1:6) | “Push”-factors | reconsidered |
| I found it all very exciting from a technological point of view. (E7:28) | Technological interest | Innovation |
| We do want to be there when this technology arrives in the industry […] (E12:8) | Practical orientation | |
| I immediately saw the purpose of the product and that you could somehow make people happier – just the fact that it makes them laugh again when they are in a really sad phase. (E18:26) | Social value creation | Social impact |
| I saw the fascination and also the necessity that we just have to change something about the environment. (E19:26) | Environmental value creation | |
| That also goes back a little bit to the idea of impact that I described at the beginning: to say that you are creating something that solves a problem somewhere and you are helping people with it. So, you have an impact, though not in the classic business sense, but for your own value creation. I think that’s the main motivation for me. (E2:40) | Sense of purpose | |
| You can become a potential employer, you can make everything that you may have found bad at previous employers better. And that has also motivated me to perhaps become a good employer, to build up a company in such a way that it attracts people who want to work for us. (E21:74) | Being a good employer | |
| I think the biggest motivation was actually being able to do what you want and not having anyone above you. […]I felt like I already knew what I was doing and I didn’t want to be held back anymore […] (E1:8) | Autonomy | Job empowerment and engagement |
| On the other hand, of course, it also gives you a certain flexibility in terms of working hours, in terms of the whole set-up, which you don’t necessarily have in a normal environment. (E2:26) | Flexibility | |
| I was well aware that it was also a kind of learning project and a very strong personal development project. (E24:58) | Learning and development | |
| I’m good at a lot of things, but I’m not excellent at anything. I’m just a total all-rounder and roles like this suit me very, very well. (E24:60) | Personal fulfillment | |
| Of course, success in some way and maybe financial success. So I would say that played a role, but not an overriding one. (E1:18) | Profit as subordinate motive from the start | Profit |
| As this is a venture capital start-up […] I knew from the beginning that the goal was for everybody to make money out of it in the end – that was of course an aspect where you think “Oh cool, I could have a piece of the cake”. That is, of course, very motivating. (E11:24) | Profit orientation | |
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for consistently pursuing innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| It’s a continuous desire to drive and shape the technology […] (E12:56) | Technological interest | Innovation |
| I’m an active part of a meaningful business, at least one that I think is meaningful and does something good for people and society. (E18:66) | Social value creation | Social impact |
| We have always wanted to make every pump sustainable. No more graveyard pump waste. That still motivates me today. (E6:280) | Environmental value creation | |
| Meaningful in the sense that the answer is of real interest to someone, that it relates to an industrial problem and could not have been done on another computer. (E12:68) | Sense of purpose | |
| Last but not least, I realize that many people have a home, a professional home, through the way I work, through my foundation. In other words, I am actually someone who has created structures here where people can think and make decisions and have meetings and think about things. And of course, I think that’s great. (E17:50) | Being a good employer | |
| Also to set an example for women and to say “you can do it” and be more than just the person who does the housework. (E16:30) | Women empowerment | |
| I’ve always been very independent. I’m happy to be able to decide for myself what I want to do every day or where we want to go. (E5:30) | Autonomy | Job empowerment and engagement |
| Like I said, it’s all the freedom you have. I don’t have to worry about, for example, if it’s my grandmother’s birthday. […] You can go to the doctor if you want, or take a week off if you want. (E1:54) | Flexibility | |
| I would say that the last two years have been the most amazing time of my life, just because I have learnt so much about my own personality. And that’s just super, super valuable I would say. (E19:24) | Learning and development | |
| That’s where I am now and that’s where I feel at home. That’s where I found what I call my founder personality. (E6:180) | Personal fulfillment | |
