Kay Koplovitz Wants to See More Entrepreneurs Who Look Like Her

Kay Koplovitz still remembers her first negotiation.Her family was moving from one suburb of Milwaukee to another in the middle of the school year, and she wanted to finish kindergarten with her class.

To cover the bus fare back to her old neighborhood, she persuaded her father to raise her allowance.“I sort of felt, well, my first one was successful,” she now says of the deal.

“Why wouldn’t all the rest of them be?”Many of them have been.In 1977, as the founder of what was later renamed USA Networks, she became the first woman in the United States to lead a television network.

Over the years, Ms.Koplovitz, now 79, racked up a lot of firsts.

She brought sports to cable before ESPN.She cut deals to bring Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League to cable operators for the first time, and she pioneered a new business model, persuading cable operators to pay a license fee to carry the channel, which was initially called Madison Square Garden Sports Network.

In 1998, USA Networks was sold to Barry Diller for $4 billion.Ms.Koplovitz was one of the most powerful people in cable at a time when women were barred from many of the golf courses and dinner clubs where deal-making happened.

“If I thought that not going to the second-floor club at Augusta National — because I’m a woman and they didn’t allow women at that time — was going to be a barrier to me, I wouldn’t have done what I did,” she recalled.In 1998, after Ms.Koplovitz stepped down from USA Networks following its sale to Mr.

Diller, President Bill Clinton appointed her as chair of the National Women’s Business Council.Ever since, she has focused on advancing female entrepreneurs.

Her start-up accelerator, Springboard Enterprises, which she co-founded 24 years ago, has admitted 930 companies, including Zipcar, the RealReal and iRobot.More than 200 of them have been acquired, 28 have gone public, and 10 have valuations of at least $1 b...