Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  As Theresia eased her Jaguar into a parking spot at Accel, she had a good feeling about entrepreneurs Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen. What a year it was turning out to be. It had been only a few months since the Facebook deal, and now Trulia was on the horizon. She almost had to pinch herself: Could Trulia end up being a Picasso, too?

  SONJA

  On a beautiful spring day in 2008, Sonja left Menlo Ventures on Sand Hill Road to see her doctor at the Stanford University Medical Center. She was confident that her physician had good news for her. She planned to do some shopping at the Stanford Shopping Center afterward, before returning to the office for a board meeting later in the day.

  The day before she was scheduled to have a mammogram, Sonja had discovered a lump under her arm. She’d had a biopsy and was now meeting with Dr. Jocelyn Dunn to get the biopsy results. But she was confident everything was fine. Years before, her father had had quadruple bypass surgery. He was a naturally happy man and didn’t spend a second worrying about his surgery. His motto had always been “Gratitude and a great attitude.”

  Sonja smiled at Dr. Dunn and thanked her for getting the results so quickly. Dr. Dunn got immediately to the point. There was no easy way to deliver this kind of news: Sonja had breast cancer. And in the pantheon of types of breast cancer, Sonja’s was serious.

  At first, the news didn’t register. Dr. Dunn continued explaining the diagnosis and walking Sonja through the stages and grades. Then Dr. Dunn said something that Sonja understood: Her tumor was very aggressive. Sonja’s blue eyes, normally placid and good at giving nothing away, blinked back tears. Her older sister, Julie, had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer a month before. It was her sister’s cancer that had prompted Sonja to make an appointment for a mammogram. Now I have breast cancer, too?

  A kaleidoscope of images ran through her mind: her parents telling her to take time off to destress; her romantic and beautiful wedding to Jon Perkins; her pitch meetings at Menlo over the years. Sonja searched Dr. Dunn’s face for more information. The most devastating and confusing part of the news came in the form of what wasn’t said: Sonja and Jon were about to adopt a baby girl, an opportunity presented to them unexpectedly, only weeks before. The birth mother was eight months’ pregnant and a week away from moving into their home for the last month of her pregnancy. All Sonja could think was, I have cancer and am about to adopt a baby.

  THERESIA

  It was close to ten P.M. on Wednesday night, and Theresia was still at work. She hated to miss her nights at home and her bedtime stories with Sarah. She had been reading her the illustrated children’s book Strega Nona, about a magic pot that floods a town with pasta. Wolfing down a Power Bar at her desk, she could think of worse things than a growing wall of macaroni.

  As a managing partner, Theresia was spending a huge amount of time working with new hires, even those who weren’t her own. She was also dealing with personnel issues, something she had come to see as the invisible work of women managers. She was still the only senior woman investor at Accel, and employees at all levels came to her with problems and questions. Her door was always open, and someone always seemed to be on her couch.

  She felt she was constantly choosing between being liked and being respected. When a female employee asked whether she could leave to pick up a sick child, Theresia asked where the babysitter, partner, or husband was. There was a certain double standard here; Theresia was driven in part to protect the female employee. If a man asked to leave to take care of his sick child—something that never actually came up—he would likely be applauded as a great dad. If a woman did it, she was seen as weak or unreliable. Theresia was careful about her credibility with the guys. She was aware that her success at Accel could lead to other women being hired and achieving success in venture capital. She felt that the decisions she made—rightly or wrongly—represented to the men around her how all women managers might respond. So she weighed her decisions carefully. One woman, however dynamic, could not change a culture. But two women, or more, could begin to shift the dialogue and priorities. Two could even make a quorum.

  Theresia’s assistant, Angela Azem, had noticed subtle changes in Theresia’s behavior and management style over the years. Theresia had become more vocal in meetings, talked faster, and tended to interrupt more, like the men. The male investors naturally spoke in deeper tones and thought nothing of interrupting.

