Her attention was drawn to an unkempt couple who came to the center almost every night to play multiuser games. They usually screamed and carried on as they played, oblivious to those trying to study. But one of her favorites was here tonight, as well, a considerably older female PhD student, impeccably dressed, in pants (never skirts). The woman had straight brown hair and smoked a pipe. Magdalena admired the woman’s theatrical sense of self.
Everywhere she went in America, Magdalena had found herself surrounded by men. In many ways, it was the world she knew and preferred. She was the son her father had never had. Her older sister had been claimed by their mother, and there would not be another child after Magdalena. Her father, a merchant, took Magdalena to business meetings and even got her enrolled in one of the top all-boys schools in Turkey.
As the night wore on, Magdalena surveyed the dozen or so students who remained in the computer center, pondering which of them would go on to become successful inventors, entrepreneurs, or even household names. There was little hint at Stanford, or in Silicon Valley, of how hard it was to make money in business. Instead, the presence of money felt persistent, taken for granted even. Her friends at Stanford had money; their parents paid their tuition. Millionaires seemed to be minted throughout the region overnight. Magdalena, on the other hand, had to make every penny count. She had a practice of calculating how many hours she needed to work to pay for a meal with friends. Afterward she would say ruefully to herself, “That meal cost me four hours!” She looked at the accumulation of money as a report card. If it was, she intended to get all A’s in her life after school.
The computing landscape had been morphing rapidly, from month to month, as massive mainframes transitioned to desktop computers. Word-processing applications, digital spreadsheets, and relational databases were becoming available. They in turn would require stable hardware platforms and, even more important, reliable software systems.
Finally, the clock in the Stanford computer center reached five-thirty A.M.—quitting time. Magdalena rustled in her bag for her sunglasses, smiled at her fellow night owls, and headed outside. Her gown made a swishing sound as she walked. She gathered up the layers before hopping onto her bike.
The early-morning light was her reward for the long night spent in the center. The smell of fresh-mown grass and the sound of the sprinklers watering the Stanford campus grounds were as soothing as a metronome. Fueled by the fresh air, Magdalena—gown hiked around her, daisies in her hair—accelerated down the soaked paths, spraying water behind her in an aerial wake.
Back in her dorm room, she left a trail of clothing from the door to her bed, then dove under the covers. She had class in a few hours, and job interviews in a few days, including one with the bearded boys of Apple Computer—two guys named Steve.
MARY JANE “MJ” ELMORE
The present was so different from MJ’s past. Her past was a small house in the Midwest surrounded by cornfields. It was her mother on her knees scrubbing floors, working nights at JCPenney, taking care of a husband and five children. It was her father driving fifty miles to teach middle school. MJ spent summers roaming unsupervised, with a bike, a paper sack lunch, and jars of Kool-Aid. The past was the occasional family dinner when everyone else got steak, but Mom opted to eat hamburger to save money.
Now in 1981, MJ, after working several years at Intel, had left the company to pursue her MBA at Stanford. One of her professors, Jack McDonald, regularly invited prominent businesspeople to speak to the class. MJ had been given the honor of choosing today’s speaker, Sandy Kurtzig, the first woman to take a tech company public.
Kurtzig, thirty-four, dressed in cobalt blue with matching high heels, had started ASK Computer Systems in her spare bedroom with $2,000 in savings. Her personal fortune was now worth $67 million. Sporting long and perfectly manicured nails and carrying a pink briefcase, she arrived at Stanford in a new Ferrari.
“The reason I studied math is that I’m a slow reader,” Kurtzig told the students. “I like things with a right and wrong answer. And I was probably more of a tomboy growing up. My mom gave me a Girl Scout doll, and I put the doll aside to play with the box.”
