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sit down with the Lila Panio. She's an awesome investor that has helped women bootstrap companies all the way to IPO.

We talked about some of the alternatives to venture capital. We talk about really aligning your capital with your personal goals and your lifestyle and just the importance of understanding your capital and that not all venture capital is what you need.

I think that that's a really great takeaway from this that you're going to hear to Lila talk about in detail that it's very glamorized at the current time taking on venture capital.

But there are expectations with that and you need to be comfortable with the jet fuel that you're taking on and it's not always right for your business.

So I think that there's some really great pieces of information for women entrepreneurs out there and just anyone that's interested in learning more about the importance of the source of your capital and also some alternative funding sources like this really cool regenerative capital concept that she talks about that's funding incredible women all over the world.

And so without further ado, let's sit down here on the exit and talk about venture capital and investing and shortening the gender gap for the venture capital and entrepreneurial world with the Lila Panio.

All right, I am here with Delilah Panio and she is the vice president of US capital formation at the Toronto Stock Exchange as well as the founder of fortuna funding.

How's it going Delilah so great Steve. Thank you so much for having on really looking forward to our conversation today.

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. So we're taking a new take on the the podcast here with a lot of the kind of lens of venture and I think that it's going to be really valuable to unpack some of the hurdles and things that women and everybody sort of faces in venture capital and

I like what we were talking about right before we started recording, which was taking on the wrong kind of capital. I really like that.

So before we get into all of that really great kind of back and forth, I'd love to understand your background like how you got into business and how you got started.

Sure. Thanks Steve. It's certainly been an interesting journey. So I am Canadian and I'm living now in California and I have this incredible opportunity to represent the Canadian capital

Marcus living in the US and so I have been in the capital Marcus for over 25 years and I have advised companies from everything from boots trapping to IPO.

And in my current role within the Toronto Stock Exchange talking to US CEO is which ultimately are primarily men.

So there are very, very few women as we know from the statistics that have taken their companies public and certainly in my day job, I see very few female founders even though I know there are an incredible number of

women building great businesses. And so on the side of what I do, I created fortuna funding specifically to work with female founders on accessing that very early stage capital.

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