  But in countless other ways, Theresia was clearly not one of the guys. When she needed to get to the East Coast for a meeting and someone suggested she charter a private plane, she asked Angela, “Do you think that’s okay? It’s a lot of money.” Angela replied, “Are you kidding me? Look at how much you contribute! You’re a managing partner. We’re a three-billion-dollar firm.” Angela had never heard of a male partner questioning the use of a chartered plane. Angela was also struck by Theresia’s kindness. She remembered her birthday, surprised her with coffee, asked about her kids, and worried when anyone was sick. This was something Angela had simply never experienced with any other boss.

  Before joining Accel, Angela had worked at Wells Fargo. She’d managed twenty people and made peanuts. Plucky and smart, she was the mother of two young boys. She was constantly struggling with how to be there for her sons and not jeopardize her job. She saw Theresia navigating the same challenges, only magnified. Theresia was managing a household, a young child, an extended family, and a multibillion-dollar firm.

  Angela witnessed a procession of white, male Ivy Leaguers at Accel and other firms funding companies started by mostly white, male Ivy Leaguers—or even more often, by elite college dropouts, many of them barely socialized geeks. The entrepreneurs repeated the pattern in hiring, creating one homogenous interlocking clique after another. Angela saw how little venture funding went to woman-founded start-ups, despite studies showing that the female-founded start-ups outperformed their male counterparts in terms of revenue. Angela also was aware of how the women founders received pushback during presentations. When a woman’s founding team included a man, the man was asked the technical questions. Women founders tended to ask for too little when seeking funding, while men often oversold their company and accomplishments. She even knew of women founders who created fictional male co-founders to communicate with investors and outsiders over e-mail. Responses to the made-up male character were quicker and more serious.

  In her seven years at Accel, Angela had met three women she considered to be “badasses”: Theresia; Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a bold and successful entrepreneur of Junglee and the financial technology start-up Yodlee; and Liz Kalodner, the wise, funny, and decisive CEO of SocialNet.

  Not easily impressed, Angela had come to see Theresia as someone in a league of her own. Theresia didn’t take it personally when visitors to Accel asked her for coffee, assuming she was someone’s assistant. Theresia didn’t let jealousy-fueled rumors sidetrack her. She brushed them off. From time to time, Theresia and Angela would go out after hours. Theresia, Angela discovered, could drink her under the table. It was Theresia who had inspired Angela to come up with her own definition of what a female badass looked like: She is not afraid to take risks in an industry that isn’t female-friendly; she shares the spotlight and empowers other women; she is philanthropic and cares about issues that aren’t just related to her world; she builds relationships rather than just networks; and she is an overachiever and high-performer who recognizes she can’t get half the things done without a village of people working with her.

  Theresia was aware of how far she’d come. But she was also savvy enough to know that in the topsy-turvy world of the tech economy, what went up often came down.

  MJ

  The venture team at IVP took their seats in the conference room with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, founders of a microblogging start-up called Twitter. The founders sat at the end of the long white conference table in the all-white room, the sun streaming in be
hind them.

  Across town, MJ sat in another white room, but instead of a conference table, there was a bed with her mother in it. Instead of talking about the future, she was thinking about the past.

  In the meeting at IVP, Norm Fogelsong asked what made Twitter special. How is it different from group e-mail or group texts? Evan Williams answered in a way that resonated with the investors. When the terrorist attacks took place in Mumbai weeks earlier, Twitter users had reported the news as it was unfolding, faster than traditional news media. There were eyewitness accounts, warnings to stay away from the area, pleas for blood donors, directions to nearby hospitals, and a helpline that would include the list of the dead and injured.

  At the hospital across town, MJ talked with her mother’s doctor about what to expect. Dorothy Hanna had fallen and broken her hip. Her mind, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, suffered another setback while she was under general anesthesia during surgery. She was now hallucinating and refusing to eat or drink.

  At IVP, Biz Stone summarized the purpose of Twitter: “It’s the pulse of the universe,” in real time, in 140 characters.