MJ smiled in recognition. Math had taken her to Purdue, then on to Intel, where she worked on one of the most important campaigns in the company’s history, a marketing crusade called Operation Crush to establish dominance in the chip industry. MJ’s math background had enabled her to understand Intel’s sophisticated chip technology, despite the fact she was not an engineer. Like Kurtzig, MJ had been something of a tomboy, schooled by the neighborhood boys in how to stand up on her bicycle seat as she rode by her house. The boys had also coached her in some of their colorful vocabulary. When her dad told a story over dinner one night about something unfortunate that happened at school, MJ piped up, “Tough titties!” Everyone burst into laughter.
Kurtzig said she knew she wanted to do something beyond changing the “thousandth diaper.” “I felt if I wasn’t happy in what I was doing, I would have a hard time making a happy life for my boys.”
MJ thought of her own mother, who had married her father in 1950 at nineteen instead of going to college, despite being offered a four-year scholarship. MJ’s family of seven had lived in Arcola, Illinois, then Terre Haute, Indiana, where they shared a single bathroom. Her mother spent hours baking their favorite foods and sewing outfits from patterns. In another place and time, given opportunities, MJ knew that Dorothy Hanna could’ve been a Sandy Kurtzig.
In Arcola, opportunity was the vending machine at the laundromat that regularly dispensed extra candy bars when MJ only paid for one. It was the huge cement drainage pipes in the summer, where the cool interior walls echoed back her shouts and songs. It was the freedom to roam the town, unsupervised, with adults expecting that she would do what was right. MJ admired Silicon Valley’s spirit of invention, but she revered its spirit of reinvention. Stanford business school was another step from her past to the future, where the girl next door could be whatever she imagined.
MJ had researched the facts about Kurtzig’s company and asked a series of questions. What was it like to be a female CEO in technology? How did she juggle being a mother and a CEO? What did she look for in building a team? Few of MJ’s classmates shared her interest in technology; most wanted to become management consultants or investment bankers. Silicon Valley had not yet become a household name.
Kurtzig talked about the development of ASK and its software, MANMAN (short for manufacturing management). Kurtzig originally intended to call it MAMA, until a CEO she knew said, “Can you imagine an executive getting in front of a board of directors and saying he wanted approval to run the company’s manufacturing operations with ‘the MAMA system’?”
Wanting to stay with the same construction, Kurtzig began jotting down a few potential names. Suddenly it dawned on her: “You often need two men to do the work of one mama!” So, she renamed the software MANMAN, and both the company and the product became hits.
Kurtzig told the class that she had never had a single female employee come in and ask for a raise, an observation that surprised MJ. “Men will come in and ask whether they’re qualified or not,” Kurtzig said. “Women will expect to have every qualification and skill and years of experience. Men are promoted based on potential, women on performance.”
Kurtzig went on to tell the class some of the more memorable stories from her career. In one, she walked into a business meeting late, the only woman in the room. A potential client sitting at the table assumed she was the secretary and asked for coffee. “Sure! Cream or sugar?” Kurtzig replied without missing a beat. When Kurtzig returned with coffee, the man, having realized his mistake, hemmed and hawed and apologized. Kurtzig told him, “I don’t mind. If you sign the contract, I’ll bake you cookies!”
“If you look for sexism,” Kurtzig told the Stanford class, “you’ll never get where you want to g
o.” When a client or potential client hit on her, she learned to deflect it with humor. “Hey, I’m busy this quarter. Maybe next fiscal year.” She found ways to dispatch men’s advances without making them so uncomfortable that they didn’t want to do business with her.
Listening to Kurtzig, MJ realized she had adopted a similar approach to dealing with slights. Humor—coupled with a change of subject—went a long way toward quelling questionable behavior. When men in her class made jokes about a campus women’s networking club, MJ learned to shrug it off. Twenty-four percent of MJ’s MBA class at Stanford—75 out of 305 students—were women. Since 1976, every MBA class had had a women’s group to facilitate networking. MJ was “captain” for the 1982 GSB class. The club, called Women in Management (WIM), met regularly. When they returned from their meetings, the guys in their class would yell out, “Oh the WIMs—‘Women Impersonating Men’—are back!”
