FEMINIST Founder Feature: Emma Bates, CEO and Co-Founder of Diem
There’s a new digital space made by women for women and non-binary people to help close the gender information gap. FEMINIST Co-Founder, Aisha Becker-Burrowes, sat down with Emma Bates, CEO and Co-Founder of Diem, the newly launched social search engine inspired by the way women have shared stories for centuries — with each other.
Emma spoke about what she’s built, why she built it, the beauty and challenges of being a female founder and of course, what feminism means to her.
The Diem app officially launched this week and we’re eager to chime in with our most pressing and perhaps, most embarrassing questions.
Q: What inspired you to found Diem?
EB: The idea initially came after I had to take the morning after pill and I couldn’t find other people’s experiences when I was searching online — it felt like a stark contrast to the stories [and] experiences I knew existed in group chats, over dinner tables or now lost in the ether! I then teamed up with my co-founder, Divia, and we developed the idea for the Diem you see today, together.
Q: What’s one of the favorite questions you’ve seen someone ask on the platform?
EB: Oo, there are too many to choose from! My favorites tend to be ones that you know were also typed into Google (e.g., “Is it normal…”) but they hadn’t found what they were looking for (which is typically validation). I also really love the questions that spark an interesting discussion — a few that spring to mind: How do you process jealousy? Are babies luxury items? How do gender norms impact your relationship? A recent conversation that made me smile was
about finding male genitalia gross to look at (!)
Q:
In many ways, Diem really runs on the power of community. How has the community played a role in your founder journey?
“Community has been huge for me on this founder journey in the last few years… I absolutely couldn’t do it without other founders. There’s no one else that truly gets the how and why it’s so hard building a business, so having a solid community of founders around me helps navigate the ups and downs.”
— Emma Bates, CEO and Co-Founder of Diem
Q: How do you envision Diem contributing to closing the gender information gap in the long term?
EB:Over generations, social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic information resources have defaulted to serve the “default male” population. As a result, women talk, having learned that the fastest way to discover reliable, valuable information is through each other instead. In the “real world,” this looks like asking your best friend to write a breakup message for you, telling your sister how to actually negotiate for a raise at work, gossiping about sex the morning after, or crowdsourcing the group chat on their anxiety medication recommendations. There’s a huge amount of value that lies within these conversations — whether it be health anecdotes or money tips, we’re collectively piecing together ways to make the world work for us, one conversation at a time. So the plan with Diem has always been to build a place that closes the gender information gap together, primarily by collating a credible, people-powered database of knowledge. Diem’s community is what makes Diem’s technology work.
Consequently, we’ve built our technology to truly recognize the value of the “datapoints” that lie within the candid conversations we have with each other. Our platform not only scales a person’s ability to have these conversations with people beyond your existing communities but on the backend, we’ve built a proprietary data model to store, organize, and turn these conversations into personalized, searchable resources for everyone to benefit from. We’ve literally built a search engine that gets better the more women talk. Every conversation or interaction that happens in Diem trains our model. So the platform can contribute to closing the gender information gap just by people having conversations with each other in a place that harnesses their value — we do all the hard work on the backend to make that data useful to everyone moving forward.
Describe what it’s like being a female founder in 3 words.
“Oh, this is a hard one. For me, it would be… Fulfilling, Underestimated, Passionate..”
— Emma Bates, CEO and Co-Founder of Diem
Q: Can you speak to any challenges you’ve faced as a female founder in the tech industry? What advice would you offer to other women and gender nonbinary individuals on their own founder journey?
EB: The biggest and most obvious is the wild bias and discrepancy in fundraising that goes to female teams (which is vast and IMO embarrassing for the VC industry at this point). It’s deeply frustrating to watch people make biased assumptions about you or your business, it also feels like such a waste of time having to sit through probing that is steeped in subconscious bias. I think the only real challenges I’ve faced (to do with my gender) have come in the fundraising realm. I think in every other way, I’ve found it to be beneficial — I think all traditionally underrepresented founders bring truly innovative ideas to the table based on their lived experiences that are not the same as the dominant, so I guess my advice would be to see it as a superpower!
Q: And of course, what does feminism mean to you?
EB: Equality and equity for all! I’m also deeply curious about what alternate types of “power” look like — right now we’re striving to be equal to what men have, but I’m always interested in talking with people about what power might look like if you live in another… body. For example, what would power (and the world) look like if pregnancy was celebrated as equally “powerful” to our current dominant perception of power being money/politics/physical strength? I don’t know how possible or realistic it is for us to change or open up new “power” structures in practice, but in an ideal world, feminism to me would also mean having more examples of what power looks like.
Emma Bates is the CEO and co-founder of Diem, a social search engine inspired by the way women have shared stories for centuries. A passionate advocate for gender equity and equality, Emma is on a mission to showcase how inclusive internet platforms that recognize real world behavior, like Diem, help close the gender information gap, and usher in a "new internet" that celebrates + fosters real connection through new, innovative technology. Emma is a Forbes 30U30 nominee and Diem is a Techstars NYC portfolio company backed by leading investors like Flybridge, Acrew & Stellation. By trade, Emma is a marketer and community builder and has held marketing roles at some of the fastest-growing consumer brands in NYC and the UK. Most recently, prior to founding Diem, Emma led Partnerships at the DTC travel brand, Away. Emma was born in Singapore, raised in the UK and moved to New York in 2016.
Diem is a social search engine. It's a dedicated place for people to search, collect, discover and share information with each other, inspired by the way women have been passing knowledge for centuries. Think of it like the best and biggest group chat you’ve ever been a part of, where all the important, silly, quick, private, and frenetic knowledge you share is organized and stored for everyone to benefit from.