  MJ hated missing IVP partners’ meetings. They were a glimpse into a better future. Seated by her mother’s hospital bed, she was focused on end-of-life care and on her mother’s pulse, on that tactile connection to a heart she loved.

  The IVP team ended the meeting with the Twitter founders with an eye toward investing. MJ and her siblings made plans for their mother to be moved to hospice care. MJ looked at her diminished mother and thought, I’m not ready to lose her.

  SONJA

  Sonja emerged from Dr. Dunn’s office at Stanford like a sleepwalker. She found her car and got behind the wheel. The springtime sunshine—so glorious an hour before—felt harsh and unkind. She needed to call Jon, who would be at work. She needed to call her parents. She reached Jon first. “I have cancer,” she told him. Jon, normally the life of the party, fell silent. They agreed to meet at home.

  Today Sonja didn’t mind the slow commute from Silicon Valley to San Francisco. She needed time to process. She thought of odd things, like the time she was at Harvard Business School and one of her professors told the women in the class not to wear pastel colors because if they raised their hand and they were wearing pastel, he wouldn’t see them. Sonja told herself from that moment on, All right, I’m wearing navy.

  She thought of the time she was president of Harvard’s venture capital club and had scheduled Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo to speak. Shortly before the event, Yang called her to say he was worried that no one would show up: The Harvard event was slated to take place the same night as the last episode of Seinfeld. Instead of rescheduling, they decided to air the show after the talk and provide snacks. The event sold out.

  She recalled the day she became a partner at Menlo, four days shy of her thirtieth birthday, in 1996. Her partners had pulled her into the conference room and surprised her with the news. Her parents had celebrated by buying her a desk chair from her alma mater, the University of Virginia.

  Then her mind wandered to her wedding, on December 2, 2006, held at a chapel in San Francisco’s Presidio. Sonja, thirty-nine, felt that being older gave her a different vantage point. She didn’t need everything to be perfect; she just wanted to be with her friends and family. And most of all, she loved the idea of marrying Jon. Her wedding dress, designed by Dean Hutchinson, was gorgeous. Her twin sister, Lisa, was her maid of honor, and her father walked Sonja down the aisle. The reception had been held on the second floor of San Francisco’s Ferry Building, upstairs from Jon’s restaurant. Sonja joked that she’d planned it that way to ensure Jon would show up. The night was magical, from the splendor of the newly renovated Ferry Building, with its grand promenade and tiled archways, to the holiday lights and decorations. The after-party moved across the street to a penthouse suite, where they danced until the sun came up.

  They had married nearly four years after she and Jon started dating. Nearly three years into their relationship, Sonja told Jon, “I will marry you if you want to get married. But if you don’t want to marry, I’m not going to break up with you, because we’re having too much fun.”

  She remembered a Thursday afternoon in late September 1991—seventeen years ago—when she slipped out of her Harvard dorm room to return to her old apartment on Myrtle Street, where her former roommate Anne and friends were hosting a keg party on the roof as a warm-up to the evening’s concert. At around seven P.M., they walked together to Boston Garden to see the Grateful Dead. Sonja loved the Dead. She hadn’t told her new Harvard Business School friends that she was going to the concert, fearful she’d be falsely labeled a pothead the first week of school—though she could have made the business point that the band raked in more money on the road than any other touring group. All their stadium shows were sellouts. But the truth was, Sonja had gone for the sense of joy and release, the positive energy that fed and mirrored her own. The band opened that night with “Jack Straw,” and Sonja sang and danced and lost herself in a sea of tie-dye and patchouli.

