Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  At the end of the eight days, MJ flew home. Bill was expected home in a month. Back in Palo Alto, she focused on caring for Kate, who was having stomach problems, and setting up appointments with doctors. Fortunately, IVP was thriving, returning huge and consistent profits to its investors. It had invested $14 million in Twitter as a part of the company’s third funding round, and made other later-stage investments in Dropbox, HomeAway, and Zynga.

  Finally, Bill returned from his sabbatical. So much had happened in the months that he had been away: the death of MJ’s mother, their children’s various victories and crises, MJ stepping back from the job she loved. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed.

  SONJA

  When Sonja arrived home, she found flowers from Jon. Jon never gets me flowers, she thought.

  She gave herself time to settle in before calling her parents. Now two of their daughters had breast cancer: Julie, two years older, had always been the animal lover in the family, taking in strays, dreaming of becoming a vet. Sonja’s twin sister, Lisa, was the creative one in the family, the talented artist. Sonja was the peacemaker, always sitting in the middle seat, helping her sisters to get along.

  After sharing the news of her breast cancer with her parents, Sonja called two close friends, one of whom was involved in biotech and life sciences. Thinking she was being helpful by being direct, the friend in biotech told Sonja, “You have a fifty-two percent chance of survival. You should not adopt a baby.”

  Hearing her friend’s words, Sonja began to hyperventilate. A day that had started like every other day had brought Sonja to tears. At work, she was on ten company boards. She was in the middle of investing a $1.2 billion fund. She had a baby coming into her life in a month. The birth mother, not ready to be a parent, was the niece of a family friend.

  When Sonja had been asked if she would consider adopting the baby, she and Jon hadn’t hesitated. But now Sonja wondered whether she could welcome this new life into a home where the future was so uncertain. She kept hearing her friend’s words: “You have a fifty-two percent chance of survival.” In other words, “You have a forty-eight percent chance of dying.”

  As she struggled to fall asleep that night, she thought about how and when she would tell her Menlo partners. When a prominent male venture capitalist let it be known he had cancer, the rest of the industry had treated him as if he were already dead. If a man is quickly written off like that, what will happen to a woman?

  PART

  EIGHT

  The Days of Reckoning

  2008–2013

  SONJA

  Sonja sat in a large cushy chair in the chemotherapy room at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. Her gloved nurse, whom she referred to as Bruce the Almighty, hooked a bag of chemotherapy onto the IV pole next to her. A catheter was inserted into a vein in her arm; the drip infusion began delivering the potent chemicals to her bloodstream. The process was terrifying because it was so unknown. It could save her, and it could send her to her knees.

  Sonja had opted to take her chemo treatments for breast cancer on Mondays, the day she’d always had her partners’ meetings at Menlo. She was used to a Monday schedule, so this would be her new routine. She faced a daunting eight sessions of chemotherapy, one every other week, followed by thirty days of radiation. Chemotherapy, as she saw it, was both modern and primitive—a cell-destroying bomb instead of a guided missile, wiping out the good cells with the bad.

  Shortly after her diagnosis, a friend gave her a book on what to expect from chemotherapy. The title and cover were so grim that Sonja took a Thomas Jefferson Monticello newsletter she had at home and used a page of it, devoted to discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to fashion a new jacket for it. The book was filled with tips about what to do before starting chemo, from going to the dentist for teeth cleaning to using towels for bed pillows—it made it easier to clean up the clumps of hair when your hair began to fall out. A minor infection or fever could turn serious quickly, and she should expect to feel worse with each treatment.

  Sonja’s health crisis had come at a time when Silicon Valley—and America—was having a life-changing crisis of its own. It was 2008, and Bear Stearns had collapsed in February, followed by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Then the Fed had had to bail out insurance giant AIG. Home mortgages and values were in a complete meltdown.

  Sonja had made a career of navigating the economy in good times and bad. Indeed, her life as a venture capitalist had been about taking calculated risks on unproven companies. But in the grand scheme of things, risk taking in Silicon Valley was circumscribed and safe. She was now facing an altogether different type of risk.

  A natural optimist, Sonja decided to invest in life. She asked Bruce the Almighty for a warm blanket. Compact and muscular, he was as kind and doting as a grandmother, yet as dishy and interesting as the latest issue of Vanity Fair. She had to undergo four hours of chemo and, Bruce told her, could have as many warm blankets as she wanted.

  Sonja had informed the mother of her soon-to-be-born adoptive daughter that she had breast cancer. The birth mother was calm and reassuring—she told Sonja that everything would be fine. The adoption plans should proceed. Sonja met with her doctors, Hope Rugo at UCSF and Jocelyn Dunn at Stanford, and the dire diagnosis she’d received from her well-meaning friend turned out to be off, in her favor. Her chances of survival were better than 52 percent. She had triple-negative stage 2 cancer, but it hadn’t metastasized. Dr. Rugo told Sonja, “You should absolutely adopt—we’ve got this.” The message was both a hug and a call to action. Sonja believed her doctors wouldn’t tell her to commit to the future with the life of a newborn baby if they didn’t think she’d get through this. She told her partners at Menlo that she needed six months off for treatment.

