Entrepreneur Silvina Moschini’s Path to Co-Founding a Unicorn

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  • In 2020, Silvina Moschini became one of the first Latin American women to lead a unicorn startup.
  • Moschini shared her career insights, including why female entrepreneurs “have to skirt the rules.”
  • She also explained why wealth creation looks so different today, including the role crypto plays.

Argentine entrepreneur Silvina Moschini’s glittering résumé may deceive at first glance.

In the early 2000s, Moschini established herself as one of the first women in fintech when she joined the leadership team at Patagon.com, a financial-services firm that was later acquired by Spain’s Banco Santander for nearly $600 million. When TransparentBusiness, the company she’d co-founded, reached a de facto valuation of over $1 billion in 2020, Moschini became the first female Latin American entrepreneur to lead a coveted “unicorn” startup.

But the staggering odds against her hide between the lines of her accomplishments.

In 2021, female startup founders raised just 2% of all venture capital funding in the US, while Latin American entrepreneurs raised the same percentage.

“As a woman entrepreneur, I encounter many of the issues that we women face — especially diverse women — when it comes to access to capital,” Moschini told Insider in a recent interview.

Moschini defines herself as a “social impact entrepreneur” because of her desire to “drive equality” and “create companies that have an impact in people’s lives.”

Most recently, she launched the reality show “Unicorn Hunters,” where hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to a panel of seasoned investors that includes Moschini, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, former US Treasurer Rosie Rios, and ‘N Sync’s Lance Bass. According to Moschini, the show has a special focus on “diverse” entrepreneurs.

“When we launched ‘Unicorn Hunters,’ it was learning from my personal journey facing the challenges that we women entrepreneurs encounter when raising money,” she said. “I always say, ‘we women have to skirt the rules — bend them, not break them — to get things done.'”

Why crypto will revolutionize investing for women

Moschini believes that young people today view wealth creation opportunities in a much different manner than previous generations like her own, which “focused on getting a job, and becoming an entrepreneur was something that you do between jobs or if you don’t find a job.”

“They never thought about investments because it was totally out of their league,” she added.

As a younger generation embraces investing as a means to create wealth, Moschini said that “more and more women are also seeing crypto as a way to get into investing,” citing growing numbers of women holding the asset in Latin America. According to CoinMarketCap, the number of Argentine female crypto holders rose by 98% in 2020, followed by an 82% increase in Colombia and 80% in Venezuela.

The growing presence of women in the world of cryptocurrencies is a trend that’s not unique to Latin America, even though a recent Bakkt study found that both men and women associate crypto more with men.

As reported by CNBC, a 2021 survey from NORC at the University of Chicago revealed that both female investors and investors of color seemed to prefer crypto over stocks. Forty-one percent of crypto traders were women and 44% were investors of color, while women made up 38% of stock traders and investors of color 35%. According to CNBC, the NORC team believed that this discrepancy stems from a connotation of crypto as more accessible compared to perceived higher barriers of entry into stock investing.

A knowledge gap also seems to pose a problem in cryptocurrency adoption, as the Bakkt study found that the key barrier for women was a lack of understanding. But the study also showed that crypto knowledge for women increased with ownership, and 82% of female crypto investors said they would invest again.

Educating women about investing is another mission of Moschini’s. Alongside a regional director of UN Women, she’ll soon spearhead a school for women in Latin America focused on entrepreneurial investing, with the goal to simultaneously empower female entrepreneurs and to create opportunities for them.

Eventually, Moschini wants to broaden the project’s scope globally to train women who — even though they may make the overwhelming majority of financial decisions in their households — still don’t consider investing a feasible option to create wealth.

“Which is a little crazy because we are really, really good at


money management

— and when we do it, we create more value than men,” said Moschini.

Moschini also noted that the pandemic was responsible for generating “a lot of new, valuable business propositions in the market,” which means more opportunities for female entrepreneurs trying to start a new business.

“The pandemic was, without a doubt, a black swan event that reshaped the way we see our opportunities, see our future,” she said. “I think it opened up massive opportunities through digital acceleration in all fronts for entrepreneurs to start up businesses that grow bigger and grow faster.”

The “shift from women spending money to women investing money” and the acceleration in the creation of companies that are scaling faster globally are “fantastic,” said Moschini.

“We are extremely optimistic because the silver lining of all the ugliness that we have seen through the pandemic is that it makes us uncomfortable. And when you are uncomfortable, you think clearly.” she elaborated. “Scarcity breeds clarity and one clear thing that we know is that we women need to be in charge of our financial futures.”

“I think that crypto and investing in female-led startups is not just the right thing to do, but it’s also a fantastic business,” added Moschini. “I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity to partner with women that I look up to and say, ‘Oh my god, she is the real thing.'”

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