“Shark Tank” investing star Kevin O’Leary says women lead all of his companies that are showing returns.
“All the cash in the last two quarters is coming from companies run by women,” he told Business Insider at a recent event for the startup Honeyfund, in which he is an investor. “I don’t have a single company run by a man right now that’s outperformed the ones run by women.”
O’Leary has 27 companies in his portfolio, he said, and 55% have female CEOs. He has spoken about his faith in female CEOs in the past, but he only recently discovered just how divided the numbers in his portfolio were in terms of gender.
He noted that not all of his companies led by women were profitable, but some were — something that couldn’t be said for any of his companies run by men.
He asked one CEO why she thought the companies led by women were doing better.
“She said to me, ‘You know, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy mom,'” he recalled. “It kind of makes sense, right?”
We posited that maybe these companies’ success has to do with women being considered better at multitasking than men.
“It could be,” O’Leary said. “These are midrange companies in the sales range of five to 10 million dollars, so that multitasking could be very important. Large corporations are a different thing, but when you’re doing venture investing like I am, it’s startup to mid-level. They’ve got to work their tails off. They’ve got to work like hell.”
O’Leary discovered this by accident. He asked his staff to see what all of the companies providing returns to his portfolios had in common, and it found that the companies returning on O’Leary’s investments were all led by women.
“Shark Tank”/ABC O’Leary on “Shark Tank.”