| I don’t feel like I’m getting into a rut. Yeah, well, sometimes I wish a week this would be a bit more predictable or similar to the week before. But on the other hand, it’s something that really motivates me because I don’t feel like I’m doing the same activities over and over again […] (E22:74) | Variety of tasks | |
| Yeah, I actually liked the idea of profit sufficiency, because […] it’s not that I wouldn’t do it now if it wasn’t like that, as long as you just get a decent salary. I also don’t want anyone who works for us to have to do it for a pittance. I don’t want to do it for a pittance either. As long as you don’t have to give up anything, I think it’s OK, and if the company ends up with zero, but everyone gets paid and everyone is happy and has a good life, then it’s great. (E3:100) | Decreased profit motivation | Profit |
| First of all, I love thinking with people, developing new things and that’s what enriches me. (E17:46) | Interpersonal relationships | Leadership and organizational development |
| […] it’s also cool when I see the development of the employees. That always makes me very happy. (E24:88) | Empowerment of employees | |
| So no matter what challenges you have in everyday start-up life, it’s always about solving problems, putting out fires and sort of approaching them with a certain naivety. Like, well, it’ll work out, let’s make a plan anyway. (E24:62) | Daily management activities | |
| I think really the most important thing is to make sure that we are much, much more stable as a company. So number one is to really get out of this crisis, but number two is to put the structures in place so that everything runs more smoothly. Diversify [our products]. (E14:112) | Venture growth and development | |
| Behavioral factors | ||
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for approaching innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| I’d been working on it for about two years, I had a good overview of the market, I knew the players and, well, you know what you know. (E8:62) | Area of expertise | Professional mastery |
| At one point there was a course called the Funpreneur Competition. It was a challenge where you set up a company and I thought it was really funny. […] you try something out and then somehow actually found a serious company and you’re a GbR [special business form] right away. (E23:12) | Entrepreneurial education | |
| What definitely helped me at that time was that my father had already started a company and had already had his own business, because otherwise […] as a normal person you don’t know how to start a company or anything like that. (E14:58) | Family involvement in entrepreneurship | |
| Women entrepreneurs’ motivations for consistently pursuing innovations and ventures in STEM | ||
| I really just pushed my feelings away and disconnected from my body because I knew that this was the only way I could survive and pull off this foundation. But yes, there was a real numbness at times. (E23:40) | Emotion regulation | Professional mastery |
| You have to be really careful not to overwork, to make sure that you take breaks. I do that now – meditation, for example, is really important to me. […] And I really do take a ten- or fifteen-minute break every day […] (E19:28) | Practical coping actions | |
| Of course, I also realized that it’s very different when you’re talking to potential customers, when you can talk to them at eye level and say, “Hey, listen, I understand your problem. I have had that too and I have thought about this and that solution. Would this work for you?” And that helps. (E2:42) | Previous professional experience | |
| Environmental factors | ||
| These are just moments or small situations where we were asked to speak at some event and then they said, yes, they would like to have me as a speaker, simply because I’m a woman. It wasn’t because they liked me […]. And they are just saying, “Yes, you’re a woman, we want more women on stage”. (E11:78) | Belonging and (hyper)visibility | Gender dynamics |
| First of all, I’ve always, always been mistaken for my own secretary. On every pitch, at every event. (E7:72) | Gender stereotyping | |
| I always feel guilty. There are three small children who are, to a certain degree, not being looked after properly. Then there are the professional challenges, so to speak. So it’s a constant balancing act, and you have to be able to justify it to yourself and, especially, to your children. And then there are the high costs that every hour of work costs me. (E4:16) | Balancing motherhood and business | |
| […] There’s how much of an outsider you are, let’s say, in an environment and as a woman in her early 40s in the medical technology sector, as the CEO of a tech start-up. It’s not that everyone is saying “Hurray, we’ve been waiting for you”, but the expectations are obviously very different. (E7:68) | Intersectionality | |
