What if five women wanted to launch a “boys only” social club? Would you bet money on it?
Most likely, you’d laugh them out of the room.
Yet flip the cards, and you might have one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms appearing to support you. Last week, Kiki, a US-based start-up which counts Blackbird Ventures as one of its investors, pivoted from a subletting business to a girls-only social club.
Toby Thomas-Smith (second from right) and the Kiki team have come under fire for its pivot from a subletting business to a girls only social club.Credit: Kiki
Kiki launched as EasyRent in New Zealand, before moving to Sydney in 2022 and rebranding and relocating to New York last year after raising $7 million.
What’s strange about this girls-only club is that it’s a business led by five men, which only hired its first woman, Caitlin Emiko, to run its social media channels in December.
Five months ago, Kiki was a team of three men, and co-founder Toby Thomas-Smith admitted on LinkedIn that “we can’t become 30 dudes”, and that he wanted to hire women, given 70 per cent of the company’s users were women.
More than 300 applications later, two of the three jobs Kiki advertised were awarded to men and the final job was left vacant.
Now, with women to comprise all of Kiki’s users, it’s no surprise the company has copped backlash.
In an Instagram post announcing the pivot this month, Thomas-Smith said Emiko had enlightened him to “this huge problem I never even knew existed”.
Kiki case highlights pitfalls of a ‘girls only’ social club run by five men
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21.01.2024
What if five women wanted to launch a “boys only” social club? Would you bet money on it?
Most likely, you’d laugh them out of the room.
Yet flip the cards, and you might have one of Australia’s largest venture capital firms appearing to support you. Last week, Kiki, a US-based start-up which counts Blackbird Ventures as one of its investors, pivoted from a subletting........
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