  Throughout that first morning of chemo, Bruce the Almighty came by countless times to ask Sonja whether she needed her feet propped up, a pillow adjusted, or another warm blanket to battle the chills. He told her about his love for Sex and the City and how much he liked the newly released Sex and the City movie. The protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, the chronicler of adventures in the Big Apple, was his you-go-girl hero, the fashionista who mixed vintage finds with Manolo Blahniks.

  “You absolutely must see the movie,” Bruce the Almighty said.

  “I am absolutely going to see the movie,” Sonja told him, as soon as Jon returned from sailing overseas.

  Sonja had actually met Candace Bushnell, the author of the book Sex and the City, in New York in the summer of 2001. Sonja had been with her fiancé at the time, and Candace was with her boyfriend, a game designer for the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series. The foursome went to a small Italian restaurant where waiters greeted them by name. Sonja remembered Candace’s outfit: a suede triangle halter top paired with preppy East Coast pants. Candace had taken to Sonja, as much as Sonja did to her, telling her she knew too few women who made their own money. Serving room-temperature champagne at two A.M., she announced that Sonja was a Norwegian superhero and gave Sonja a superhero name: White Sonja.

  Sonja smiled thinking of this now. She would need all the superhero powers she could muster to fight off the cancer cells invading her body.

  THERESIA

  Theresia was having a late breakfast with Sheryl Sandberg at Hobee’s Restaurant in Palo Alto. Compared with Buck’s see-and-be-seen restaurant in Woodside or Il Fornaio in Palo Alto, Hobee’s was a low-key meeting choice near the Stanford campus. It was where Theresia had come as a grad student to study and indulge in Hobee’s “world famous” blueberry coffee cake, or an early-morning or late-night super veggie scramble. At one point, the restaurant offered an omelet called the Dot Com Ommie.

  Sheryl was about to share a secret with Theresia that would make news in Silicon Valley and beyond. “I just got back from telling Eric
Schmidt that I’m going to Facebook,” the Google executive said.

  Theresia grinned. “Well, then, this just turned into a business meeting. And breakfast is on me.”

  It was March 2008. Sheryl had been vice president for global online sales and operations at Google, and now she was leaving to join Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook as chief operating officer. Theresia was one of the first to know.

  Theresia and Sheryl had become fast friends after being introduced by Sheryl’s husband, Dave Goldberg, who knew Theresia from their days working at Bain in Boston. Goldberg, a year ahead of Theresia at Bain, was a peer of Theresia’s husband, Tim, and her friend and fellow VC Jennifer Fonstad. Everyone loved Dave. When Theresia ran into Goldberg at a recent event, he said, “I’ve got to introduce you to my wife, Sheryl. She runs a part of Google,” and he added, “We have too few women in tech—and too few moms in tech.”

  The women also shared overachieving pasts: Sheryl, whose father was an ophthalmologist and whose mother was a teacher, had a 4.64 grade-point average in high school and had earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. By twenty-nine, she was chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who had been her professor at Harvard and thesis adviser when she wrote about the economics of spousal abuse. Like Theresia, who had founded a women’s engineering group at Brown, Sheryl had started a student organization, Women in Economics and Government, to inspire more women to major in those subjects.

  Sheryl and Dave had a one-year-old son, Nate. Theresia’s daughter, Sarah, was now five. Both of their husbands were entrepreneurs, and both were between jobs. Goldberg had built and sold his company, Launch, a music site, to Yahoo! He was now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, looking for his next start-up. Tim was not working, having closed his company.

  Theresia immediately liked Sheryl, who she thought was smart and a lot of fun. Sheryl looked at Theresia the same way: whip smart and a genuine geek with a thing for the latest Manolo Blahnik pumps and sandals and Jimmy Choo boots.

  The women talked about the challenges of balancing demanding full-time careers with husbands who were entrepreneurs. The life of an entrepreneur tended to fall into one of three patterns: working at all hours to build a company; figuring out the next deal; or “vesting in peace” and doing very little after a start-up was acquired. Right now, for both husbands, it was the latter—and the two men had ample free time.

  “All of a sudden I’m getting e-mails or texts at six P.M. asking when I’m going to be home!” Theresia said. Sheryl laughed, as they had over stories of pumping breast milk during conference calls.

  Facebook was emerging from a maelstrom of controversy over a project called Beacon, which allowed companies to track users’ actions and purchases on sites other than Facebook. Zuckerberg had publicly expressed regret for Beacon, saying, “We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

  Sheryl had been heavily recruited by Zuckerberg and by Facebook board member and Accel managing partner Jim Breyer. Breyer used the Beacon fiasco to convince Zuckerberg it was time to bring in a strong chief operating officer. Zuckerberg and Sheryl had met at a Christmas party in 2007 and had several lengthy talks afterward. All the finalists for the COO position were male except for Sheryl. Breyer was particularly impressed by Sheryl’s focus on results. She also was different from the male candidates in a key way. The men he interviewed for the job thought of the COO position as a two-year stint on the way to being CEO. Sheryl got the complexity and importance of the COO position and zeroed in on that, without looking beyond. She understood she would be working in lockstep with Zuckerberg. Breyer and Zuckerberg fretted that they might not be able to land Sheryl, given her success at Google. After more talks, Breyer invited Zuckerberg and Sheryl to his home in Woodside for lunch. Over salad and sandwiches, the three talked about Facebook’s economic model, Sheryl’s personal goals, how she would work within the culture of Facebook, how she would scale the site, and what the immediate areas for improvement were. After several hours of discussion, Sheryl agreed to join the company.