| Now that I’m here in the [area], I realize that I just have to explain it a lot more often. And in Berlin I don’t have to explain anything. I have to say, I think more often now, is this really still the right place? Why am I not in Berlin if I have to explain so much less there? (E23:14) | Location disadvantages | Structural, institutional and sectoral dynamics |
| I think it was a good thing that we didn’t have that knowledge, because if I had known how highly regulated the healthcare market would be and what problems we would have to deal with, I think I would probably have just shied away and said ‘Oh no, we’ll never make it. (E18:30) | Sector-specific hurdles | |
| Of course, the fact that engineering is not an investment theme makes things even more difficult. What is popular with people is that they want digitization. [ …]. Something that’s somehow sustainable, software, exactly. Because you can exit after 3–5 years. (E6:176–178) | Investor’s focus on software and monetary aspects | |
| We pitched together with some programmers who wanted to write some applications and wanted €10,000. I can’t buy lab equipment with €10,000, I can rent a lab for two months, I can’t hire anybody. I wouldn’t get very far with €10,000 […] (E15:50) | Difficulties with non-software solutions | |
| Of course, Corona meant two years that didn’t play into our hands, despite the digitalized startup. (E10:60) | Macro-economic events | |
| Starting a business in Germany is not made easy and I am fascinated by how many people have been able to start a business without having the best academic degree. (E22:66) | Institutional hurdles | |
| Yeah, it definitely motivated me and actually having that support made it a lot easier, as well as hearing that we have a workplace that we can go to, and we don’t always have to meet in somebody’s living room. (E13:60) | Office location | Organizational and team dynamics |
| I would say it’s just our team spirit and our intrinsic motivation. (E19:60) | Team and leadership dynamics | |
| It helps us when we find the right people […]. And we often get people from outside who bring some good input and really help us in terms of content and expertise. (E7:116) | Access to human capital | |
| I think the problem in our field is that the scalable product obviously depends on a quantum computer, and the hardware of the quantum computer is not necessarily in our hands. (E12:10) | Technological barriers and know-how demand | |
| Sometimes we both get down and think, “Shit, what are we going to do now?”. Then it’s important that you do it yourself. Nobody’s going to stand there and cheer you on. (E11:60) | Pressure and emotional fluctuations | |
| I was extremely frustrated by venture capital discussions. Business angels weren’t any better. They wanted 30% of the shares in a start-up company for €30,000, for a project that we had already pre-funded to the tune of half a million. It just didn’t add up. (E6:178) | Financial difficulties | Financial dynamics |
| Now, with the war in Ukraine, we’ve suddenly got a new target group that we didn’t even know we had. […] And the exciting thing is that it has just become a really big target group for us. (E16:36) | Finding new markets | |
| We have great investors. We also have a great supervisory board that works with us in a very solution-oriented way. We have a great investor who said, “Hey, you’re short of money right now. I can give you some more in the short term.” (E14:110) | Suitable investors | |
| I also wonder about how the investments are made. They think: […] Do we trust this person? And then, when they find out, oh, she also has childrencan she manage this? I think that often causes them to say no, to reject the application. Of course, it’s never communicated openly, but that’s my feeling. (E2:72) | Gender-biased investment decisions | |
| What helped a lot was that one of the members of the [name] forum was on the local council and he was in favor of us doing a project with the city. We got €120,000 over two years, even though we couldn’t really do anything yet. And that almost completely financed our development. During that time, when we didn’t have any staff costs or anything like that, we didn’t pay ourselves, so we had a lot of money. (E3:48) | Receiving financial capital | |
| That has actually helped me time and time again. Building a network and trusting the network. (E8:66) | Network contacts | Network and visibility dynamics |
| There weren’t really any obstacles (…) because everyone was behind our idea and our friends and family just said try it out, we are behind you, no matter how crazy the idea might seem! (E16:62) | Private network support | |
| I thought that was very good too. It really is just a women’s network, which is another very interesting point. (E5:58) | Women-only exchange | |
