The amount could be $25,000 or $500,000. To Jules Miller, a funding venture is about more than writing a check.

“The more critical thing is partnerships. People congratulate themselves a lot for raising big rounds of financing, but to me that’s missing the point,” she said. “The point is, can you build a big business and acquire the customers and revenue to really get you where you want to go? Raising money is a piece of that puzzle, but not the biggest piece and we tend to get distracted by that.”

Miller runs the Blockchain Ventures fund and blockchain accelerator at IBM, picking and guiding tech startups for IBM to partner with. She also runs her own venture fund, Prose Ventures, which focuses on tech startups in the legal and compliance space.

Miller doesn’t have a mandate to accommodate women entrepreneurs at IBM, and she doesn’t package Prose Ventures as a fund focused on women.

“That being said, I invest in them anyway. I find that you can have more of an impact when you’re incorporating women into a wider thesis,” she said. Women-only funds tend to be seen by investors as impact investing, with a lower expectation of returns for a trade-off of higher social mission.

Only 5 percent of venture capital funding goes to women, she said, something she felt the sting of when starting three of her own tech companies. Part of the reason is how women entrepreneurs operate versus men entrepreneurs.

“They’re not out there promoting themselves as much on average. They’re not applying to accelerator programs as much on average,” Miller said. “At IBM, we’ve had very few women-founded companies apply, not because they aren’t out there but because maybe they think they’re not mature enough or, for whatever reason, aren’t as brazen about going to market as some male entrepreneurs.”

It takes about three to five times as much work to recruit the best female entrepreneurs into her pipeline because of those factors, she said. But her experience as an entrepreneur led her to the realization that those who dole out the money are the ones with the opportunity to move the needle, so she puts in the work. “When I would see an all-male investor team [as an entrepreneur], I’d know I was less likely to get funded than a team with one woman,” she said.

At IBM’s accelerator program, her focus on recruiting women entrepreneurs enabled the company to recruit 30 percent women-owned businesses.

“If we hadn’t been focused on recruiting women, one in 10 companies [recruited] would be founded by women. My goal was 50, and we ended up at 30 percent … better than 10 percent but I’d like to achieve parity,” she said. “I don’t like the phrase ‘women’s empowerment.’ I like ‘enrichment.’ The best way to make women entrepreneurs more successful is to make them wealthy and profitable and make money for investors.”

At the Leading Women Entrepreneurs Force For Change event in Newark on Nov. 14, Miller will host a pitch room for entrepreneurs looking for seed money to grow their early-stage companies.

In those pitch rooms, she said, she and other VCs aren’t looking to hear the minutiae that an entrepreneur would share in an hour-long meeting. With only a few minutes to make an impression, Miller recommends entrepreneurs articulate their pitches well to get investors excited, but pitch like a movie trailer: show the highlights, so investors want to watch the whole movie.

But, once again, she said, having the money is not a good enough reason to invest in a certain business. With partnerships comes connections, and what good is an investor with the wrong connections?

“Just because it’s a good business doesn’t mean I’m the right investor to invest in it. If I can’t add value, it’s not going to be a good fit. It doesn’t reflect negatively on the entrepreneur,” she said. “$25,000 might sound like a lot for an early stage entrepreneur, but the money is not the point. It’s the access, the credibility, the connections. If I can’t be helpful to that particular entrepreneur, it’s not worth the capital for either of us.”