MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ALPHA GIRLS
“An intimate and addictive homage to the fearless female pioneers who made Silicon Valley blossom. Julian’s vivid portrayals of once-hidden risk takers and mavericks will leave you heartbroken, hopeful, and hungering for more.”
—Brian Keating, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Losing the Nobel Prize
“Finally, it’s here: a book about Silicon Valley as seen through the accomplishments of the powerful women who, against all odds, made their mark there. Alpha Girls offers an inside look at the true meaning of grit and drive and upends the myth that it is only men who create and build tech companies. For any young woman in search of a role model, or any young man too, Alpha Girls is a must-read.”
—Caroline Paul, author of The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure
“Alpha Girls is about four women in a high-stakes, high-drama world. Each of these women’s stories is gripping, treacherous, heroic, and entertaining. They are being pulled out from behind the gender curtain and given their rightful place in contemporary history.”
—Cathy Schulman, president of Welle Entertainment, Academy Award–winning producer, and women’s activist
“Julian Guthrie is the best author writing about Silicon Valley today, and Alpha Girls is the book that the world needs right now. It’s the real story behind the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. If you are a woman who works, or simply work with women, Alpha Girls is essential reading.”
—Adam Fisher, author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
Copyright © 2019 by Julian Guthrie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
currencybooks.com
CURRENCY and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780525573920
Ebook ISBN 9780525573937
Cover design: Lucas Heinrich
Cover image: (gradient) A-Star/Shutterstock
v5.4
ep
To my mother,
Connie Guthrie,
an original Alpha Girl
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART ONE: The Valley of Dreams
PART TWO: Getting in the Game
PART THREE: The Outsiders Inside
PART FOUR: Survival of the Fittest
PART FIVE: Girl Power
Photo Insert
PART SIX: Marriage, Motherhood, and Moneymaking
PART SEVEN: Life, Death, and Picassos
PART EIGHT: The Days of Reckoning
PART NINE: The Awakening
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
SAND HILL ROAD
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.
A pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Mary Jane had graduated from Purdue University in 1976 with a degree in mathematics. She paid for her car by waitressing during college summers, wearing a small orange romper that prompted oversize tips. Her beat-up Pinto, which leaked radiator fluid and still had its original Firestone 500 tires, had taken her nearly two thousand miles, from Kansas City to northern California, where she had landed a job at an eight-year-old technology company called Intel.
Although Sand Hill Road was the center of the venture capital world, no bronze statue of a charging bull, no Gilded Age architecture, and no artificial canyons towered over by gleaming skyscrapers commemorated it. At that time it was a stretch of rolling land laced with scrub brush, sprawling oak trees, big pink dahlias, and buildings that stretched long and low like an old Lincoln Continental. The midcentury modern structures, with outer skins of cedar, redwood, and masonry, featured numbers but no names. Unlike other centers of commerce, Sand Hill Road is intentionally inconspicuous; it consciously resists contemporary symbols of money and power. Instead, it is country club hush. To Mary Jane, it was a world away from the tall cornfields where she had skittered about as a child, playing hide-and-seek, moving three rows up and four rows over, strategic and mathematical in her decision making even then.
Her aptitude in math—not to mention a prescient feel for the markets—would make Mary Jane particularly well suited for this new California frontier. And in the 1970s, that was exactly what Silicon Valley felt like, a frontier, steeped in the aggressive and hungry spirit of the Gold Rush, of adventurers and fortune seekers risking everything for a glimmer of gold, aware that only a lucky few walked away winners. The original Gold Rush days of 1849 were dominated by mining companies and merchants hawking overpriced goods. It was ruled by men: Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo. Women, outnumbered and overmatched, were mostly reduced to entertainers, companions, wives, or housekeepers. Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff.
Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner. Less than 2 percent of venture dollars go to start-ups founded by women (less than 1 percent to women of color), and roughly 85 percent of the tech employees at top companies are men. Yet technology is pervasive, and it is changing our lives. When Mary Jane first drove up Sand Hill, women made up barely 40 percent of the overall American workforce. Less than a handful of those women were venture capital partners.
But Mary Jane Elmore, the unflappable, fresh-faced girl next door, would go on to become one of the first women in history to make partner at a venture capital firm. Like the bold pink dahlias flourishing in one corner of Sand Hill Road, she and the other pioneering women venture capitalists, the “Alpha Girls,” would figure out a way to take root and thrive.