| In the accelerator program you actually learned how to pitch, not an invention or a technique, a technology, but how do I translate my technology into a product and a business plan that I can pitch? And that was incredibly helpful for me personally because I really didn’t know anything about that. (E8:40) | Accelerator and incubator programs | |
| We actually met our first customer at that very first start-up fair. He was in product development himself and had come from university and was interested in what his product did and why his product worked. And then we sort of built our toolbox with him. What does he need? What can we deliver? We sold our first customer trial in a very experimental way and we are still working with them five years later. (E15:28) | Relationships and development with community of inquiry | |
| Our company was founded in January 2020, and in December 2020 I got a request from [magazine], asking if they could do an article about me. That gave me a huge boost, because they were so supportive. I was so happy about it, because I knew it would be good for us, and it turned out to be. (E1:34) | Publicity | |
| Of course, when we get positive feedback from women saying the app has really helped them or has done something, that’s super nice. (E20:62) | Appreciation and recognition | |
| Illustrative quotes | Second-order themes | Aggregate dimensions |
|---|---|---|
| I knew what I could do and that I could think analytically. I know the problem and I […] can also deal well with defeat. That was also a very important aspect for me. I knew that it was possible. (E17:40) | Self-efficacy | Confidence |
| It really came out of necessity. […] there was nothing at all at that time. (E9:20) | Opportunity recognition | |
| I already have a certain amount of experience and a track record that works in my favor, because I said to myself, even if it doesn’t work out, if you come back to the company in two years, well, okay, you can still do it. […] And I think having that comfort or knowing what you can do and knowing that you can bounce back in a lot of areas has at least made this a little bit more comfortable for me from a risk perspective. (E2:38) | Sense of security | |
| We just wrote a business plan, went to the [pitch], ended up in the interim awards and thought “yeah, it’s kind of cool and it’s fun”. (E19:16) | Intrinsic motivation | Inner drive |
| I think the very first phase was mainly driven by curiosity. I just wanted to try something out. (E7:28) | Risk taking | |
| I was very passionate about the subject. (E6:156) | Passion | |
| Yes, of course it has grown a lot. I have more experience now and I think I’m in a good position at the moment. (E5:54) | Increased self-efficacy | Confidence |
| I enjoy it. I’ve been doing it for a few years now. I think it’s great. (E13:72) | Intrinsic motivation | Inner drive |
| Sometimes you just have to wait. […] And then sometimes you just have to keep going before it gets better again. Even if you didn’t think it would, somehow it always gets better. (E3:78) | Perseverance | |
| That’s what kept us going: Maybe the hope that it would work out, or the belief that it would work out in the end. (E18:46) | Hope for success | |
| No, I think I can really say that I don’t see any other alternative at the moment. (E14:80) | Lack of alternatives | Constraint |
| And then the fear of failure […]. Of course, as an achiever, it just drives you to keep going. (E1:42) | Fear of failure | |
| What has always held me back is my sense of responsibility to the investors. I have always felt that they gave me their money and told me they trusted me […]. Then I said: “This is their money and this is my jobto try everything to make it work”. (E2:50) | Entrepreneurial commitment | |
| I have to honestly say that my two bosses, who were both male, often made decisions that I couldn’t really understand and I really saw all the potential in this area of industrial AI. (E1:6) | “Push”-factors | reconsidered |
| I found it all very exciting from a technological point of view. (E7:28) | Technological interest | Innovation |
| We do want to be there when this technology arrives in the industry […] (E12:8) | Practical orientation | |
| I immediately saw the purpose of the product and that you could somehow make people happier – just the fact that it makes them laugh again when they are in a really sad phase. (E18:26) | Social value creation | Social impact |
| I saw the fascination and also the necessity that we just have to change something about the environment. (E19:26) | Environmental value creation | |
| That also goes back a little bit to the idea of impact that I described at the beginning: to say that you are creating something that solves a problem somewhere and you are helping people with it. So, you have an impact, though not in the classic business sense, but for your own value creation. I think that’s the main motivation for me. (E2:40) | Sense of purpose | |
