While many VC-backed start-ups may fail, 42% of US public companies founded between 1974 and 2013 are VC-backed, and they accounted for 85% of R&D expenditures in 2014 (Gomall and Strebulaev, 2015[2oi)- Many recent tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, Uber, WhatsApp and Alibaba were initially VC-backed. For example, in the European Union the proportion of women in self-employment is under 10% compared with 17.5% for men. Similarly on average in the OECD, over 2012-16 some 5% of women declared themselves as working towards opening a business, while the share was 7.4% for men.