They made their way west like early-day prospectors during Silicon Valley’s headiest days, as enormous mainframe computers gave way to minicomputers, personal computers, and the Internet, just as punched computer cards had at one time set the stage for computation. Through the start-ups they would discover, fund, and mentor—financing the ideas of entrepreneurs—these women venture capitalists would play a critical role in shaping how people around the world work, play, communicate, study, travel, create, and interact. Venture capitalists influence many of the most important new inventions in drugs, medicine, and technology.
In addition to Mary Jane, there is Sonja Hoel, a blond, blue-eyed, doggedly optimistic southern belle whose investments at the white-glove Menlo Ventures on Sand Hill Road would focus on making the Internet safer and more reliable; Magda
lena Yeşil, a feisty Armenian outsider reared in Istanbul, who loved getting in where she wasn’t invited; and Theresia Gouw, an overachieving daughter of Chinese immigrants, who went from flipping burgers at Burger King to chasing down some of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley history. There are other Alpha Girls, too, such as the first investor and board member of Tesla; the woman who started the first venture fund in India; the first woman to take a tech company public; the first women to build an online beauty site; and today a whole new generation of young women financiers and entrepreneurs. These women share a determination with Alpha Girls everywhere, transcending vocation and location, working in Hollywood, academia, economics, advertising, politics, the media, sports, automobiles, agriculture, law, hospitality, restaurants, and the arts.
History is rich with women rebels who have shined a spotlight from the outside—women such as Rosa Parks, whose one defiant act became synonymous with the civil rights movement. But it is also rife with what one academic calls “tempered radicals,” those who learn to play the game to perfection—whatever the game is—before trying to change the rules. Margaret Thatcher took elocution lessons to deepen her voice, to better be heard. Georgia O’Keeffe painted “low-toned dismal-colored” paintings like male artists, to show she could, before turning to the bright desert flowers that made her a giant of American modernism.
As Mary Jane drove up Sand Hill Road on that perfect fall day, she had little sense of the hard realities ahead. She could never have imagined juggling a high-stakes job, three children, a husband aggressively pursuing his own Silicon Valley dreams, and a junior partner with outsize ambitions. But she knew intuitively that this was the right place for her: Silicon Valley was the embodiment of breathtakingly bold ideas and inventions, a region awash in unparalleled ingenuity, originality, tenacity, optimism, and opportunity. It had given rise to more new companies and industries than anywhere else in the world, including such technology giants as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb.
But Mary Jane and the other Alpha Girls would need steel in their spines to stay the course, and they would pay a steep emotional price along the way. They would be betrayed when they least expected it. Silicon Valley, teeming with youthful testosterone, is a deceptively rough arena, where bullying, bias, dysfunction, and subjugation are part of the rules of engagement. In the end, the Alpha Girls—these resilient daughters of merchants, teachers, dentists, and immigrants—would come to realize there was only one way to shake up the industry they loved: by breaking and remaking its rules.
PART
ONE
The Valley of Dreams
1980–1994
MAGDALENA YEŞIL
Breathless from her bike ride across campus, Magdalena Yeşil arrived for work at the Stanford computer center wearing a white floor-length gown and yellow daisies in her hair. It was ten P.M., and the room was full of men playing Dungeons & Dragons and working on their engineering theses and dissertations. Magdalena smoothed her dress, unpacked her bag, and sat at her desk. The sign on the wall behind her read COMPUTER CONSULTANT.
It was late spring 1980. Magdalena worked the night shift at LOTS, Stanford’s Low-Overhead Time-Sharing center, where she fielded predictable questions and laments from students: “I ran out of allocated memory”; “My software keeps running in an infinite loop”; and “I can’t log into my account.”
Magdalena herself was anything but predictable. Already striking with her long, thick, reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes, she attracted even more attention wearing ballgowns and tiaras to work, or Sixties-inspired fashion; she loved geometric dresses, patterned tights, paisley pantsuits, and anything with daisies. If she had to endure the boredom of these graveyard shifts, she was determined to keep herself, at least, if not those around her, entertained with her whimsical costumes.
As Magdalena logged in, username Y.Ynot, one of the regulars took a seat next to her. He’d printed out a long sheet showing the software he was using and the code he’d written. Pencil in hand, Magdalena studied the printout, and like a forgery expert searching for anachronisms in a painting, she zeroed in on a line created with the wrong command. The satisfied graduate student, his mistake corrected, returned to his table.