| You can become a potential employer, you can make everything that you may have found bad at previous employers better. And that has also motivated me to perhaps become a good employer, to build up a company in such a way that it attracts people who want to work for us. (E21:74) | Being a good employer | |
| I think the biggest motivation was actually being able to do what you want and not having anyone above you. […]I felt like I already knew what I was doing and I didn’t want to be held back anymore […] (E1:8) | Autonomy | Job empowerment and engagement |
| On the other hand, of course, it also gives you a certain flexibility in terms of working hours, in terms of the whole set-up, which you don’t necessarily have in a normal environment. (E2:26) | Flexibility | |
| I was well aware that it was also a kind of learning project and a very strong personal development project. (E24:58) | Learning and development | |
| I’m good at a lot of things, but I’m not excellent at anything. I’m just a total all-rounder and roles like this suit me very, very well. (E24:60) | Personal fulfillment | |
| Of course, success in some way and maybe financial success. So I would say that played a role, but not an overriding one. (E1:18) | Profit as subordinate motive from the start | Profit |
| As this is a venture capital start-up […] I knew from the beginning that the goal was for everybody to make money out of it in the end – that was of course an aspect where you think “Oh cool, I could have a piece of the cake”. That is, of course, very motivating. (E11:24) | Profit orientation | |
| It’s a continuous desire to drive and shape the technology […] (E12:56) | Technological interest | Innovation |
| I’m an active part of a meaningful business, at least one that I think is meaningful and does something good for people and society. (E18:66) | Social value creation | Social impact |
| We have always wanted to make every pump sustainable. No more graveyard pump waste. That still motivates me today. (E6:280) | Environmental value creation | |
| Meaningful in the sense that the answer is of real interest to someone, that it relates to an industrial problem and could not have been done on another computer. (E12:68) | Sense of purpose | |
| Last but not least, I realize that many people have a home, a professional home, through the way I work, through my foundation. In other words, I am actually someone who has created structures here where people can think and make decisions and have meetings and think about things. And of course, I think that’s great. (E17:50) | Being a good employer | |
| Also to set an example for women and to say “you can do it” and be more than just the person who does the housework. (E16:30) | Women empowerment | |
| I’ve always been very independent. I’m happy to be able to decide for myself what I want to do every day or where we want to go. (E5:30) | Autonomy | Job empowerment and engagement |
| Like I said, it’s all the freedom you have. I don’t have to worry about, for example, if it’s my grandmother’s birthday. […] You can go to the doctor if you want, or take a week off if you want. (E1:54) | Flexibility | |
| I would say that the last two years have been the most amazing time of my life, just because I have learnt so much about my own personality. And that’s just super, super valuable I would say. (E19:24) | Learning and development | |
| That’s where I am now and that’s where I feel at home. That’s where I found what I call my founder personality. (E6:180) | Personal fulfillment | |
| I don’t feel like I’m getting into a rut. Yeah, well, sometimes I wish a week this would be a bit more predictable or similar to the week before. But on the other hand, it’s something that really motivates me because I don’t feel like I’m doing the same activities over and over again […] (E22:74) | Variety of tasks | |
| Yeah, I actually liked the idea of profit sufficiency, because […] it’s not that I wouldn’t do it now if it wasn’t like that, as long as you just get a decent salary. I also don’t want anyone who works for us to have to do it for a pittance. I don’t want to do it for a pittance either. As long as you don’t have to give up anything, I think it’s OK, and if the company ends up with zero, but everyone gets paid and everyone is happy and has a good life, then it’s great. (E3:100) | Decreased profit motivation | Profit |
| First of all, I love thinking with people, developing new things and that’s what enriches me. (E17:46) | Interpersonal relationships | Leadership and organizational development |
| […] it’s also cool when I see the development of the employees. That always makes me very happy. (E24:88) | Empowerment of employees | |