  Now, driving on Interstate 280 heading into San Francisco, Sonja hummed the lyrics to the Dead’s “Box of Rain”—“Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day / maybe the sun is shining, birds are singing…”

  MJ

  MJ’s husband was in Antarctica starting a nine-month sabbatical, in which he planned to travel across the globe. Her son, Will, was home for winter break from Colgate University, where he was a freshman. The little boy who used to love to ride his BMX bike and play T-ball was now an offensive lineman at the academically challenging Colgate. He weighed in at 260 pounds; MJ was half his size. He had grown into a smart, emotionally intelligent young man and a leader among his friends. MJ’s elder daughter, Kate, had graduated from Stanford and was living in San Francisco’s Mission District, looking for her first job and finding her way. Hanna, her youngest, was a high school sophomore excelling at a top private school that she loved. As the kids got older, MJ felt that her ability to intervene in their lives and help solve their problems was diminished. Instead of diaper rash and playground mishaps, their issues revolved around boyfriends, girlfriends, partying, cliques, mental health, academic pressure, and peer pressure.

  MJ had stayed on at IVP as an adviser, but she had stepped back from full-time work for the second time, to take care of her family and to be more present for her husband. Her mother was also requiring more of her attention.

  At a hospice care center in Redwood City, MJ and her dad and her siblings spent time with Dorothy, shared stories, and kept one another company. MJ pulled out a journal she had kept from childhood and found the page where she had written about the newspaper route that she and her sister Shirley had had as kids:

  Since I was so young—I was six—I had about thirty customers that I could walk to. Every week I would have to go and collect thirty-five cents from my customers….The profits and the tips from the route really added up, and Shirley and I spent it on sweets, gifts for Mom, and trips to the town trampoline park. Most Saturdays we would go downtown to the soda shop and take turns proudly treating each other to our hearts’ desire of sundaes, banana splits, cherry cokes, root beer floats, or cherry phosphates. It was a great feeling sitting on those stools with pockets full of cash. We would then walk over to the Rexall Drug Store and buy a gift for Mom. She had a favorite red Revlon lipstick called Fire and Ice that we loved to get her….We loved treating her because she gave so much to make a nice home for us, and Dad was not the type to spoil her in any way. So, we took on that task. It was easy enough to show her our love.

  The room at the hospice center took on a heavy amber light. MJ had asked the pastor from her church to come to see her mother. As the pastor stood over Dorothy and prayed, her mother suddenly woke up, looked at the man, and said, “I don’t know you!” It was a moment of clarity that MJ hadn’t seen from
her mother in years.

  The pastor smiled and placed his hand on her arm. “That’s right, Dorothy, you don’t know me.”

  MJ’s father, Michael, cheered by this moment of lucidity, asked the pastor to pray again. But as the room dimmed with the winter light, the pulse of life in her mother was fading. Later that night, MJ’s mother, always in motion, was finally still. Dorothy Wilson Hanna, born August 28, 1929, a graduate of Gerstmeyer High School, a catalogue supervisor at JCPenney, a seamstress and baker, a wife of fifty-nine years, a mother of five and grandmother of ten, had died.

  That summer, still grieving her mother’s loss, MJ went to meet her husband on his sabbatical. Bill had come home briefly for Dorothy’s funeral in March, then set out again. MJ had supported his sabbatical idea—she thought it would be good for him. She had originally planned to meet him in London a month earlier but had to scrap her plans because Kate was having challenges and had moved back home. Will and Hanna were also home for the summer.

  MJ was reluctant to leave the Bay Area even now, but she felt she needed to spend some time with Bill. Her marriage wasn’t in the best of shape, and she knew she needed to work on it. So she flew to France to begin an eight-day Tour du Mont Blanc hike that started at the base of the mountain. Their walk would take them from France into Italy, into Switzerland, and back to France. The company that organized the tour transported their luggage from one hotel to the next. Accommodations ranged from the luxurious to the equivalent of a youth hostel. At night, ravenous from hiking, they feasted on fondue, stews, raclette with potatoes, and tarts. The scenery was gorgeous, from snowy spires in the Alps to meadows filled with colorful wildflowers, from narrow paths through coniferous forests to a long suspension bridge that crossed a plunging valley. But while the others enjoyed the serenity of the hike, MJ found herself stepping off the path regularly to deal with issues at home nearly six thousand miles away. Bill seemed annoyed at the interruptions. He had been acting strangely to MJ, but she figured it was because of the amount of time they had been apart.