Kurtzig told the Stanford class that she’d made it a policy of never talking to women-only groups—she had no patience for a “can’t-do-it attitude.” She concluded her presentation with one of her favorite credos, targeted specifically at the women in the class: “You can’t play the game if you’re not in it.”
MJ nodded; she too had a history of finding her way around walls. She’d enrolled at Purdue, a highly respected public university, instead of Indiana State, paying her own way. When she graduated from Purdue, she discovered that job recruiters were not interested in math majors. Companies listed the majors or specialties they were looking for, and only those students could sign up for interviews. MJ had to figure out who was coming to campus and wait outside the interview room door—or follow the recruiters on their way to the bathroom—to make her case for why she should be interviewed.
A year into her job at Intel, MJ hit another wall. She had spent her first year trying to expedite memory chip deliveries to impatient customers—it was frustrating. MJ was determined to switch to product management, where she could help bring something new to market. She found an ally in Susan Thomas, a computer scientist and electrical engineer trained at MIT. Thomas had joined Intel in 1976 and worked in marketing for microprocessors, traveling with the salesmen to explain how the microprocessor worked. Thomas helped MJ transfer to the division that made the tools for making microprocessors.
The timing could not have been better. Within a few months, MJ became part of Operation Crush, the make-or-break companywide race to win the microprocessor war with Motorola. Intel needed its new 8086 sixteen-bit microprocessor chip to “crush” the competition, Motorola’s sixteen-bit 68000 chip. MJ flew around the country with one of Intel’s so-called SWAT teams, hosting seminars and meetings to sell customers on how Intel’s microprocessors would automate manufacturing, run assembly lines and satellites, and change the way businesses operated.
Intel, from founders Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce to COO Andy Grove, poured everything into Operation Crush. Media strategist Regis McKenna—who also handled marketing for Apple—ran a $2 million advertising campaign, using images from artist Patrick Nagel. Intel offered trips to Tahiti to the top salespeople. A young man named John Doerr, brimming with competitive energy, sold the microprocessors as if his life depended on it, employing such then-novel techniques as videos to help him sell. Employees wore OPERATION CRUSH T-shirts—until Intel’s attorney decided a “crush the competition” mantra might stir unwanted antitrust concerns.
MJ, Sue Thomas, John Doerr, and Ann Howland, an electrical engineer who later became Doerr’s wife, socialized at company picnics, volleyball games, and Christmas parties. The Hungarian-born Grove, blunt and demanding, expected employees to sign a tardy sheet if they came in after eight A.M. Some employees who arrived late signed in with aliases, including “Chuck Roast” and “Luke Warm.”
MJ felt like she had landed at the center of the universe. IBM was working on its 5150 personal computer and had narrowed the microprocessor that would power the PC down to Motorola and Intel. When MJ decided to leave Intel to pursue an MBA, to advance her career, she asked Grove for a letter of recommendation. Grove told her he was ambivalent about the value of an MBA—but agreed to write the letter anyway.
Now, just a few months shy of graduating from Stanford, MJ helped Kurtzig field final questions, and afterward, she walked Kurtzig out. MJ admired Kurtzig for her boldness. She was strong and confident, and she owned her success. As Kurtzig stepped into her Ferrari, she urged MJ to think big: “Why sit at the table when you can buy it?”
MJ soon began to interview with start-ups and venture capital firms. This time she had the qualifications recruiters were looking for, given her background at Intel. Intel had won the war with Motorola, and Operation Crush marked the company’s move away from memory products and into the microprocessor world, Intel’s future. MJ had seen firsthand the power of small and highly motivated teams.
MJ told a few of her business school classmates that she had an interview with Reid Dennis, one of the founding fathers of venture capital, at Institutional Venture Partners. Her classmates warned her, “Reid Dennis is not going to hire a woman.”