| So no matter what challenges you have in everyday start-up life, it’s always about solving problems, putting out fires and sort of approaching them with a certain naivety. Like, well, it’ll work out, let’s make a plan anyway. (E24:62) | Daily management activities | |
| I think really the most important thing is to make sure that we are much, much more stable as a company. So number one is to really get out of this crisis, but number two is to put the structures in place so that everything runs more smoothly. Diversify [our products]. (E14:112) | Venture growth and development | |
| I’d been working on it for about two years, I had a good overview of the market, I knew the players and, well, you know what you know. (E8:62) | Area of expertise | Professional mastery |
| At one point there was a course called the Funpreneur Competition. It was a challenge where you set up a company and I thought it was really funny. […] you try something out and then somehow actually found a serious company and you’re a GbR [special business form] right away. (E23:12) | Entrepreneurial education | |
| What definitely helped me at that time was that my father had already started a company and had already had his own business, because otherwise […] as a normal person you don’t know how to start a company or anything like that. (E14:58) | Family involvement in entrepreneurship | |
| I really just pushed my feelings away and disconnected from my body because I knew that this was the only way I could survive and pull off this foundation. But yes, there was a real numbness at times. (E23:40) | Emotion regulation | Professional mastery |
| You have to be really careful not to overwork, to make sure that you take breaks. I do that now – meditation, for example, is really important to me. […] And I really do take a ten- or fifteen-minute break every day […] (E19:28) | Practical coping actions | |
| Of course, I also realized that it’s very different when you’re talking to potential customers, when you can talk to them at eye level and say, “Hey, listen, I understand your problem. I have had that too and I have thought about this and that solution. Would this work for you?” And that helps. (E2:42) | Previous professional experience | |
| These are just moments or small situations where we were asked to speak at some event and then they said, yes, they would like to have me as a speaker, simply because I’m a woman. It wasn’t because they liked me […]. And they are just saying, “Yes, you’re a woman, we want more women on stage”. (E11:78) | Belonging and (hyper)visibility | Gender dynamics |
| First of all, I’ve always, always been mistaken for my own secretary. On every pitch, at every event. (E7:72) | Gender stereotyping | |
| I always feel guilty. There are three small children who are, to a certain degree, not being looked after properly. Then there are the professional challenges, so to speak. So it’s a constant balancing act, and you have to be able to justify it to yourself and, especially, to your children. And then there are the high costs that every hour of work costs me. (E4:16) | Balancing motherhood and business | |
| […] There’s how much of an outsider you are, let’s say, in an environment and as a woman in her early 40s in the medical technology sector, as the CEO of a tech start-up. It’s not that everyone is saying “Hurray, we’ve been waiting for you”, but the expectations are obviously very different. (E7:68) | Intersectionality | |
| Now that I’m here in the [area], I realize that I just have to explain it a lot more often. And in Berlin I don’t have to explain anything. I have to say, I think more often now, is this really still the right place? Why am I not in Berlin if I have to explain so much less there? (E23:14) | Location disadvantages | Structural, institutional and sectoral dynamics |
| I think it was a good thing that we didn’t have that knowledge, because if I had known how highly regulated the healthcare market would be and what problems we would have to deal with, I think I would probably have just shied away and said ‘Oh no, we’ll never make it. (E18:30) | Sector-specific hurdles | |
| Of course, the fact that engineering is not an investment theme makes things even more difficult. What is popular with people is that they want digitization. [ …]. Something that’s somehow sustainable, software, exactly. Because you can exit after 3–5 years. (E6:176–178) | Investor’s focus on software and monetary aspects | |
| We pitched together with some programmers who wanted to write some applications and wanted €10,000. I can’t buy lab equipment with €10,000, I can rent a lab for two months, I can’t hire anybody. I wouldn’t get very far with €10,000 […] (E15:50) | Difficulties with non-software solutions | |
| Of course, Corona meant two years that didn’t play into our hands, despite the digitalized startup. (E10:60) | Macro-economic events | |
