- Today’s startup has good chances to take off on the wave of two trends simultaneously. The first trend is the growing shortage of programmers and computer scientists.
- And the second trend is the increasing desire of women to build their careers. This might turn out to be significantly easier in this field precisely due to the emerging shortage!
- So, it’s possible to simultaneously help both companies and women 😉 And to do this, it’s enough to replicate the model of this startup:
The New Club is a community with the motto “Feel a sense of belonging in a new way.” Belonging to what?
The startup has created a community for women working in “engineering” positions, traditionally considered male-dominated. “Engineering” in the American context includes not only classical engineers but also other technology professionals— including programmers and “techies” in the broadest sense.
The New Club primarily focuses on computer scientists and programmers working in both large tech companies and small startups.
The community exists both online and offline. Offline events include hackathons, meetings, and gatherings. At the same time, there are events that take place only online. Additionally, there’s a Slack group online accessible only to community members.
The main goal of the community is to help participants advance their careers. In addition to general events, the club offers:
- A mentoring system where more experienced community members assist newcomers in the profession.
- Individual coaching sessions conducted by invited experts.
- Opportunities to network with community members who can help candidates connect directly with founders of interesting startups where they can take on promising positions.
The community was founded in 2023, but its members already include employees from well-known companies and startups such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, OpenAI, Nvidia, Stripe, Airtable, and many others.
Membership in the community is intended to be paid, but the startup is still recruiting its first “founding members,” for whom membership is currently free. However, this free membership does not include additional services such as coaching or participation in separate events.
It’s important to note that The New Club is striving to attract not only individual members but also entire companies that may want the community to help their female employees grow.
Currently, the startup has raised its first $3.1 million in investments.
What’s Interesting
The theme of women’s communities dedicated to career development is gradually gaining momentum.
Arguably, the most illustrative example is Chief, a community for women holding leadership positions in companies, which I wrote about in the spring of 2022. This startup raised $140 million in investments with a valuation of $1 billion.
I wrote about the Athena Alliance community in the fall of 2023. This community brings together women who have already become business leaders and those who are still climbing the career ladder. However, the membership fee for this community is quite high, ranging from $2,500 to $9,000 per year. This startup raised $3 million in investments.
In the fall of 2022, I wrote about the startup Code First Girls, which at the time was only offering programming courses for women. Now, this startup has also evolved into a community that offers not only education but also mentoring, coaching, and events. This startup raised £4.5 million in investments.
If we’re talking about women, we can’t overlook Ellevest, a startup I wrote about in the spring of 2022. It created a service to help women achieve their financial goals, including through investments. The startup currently manages $2 billion from community members. This startup raised $153.4 million in investments.
Returning to the topic of women in computing, their proportion of the total number of computer scientists in the United States is currently around 23%. However, in companies with 10–300 employees, their share is 25%, while in companies with over 5,000 employees, it’s only 22%.
However, if we narrow down computer scientists specifically to programmers, men overwhelmingly dominate at 91.88%, while those who identify as “purely women” make up only 5.17%.
It’s interesting that the percentage of women earning bachelor’s degrees is increasing in all fields except computer science, where the share of women suddenly began to decline in the early 1980s.
And this isn’t because it’s the “hard sciences” that men are supposedly better suited for.
In medicine, law, and even in physics, the proportion of women continues to grow, but in computer science, it’s still declining.
Where to Run
Today’s The New Club is interesting because it intersects two trends.
The first trend is the overall increase in women’s self-awareness, pushing them to actively pursue their careers rather than solely focusing on maintaining the home front and raising children.
The second trend is the shortage of programmers and engineering employees in related fields. It’s evident that the demand for programmers, especially in the United States, is growing twice as fast as the demand for employees in other professions.
But where can these programmers be found? Developed countries are already facing a shortage of internal resources for this.
As a result, startups that focus on training new programmers from Africa, Latin America, and other developing regions for subsequent remote work placement in American and European companies are starting to emerge and attract investments. Among them are Microverse and Propel.
Another option is to actively encourage women to enter this profession, as their representation in this field has declined significantly since the 1980s. This decline is due to both women’s own reluctance to pursue this profession and, to put it mildly, the lukewarm attitude of employers towards female programmers and computer scientists.
Thus, today’s theme of The New Club brings together two desires:
the emerging desire of companies to address the shortage of programmers by recruiting more women, the growing desire of women to find decent jobs and build careers, which may be easier in programming and related fields due to the emerging shortage in this area. From this perspective, The New Club’s desire to attract companies as corporate members of its community becomes clear — giving them access to a wave of new talent to fill their vacancies and support the women in tech already hired by them. And the startup itself can start making decent money from such corporate members 😉
So, the possible direction of movement is the creation of a similar community, which has good chances of taking off precisely on the wave of these two coinciding trends.
About the Company
The New Club
Website: thenewclub.fyi
Last Round: $3.1M, 03/13/2024
Total Investments: $3.1M, Rounds: 1