Mr Yum’s CEO Kim Teo Urges Female Founders To Shatter The Glass Ceiling And Take Charge

Kim Teo shared that she is passionate about enabling and empowering female CEOs, and while there is an abundance of data about startups and investments made into companies with female co-founders or female-only co-founding teams, there is little data about female CEO-led startups.

As CEOs are typically paid more and have a bigger equity stake in the company than co-founders, it is crucial for women to take on this role to advance their careers. However, Teo notes that female participation in building and selling, particularly at the C-level, is often lacking. Therefore, she encourages female entrepreneurs to learn these skills by surrounding themselves with great minds, asking questions, and giving it a try.

Teo emphasizes the importance of being a T-shaped person, meaning having a broad range of knowledge (the top of the T) and being an expert in a few areas (the length of the T). She believes that having a strong product vision and executing on it is crucial, as it can attract an excellent sales leader, and together, they can attract a great customer success team.

The Chief Executive of Mr Yum also calls attention to the misleading clickbait headlines on venture capital investment statistics, clarifying that the 2% figure reported last year applies only to companies with solo female founders, whereas the number increases to 15% for all female-founded companies. She also points out the encouraging trend of 33% of pre-seed stage funding in Australia going to female co-founded companies in 2022.

Teo acknowledges that the ideas she is putting out into the world are a first iteration and hopes to hear from others who share her sentiments. In conclusion, she encourages female entrepreneurs to learn to build and sell, to surround themselves with great minds, and to ignore clickbait headlines that may not present the full picture.

“We’ve got this!” Teo said in her post.