| Starting a business in Germany is not made easy and I am fascinated by how many people have been able to start a business without having the best academic degree. (E22:66) | Institutional hurdles | |
| Yeah, it definitely motivated me and actually having that support made it a lot easier, as well as hearing that we have a workplace that we can go to, and we don’t always have to meet in somebody’s living room. (E13:60) | Office location | Organizational and team dynamics |
| I would say it’s just our team spirit and our intrinsic motivation. (E19:60) | Team and leadership dynamics | |
| It helps us when we find the right people […]. And we often get people from outside who bring some good input and really help us in terms of content and expertise. (E7:116) | Access to human capital | |
| I think the problem in our field is that the scalable product obviously depends on a quantum computer, and the hardware of the quantum computer is not necessarily in our hands. (E12:10) | Technological barriers and know-how demand | |
| Sometimes we both get down and think, “Shit, what are we going to do now?”. Then it’s important that you do it yourself. Nobody’s going to stand there and cheer you on. (E11:60) | Pressure and emotional fluctuations | |
| I was extremely frustrated by venture capital discussions. Business angels weren’t any better. They wanted 30% of the shares in a start-up company for €30,000, for a project that we had already pre-funded to the tune of half a million. It just didn’t add up. (E6:178) | Financial difficulties | Financial dynamics |
| Now, with the war in Ukraine, we’ve suddenly got a new target group that we didn’t even know we had. […] And the exciting thing is that it has just become a really big target group for us. (E16:36) | Finding new markets | |
| We have great investors. We also have a great supervisory board that works with us in a very solution-oriented way. We have a great investor who said, “Hey, you’re short of money right now. I can give you some more in the short term.” (E14:110) | Suitable investors | |
| I also wonder about how the investments are made. They think: […] Do we trust this person? And then, when they find out, oh, she also has childrencan she manage this? I think that often causes them to say no, to reject the application. Of course, it’s never communicated openly, but that’s my feeling. (E2:72) | Gender-biased investment decisions | |
| What helped a lot was that one of the members of the [name] forum was on the local council and he was in favor of us doing a project with the city. We got €120,000 over two years, even though we couldn’t really do anything yet. And that almost completely financed our development. During that time, when we didn’t have any staff costs or anything like that, we didn’t pay ourselves, so we had a lot of money. (E3:48) | Receiving financial capital | |
| That has actually helped me time and time again. Building a network and trusting the network. (E8:66) | Network contacts | Network and visibility dynamics |
| There weren’t really any obstacles (…) because everyone was behind our idea and our friends and family just said try it out, we are behind you, no matter how crazy the idea might seem! (E16:62) | Private network support | |
| I thought that was very good too. It really is just a women’s network, which is another very interesting point. (E5:58) | Women-only exchange | |
| In the accelerator program you actually learned how to pitch, not an invention or a technique, a technology, but how do I translate my technology into a product and a business plan that I can pitch? And that was incredibly helpful for me personally because I really didn’t know anything about that. (E8:40) | Accelerator and incubator programs | |
| We actually met our first customer at that very first start-up fair. He was in product development himself and had come from university and was interested in what his product did and why his product worked. And then we sort of built our toolbox with him. What does he need? What can we deliver? We sold our first customer trial in a very experimental way and we are still working with them five years later. (E15:28) | Relationships and development with community of inquiry | |
| Our company was founded in January 2020, and in December 2020 I got a request from [magazine], asking if they could do an article about me. That gave me a huge boost, because they were so supportive. I was so happy about it, because I knew it would be good for us, and it turned out to be. (E1:34) | Publicity | |
| Of course, when we get positive feedback from women saying the app has really helped them or has done something, that’s super nice. (E20:62) | Appreciation and recognition | |
Source(s): Authors’ own work
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