Arriving at 3000 Sand Hill Road, she parked in the back lot and walked through a quiet courtyard with a sprawling oak tree. The fifty-six-year-old Dennis had white hair and thick glasses, wore pleated slacks, a button-down shirt, and a belt with a big buckle. As the two sat down in his corner office, MJ tried not to let her nervousness show. His office was full of historical San Francisco lithographs, and several of his brass scale-model trains—including a four-foot tinder—were on display. He told MJ that as a child, he’d loved watching the trains go over the Donner Pass.
MJ told Dennis about growing up in Terre Haute and about her time at Purdue, Intel, and Stanford. She talked about her strong mother, her father’s teaching career, and her large family.
As she talked, she kept her hands loosely clasped on her lap, composed. Her sister often told her she had a knack for remaining calm amid chaos.
“I’ve always been interested in solving problems,” MJ told Dennis. “Math gave me a way of looking at the world. It taught me how to find the right answer, but also how to avoid the wrong answer, to avoid misleading probabilities and percentages.”
As the two talked about microprocessors and the changing landscape of computers, it was clear that Dennis appreciated MJ’s grasp of technology and liked that she was more of a generalist than an engineer. He was an electrical engineer by training, he said, and had enough engineers working for him already.
“I used to change power tubes and radio transmitters in the navy,” he said. “I have to admit I’ve been surprised by this incredible miniaturization of electronic circuits. The smallest little deposit of conducting material can make all sorts of things happen.”
“But technology is only as good as the people behind it,” MJ pointed out. “Intel showed me that. The Motorola microprocessor was just as good as—if not better than—ours, but we had amazing people on a warpath to win. I think I’d say I’m most interested in people, relationships, and solving problems.” Then she added, “I want to accomplish something lasting in my lifetime.”
He told her that IVP was in the second year of a new $22 million fund. “We invest in both people and the product,” he said. “But I would agree that people are more important than the product. If the product fails, the right people find something else to do.”
Dennis offered to give MJ a tour of the IVP offices. He told her that when he hung his shingle on Sand Hill Road in 1973, he would arrive at work to silence. The phones didn’t ring. Entrepreneurs were not beating down the doors, he said with a laugh. “I used to get in my car and drive around South Palo Alto and look at names on doors,” he said. “If something said ‘electronics,’ I would knock on the door and see if they needed money. That was how investments were made. Venture was not an industry; it was an activity.”
Even earlier,
in the 1950s, Dennis said, when he worked at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, he and a small group of friends—Bill Bowes, John Bryan, Bill Edwards, and Brooks Walker Jr.—would invite entrepreneurs to Sam’s Grill in San Francisco for lunch. The men would listen to the entrepreneur make a pitch, then tell him to wait outside for five minutes so they could talk it over.
“We could raise around a hundred thousand dollars between us,” Dennis said. “Over a period of eight to ten years—remember, we all had day jobs—we probably helped start twenty-three or twenty-four companies. Of those, I’d say eighteen were wonderfully successful.”
He continued, “What makes you successful is your ability to judge people. You get in these meetings with entrepreneurs and listen to their stories. You have to figure out whether you believe their business model or not, and whether it makes sense.”
Looking at his watch, Dennis said to MJ, “Why don’t you stay and sit in on the meeting coming up? We have a company coming in to pitch.” Then he added half-jokingly, “One of your responsibilities will be to stop me from investing in my hobbies: boats, classic cars, trains, and planes.”
MJ stayed and listened to the pitch. She felt less nervous, observing, taking mental notes, even asking a few questions. Sandy Kurtzig’s advice echoed in her head: “You can’t play the game if you’re not in it.”
Later, as MJ gathered her things, Dennis turned to her, extended his hand, and asked when she could start. She stared at his outstretched hand in disbelief. I have a job at IVP? On Sand Hill Road?
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