Natalia Oberti Noguera is in the business of creating women sharks

Called 'the Coach' by Marie Claire magazine, Natalia Oberti Noguera is founder and chief executive officer of Pipeline Angels, a network of women investors launched in 2011 that aims to change the face of venture-capital investing and creating funding for women social entrepreneurs.

She was named to the Forbes list Top 20 Women for Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter, as well as Latina.com's 25 Latinas Who Shine in Tech. Women's eNews recognized her as one of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century for 2012 and Fortune magazine highlighted her as one of the 55 Most Influential Women on Twitter. You can follow her on Twitter at @nakisnakis.

Though this will be her first visit to the Corridor, her parents met as high school exchange students in Cedar Rapids — her mother is Colombian,  her father is Italian.

'I have this special connection in terms of having heard of Cedar Rapids when I was growing up. I'm extra intrigued to check out Cedar Rapids,' she said. She will be the keynote speaker for the conference's professional track, in which she'll discuss, 'Changing the World & Generation She.'

Pipeline Angels is akin to the TV show 'Shark Tank,' in which would-be entrepreneurs get a chance to pitch their ideas to investors, Oberti Noguera explained.

'The reason I like that pop-culture reference is I like to say I'm in the business of creating women sharks,' she said. 'There are enough guy sharks out there. Boot camp participants are my sharks-in-training.'

She created the program in 2011 because she saw a huge disparity in the number of women making investments — and in the number of woman-run companies being invested in.

Pipeline Angels puts women through a six-month investing boot camp, at the end of which the group invests in a woman-led enterprise. When it launched, 12 percent of angel investors were women, according to a report by the Center for Venture Research.

'I kept hearing from women how hard it was to secure funding,' Oberti Noguera said.

She also wants to counter assumptions about ways women can make an impact.

'As a society, whenever a women said she was going to change the world, the assumption was she's going to launch a non-profit. I share with them they can make a positive impact as well by investing in women entrepreneurs,' she said.

'A lot of women are not necessarily interested in launching a startup or being an entrepreneur, but they can still be involved by being an angel investor.'

Investors tend to back entrepreneurs who remind them of themselves, and it takes conscious effort to rise above that, she noted.

Noguera cited an example of a company making positive efforts,  Pipeline Angels portfolio company Blendoor, which is a 'merit-based' job matching app that seeks to eliminate any sort of identifying information between employer and applicant.

'We look for what's similar to us, familiar to us. There are a lot of great companies out there that are making a good case for diversity (by doing things such as) eliminating any sort of identifying information,' Oberti Noguera said. 'There are all these studies that 'black-sounding' names have less of a chance of being considered for a job than 'white-sounding' names, etc., and similarity for women and men.

'At the same time, I'm cheeky, and so I wanted to turn this on its head and say, hey, ...

then let's get more women as well as men of color on the investment side because then we get more on the entrepreneur side.'

She said she makes a point to say women as well as men of color because too many gender parity conversations end up focusing only on white women.

'Language is important. Just be explicit about it,' she said.

Oberti Noguera cited an article that lays out an example of the challenges — that while black women lead more than 1.5 million businesses in the United States, they received only .002 percent of all venture funding over the past five years. She also noted work by Nicole Sanchez, founder and chief executive officer of Vaya Consulting, which works with companies to increase diversity in the workplace.

'She talks about how bootstrapping is glamorized in the startup world. For a lot of our communities, bootstrapping is simply called living,' Oberti Noguera said.

She also mentioned a study by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlit that showed men get promoted due to their potential, versus women, who get promoted due to their performance.

'There's a huge parallel in startup world: Men have paper-napkin ideas and get funding. Women already have business plan and capital and numbers and are still told come back when they have more numbers,' she said.

'There's a higher threshold of expectations that need to be met.'