As the lights flickered and buzzed, many of the regulars stole glances at Magdalena in her latest ensemble. She bought most of the costumes for a dollar or two at a secondhand clothing store just off campus on California Avenue. But before long their attention was pulled back to the Digital Equipment 2040, a massive mainframe computer that gave users the illusion of having its undivided attention. The DEC was housed in its own cooled room behind glass. The LOTS regulars tended to fit into three categories: students still working on their dissertations, sometimes a decade after graduating; the graduate students in engineering or computer science who came in to do research or play Dungeons & Dragons, Pong, or Asteroids; and the social sciences graduate students—often the only women—who used the center’s statistical analysis tool, SPSS.
Many of the regulars, she knew, were brilliant; she affectionately referred to them as her “colorful weirdos.” She also knew that they were kindred spirits—people who, like her, considered engineering akin to a religion, artfully assembling complex puzzles. And despite the night-owl hours, she appreciated a place where she could both stand out and fit in at the same time.
Growing up in Turkey, she learned that fitting in had consequences. From an early age, she had been taught the importance of guarding her Armenian ethnicity. She went by Lena instead of her Christian name, Magdalena. Armenians in Turkey were both cursed and harassed in Magdalena’s time. In her grandparents’ time, they had been jailed and executed, just as Jews were decades later by the Germans.
There were moments even now, nearly seven thousand miles from home, when she couldn’t shake images of sunny days that suddenly darkened, beautiful afternoons on the public beaches in Istanbul, laughing, running, and swimming, until she was singled out as an Armenian. The other kids at the beach would turn on her, throwing sand in her face and chasing her away. Their rejection, however, made her even more determined to fit in, to play with them, to challenge Turkey’s rigid social boundaries. She would return home and plot out what she could do to get herself invited back. A strong swimmer, she would show off her swimming strokes. She would use the change she’d saved to win favors by buying the other kids candy or ice cream.
Her father had raised her to dress like a lady but think like a man. As a young girl, she wore frilly dresses and white gloves and pushed a play stroller with a baby doll in it. Growing up in Turkey, being well mannered was even more important than being well educated. But when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied without hesitation, “A carpenter,” a profession that wasn’t considered appropriate for girls in Turkey. One of Magdalena’s favorite pastimes as a child was hammering nails into the walls of her family home. When her parents took away her hammer, she used wooden hangers to strike the nails.
Magdalena arrived in America to attend college in 1976, with forty-three dollars in cash and nine gold bracelets that her parents told her she could sell when she needed extra money. She hadn’t sold one yet, thanks to the two jobs that she held down while attending Stanford, including the graveyard shift at the computer center. She was fluent in Turkish, Armenian, French, and English.
As the center’s computer expert, Magdalena was able to access the student’s work. In the early-morning hours, to stave off boredom, she perused files. She found that the men wrote a great deal about movies (The Empire Strikes Back and The Deer Hunter), basketball (Michigan State beat Indiana State in the NCAA championship), music (Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,”
the Knack’s “My Sharona”), and politics (whether President Jimmy Carter could defeat Hollywood actor and Republican candidate Ronald Reagan). But mostly the men working through the night at the computer center came across to her as lonely, fixated on fellow classmates and unrequited love, or caught up in the gossip surrounding stars like Carrie Fisher, Sigourney Weaver, Farrah Fawcett, Jacqueline Bisset, and Debbie Harry.
* * *
Besides offering computer assistance, Magdalena helped the students with their research on everything from writing basic software to writing machine language. She had enrolled at Stanford thinking she would become a doctor but found the premed classes tedious. She was now about to graduate with her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, while simultaneously earning a master’s in electrical engineering—the only woman in the “double e” master’s program. Electrical engineering and digital computer design, unlike medicine, opened her mind in unexpected ways and taught her the flaws in her own deductive reasoning. As she learned about the absolute logic of electrical circuits and digital computers, she began to debug her own logic.
To her surprise, designing computer software brought her back to her faith. Growing up in Turkey, religion had been everything: tribe and identity, more important than race. As a young woman on her own in America, Magdalena had moved toward agnosticism. But as she worked on problems in engineering classes, designing logic gates, end gates, outputs, inputs, and registers, she saw the faultiness of her logic, at times, and reveled in the finding. She was a member of the first class at Stanford to design the complex VLSI (Very Large-Scale Integration) circuit. She designed with precision and care, reviewing her work over and over, until she was confident she had got it right. But inevitably something would fail. Eventually, she would see—or someone would point out—a blind spot in her thinking. Individual logic is not absolute, she came to realize. She could not rely on her brain alone to know with certainty. Her engineering and computer classes made her realize: There is so much above and beyond my brain, my logic. She found the same thing in others at the computer center. Even the most brilliant students had blind spots.
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