Portrait No. 001
Dorothy Li & Tara Kappel
Co-Founders
RealRoots Inc.
Raised — $6.5M
After struggling to find my community after each move, I started dreading the loneliness that came with moving for work or school or love. And yet, geographical relocations are a part of life. I wanted to solve new mover loneliness for myself and others like me.
In her words
“The future for women will be built by female founders resilient enough to solve their own problems.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Solving a female problem as a female founder is uniquely difficult in our predominantly male VC ecosystem. The first time I pitched a VC, he told me that my idea was \"cute\" and he didn't mean it as a compliment. When I was first starting out, my professors, investors, and classmates all seemed to agree that RealRoots 1) wouldn't get many users, 2) couldn't scale even if it did. If I hadn't experienced loneliness so many times in my own life, I might have given up before I started. Now after attracting tens of thousands of paying users and two round of VC funding, people are finally starting to believe me!
Chapter II
Your vision.
We're going to solve loneliness by systematically eliminating the barriers to meaningful social connection. Our product will talk to you like a friend to understand your social needs and then plan your entire social calendar for life, including the experiences you most crave with the people you most need to meet.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Founders, like VC's, are pattern-recognizing beings. The more amazing female founders an aspiring female founder sees, the more she believes that she can do it too. As a female founder, we have an unique advantage. There are so many underserved female problems that are ripe for disruption, and I hope to help enable a new generation of women to change the world for all of us.