  From the VC side, Theresia could see that Zuckerberg, now twenty-three, was maturing into his role of CEO. He had come a long way from his pajama pants and Adidas slides days when Accel made its initial investment. Even a year later, in 2006, Theresia had seen Zuckerberg struggle in social situations. Accel invited him to its annual limited partners’ meeting in San Francisco, where the firm liked to trot out an impressive start-up or two. Mark, in jeans and Facebook hoodie, was scheduled to speak to the group of roughly one hundred investors. Before his speech, he was sheet white, sitting with his head in his hands. Worried he was going to faint, Theresia offered him a glass of water. She told him this was no big deal, that no one was going to ask follow-up questions. “They are here to applaud you,” Theresia told him. “We’ve chosen you as a standout company and founder in the Accel portfolio.” Theresia wasn’t sure if it was her words or the water, but Mark soon began looking more at ease, and the color returned to his face. Facebook had grown to more than 66 million users and had a recent valuation of $15 billion.

  Theresia recounted a story Breyer had told her. He had invited three senior executives from Wal-Mart to Palo Alto to meet Zuckerberg. The team from Wal-Mart wanted to learn more about Facebook. Zuckerberg, without saying so much as hello, had asked Doug McMillon, “Why would anyone shop at Wal-Mart and not Amazon?” It was Zuckerberg being Zuckerberg. McMillon became Wal-Mart’s CEO and president.

  Theresia was happy for Sheryl. Both of their careers had taken off meteorically, at a time when the economy was tough. Sheryl had joined Google when it had fewer than three hundred employees. She helped build AdWords and AdSense into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream, and her department went from a handful of employees to thousands. She wanted to help Facebook grow into a global leader as well. As Theresia and Sheryl finished breakfast, they made plans to meet along with their husbands for dinner in Woodside.

  Shortly afterward Theresia was off to Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit, where the conference theme was “Extraordinary Talent.” Toward the end of the summit, the Fortune team unveiled to great fanfare the year’s Most Powerful Women issue. Copies were distributed to attendees and the press. The cover featured Sheryl Sandberg, Gina Bianchini, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and Theresia, against a simple gray background, looking fashionable and formidable in beautifully tailored black suits. The title of the issue was “The New Valley Girls.”

  The article included vignettes about each of the four women. Theresia talked about her partners’ meetings at Accel: “You can imagine Monday morning meetings. Nine guys, all used to being in charge. I’m absolutely conscious about speaking up more frequently and interrupting people—even though we were taught not to interrupt. Damn it, I’ll repeat myself! I’ll say it louder! I’ll lean forward in my chair.” Theresia noted, though, that she had a different role at board meetings, including the board meeting of her alma mater, Brown University. In those meetings, she was an adviser instead of a partner, allowing her to show her feminine side, her real self. “Having a more female style works there. You’re playing more to the male ego. Though that doesn’t mean that I won’t take the men on.”

  Theresia had Sheryl Sandberg to thank for being included in the Fortune cover. The magazine had wanted to feature Sheryl alone and write about the salons and dinners she hosted for women at her home in Silicon Valley. But Sheryl wanted other women to share the spotlight and suggested Theresia. Sheryl said, “When women celebrate each other’s accomplishments, they’re seen as more professional and accomplished as well. Supporting other women helps each other, helps women as a group, and also helps the woman that does it.”

  When Theresia returned home after the Fortune conference, she received congratulations from Accel co-founder Arthur Patterson, from the staff at Accel, who had the cover framed, and from her parents. The o
nly person who said very little was her husband.

  MJ

  MJ remembered every detail of the night she first met her future husband in 1973 at Purdue. She wore blue-and-white-checked bell-bottoms, a halter top, and white clogs. Her hair was almost down to her waist. Her hand was newly stitched up and bandaged following a mishap earlier that day in the chemistry lab. MJ, a freshman, needed a last-minute date for her sorority pledge dance. Her older sister Shirley, a member of Alpha Xi Delta, asked around and was told there was “only one nice Beta left,” referring to the fraternity Beta Theta Pi. That one nice Beta was Bill Elmore.

  So MJ, who had the use of only one hand, relied on a fellow sorority pledge to help her get ready and do her hair, before meeting Bill at a pre-dance dinner at the Beta house. As the dinner progressed, toasts were made and quickly grew louder and livelier. At the end of the toasts, Betas picked up water glasses and lightly doused the table and diners. The dousing escalated, and soon a kitchen worker appeared with an industrial hose, hosing down the group as if the house were on fire. Pandemonium ensued, with shrieking, laughter, and food flying. MJ and Bill, thoroughly soaked, dove for cover. From that night on, the two were a couple.