Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  Now, four decades later, Bill had moved out and rented his own apartment. They had separated and were getting a divorce. When Bill had returned from his nine-month sabbatical, the relationship had gone from unhappy to untenable. MJ had been hit with certain painful realities that she wouldn’t share even with her siblings or closest friends. After months of counseling, they began divorce mediation. It was one of those times when her experience in venture capital paid off in her personal life: She knew how to negotiate with men.

  Driving to his apartment, MJ thought about the early years, when Bill had looked at her as if she walked on water. At Purdue, they would hop into his little orange Fiat convertible and head to nearby towns to discover dive bars with jukeboxes that played MJ’s favorite country music. When they were newlyweds, Delta Airlines ran a special deal where travelers could buy an inexpensive pass and fly anywhere in the world over a three-week period. Wherever Bill and MJ flew during those three weeks—whether to Dayton, Ohio, or to the Bahamas—they always seemed to go through Atlanta, something they laughed about afterward. In the early days of their marriage, they continued to travel together on backpacking trips to Yosemite, and ski trips to Tahoe. At Intel, one of the men told MJ, “We all know you are very married.”

  But with the arrival of Kate, their first child, MJ’s attention had been pulled away from her husband. Then Will was born, leaving less of MJ’s time and attention for Bill. And then came Hanna. Three kids in nine years. Questions about each other’s day turned into questions about the kids. Though they both worked full-time, MJ was the “on call” parent.

  MJ had regrets about her marriage and knew she had made her share of mistakes. But as she saw it, her mistakes were of omission rather than commission. She should have talked more with Bill when they first had kids and delineated their parenting responsibilities. Instead, she had tried to do it all, to work full-time and parent full-time. It felt easier to do it by herself than to ask for help. She made sacrifices that she felt Bill never considered for himself: cutting back her work hours, and stepping away from a lucrative job she loved, to be with the kids and try to improve her marriage. In doing so, she realized, she made a subconscious decision that her career was less important than Bill’s—and neither one of them suggested otherwise. She had given up her job to save her marriage, and it had failed anyway. She knew the statistics: Women who become chief executives divorced at a higher rate than men; winning a best actress Oscar portended a divorce, while winning best actor did not; and winning elections for women increased subsequent divorce rates. One female CEO she knew hinted that it was the spouses at home who often helped install the glass ceiling at work. MJ had felt supported by her husband as a venture capitalist but unsupported at home. She believed that if Bill had supported her more as a person, she could have stayed at work.

  To be sure, Bill had never asked her to cut back at work; he was proud they were a two-VC family. He was married to one of the first women to make partner at a venture capital firm in the United States. MJ’s investments in enterprise software solutions, such as Clarify and Aspect Communications, changed the way businesses and customers interacted. The legacy of these companies was seen in later-enterprise software companies, including Salesforce, WorkDay, and PeopleSoft, which had been acquired by Oracle.

  * * *

  Arriving at Bill’s apartment, MJ studied her hands; she was still wearing her wedding ring. When they were first engaged and had no money, Bill had asked his brother, an aspiring jeweler, to make an engagement ring with a tiny chip diamond. Years later Bill got MJ a new ring, a beautiful emerald-cut diamond with a solid gold band. MJ had added yellow emerald-cut side diamonds. She loved her wedding ring.

  Before going in, MJ took a few deep breaths. Their conversations together were not easy. As the two began to talk, MJ felt something strange in her hand. Her left thumb felt the back of her ring finger. As Bill continued to make his point, MJ turned her hand over. She could not believe what she saw. The solid gold band of her wedding ring had broken in the back, down the middle. Her wedding ring had literally cracked in two. Holding the two pieces of her ring, MJ mumbled something to Bill and rushed out the door.

  MJ was a spiritual person. To her, the universe was confirming what she already knew. Her marriage, once so treasured, was irreparably broken.

  THERESIA

  Theresia was in a Glam Media board meeting near the San Francisco Airport when she began to feel back pains. She was almost nine months pregnant, and it had been a difficult pregnancy. She had been to her ob-gyn the day before and the ob-gyn had scheduled a C-section for the following week, still two weeks before her due date. The doctor told her everything looked fine.

  But this morning, Theresia felt increasingly not fine. At first she told herself, This is because I’m huge and fat. She did what she’d seen a lot of guys with back pain do in meetings. She got up and paced. But the pain kept returning. Finally, she told everyone: “Look, guys, I know the board meeting is supposed to go until noon, but I’m not feeling well. Can we do the formal board approvals and complete finance and sales updates by ten, and I’ll leave and dial in for the rest of the call?” After the sales updates, she gathered her things and called her doctor from the car.

  “I’m feeling pain I haven’t felt before,” Theresia told the nurse’s assistant, who asked whether the pain was steady or intermittent. “Intermittent,” she replied.

  “Okay, so I want you to time the pain,” the assistant said. Theresia sat in her car and watched the clock. It was another six to seven minutes before the pain returned. The assistant said, “I think you’re in labor. How quickly can you get here?” Theresia remained strangely calm. She figured it would take twenty minutes to drive to her ob-gyn’s office next to the Stanford Medical Center. She looked at the clock: 10:10. She should be at the hospital by 10:30. As she drove, the pain came in waves, but that didn’t stop her from getting on the conference call for her board meeting.

  As soon as she walked into the ob-gyn office, her doctor took one look at her and said, “Theresia, you are one hundred percent in labor. Go straight to admitting. They have your paperwork. The baby is coming.”

  By the time she got over to Stanford and was admitted, it was 10:50. Tim arrived at 11:00, at which point Theresia had to hang up from the conference call, telling the group, “I have to drop off early. I’ll catch up with you this afternoon.” Her son, Luke, was born at 11:30.

  Once again, Theresia was called back to Accel within a matter of weeks. This time, she had her support group of family and her nanny around her, and was making new deals and mentoring new investment hires at Accel. Nothing could slow her down—at least that’s how she felt at the time.

  SONJA

  Sonja’s second chemo session fell on the same day her daughter was born. The birth mother had gone into labor that morning. Sonja had shared her news with Bruce the Almighty, who couldn’t contain his excitement. She was eager to get through her chemo session so she could go to the hospital and be there for the birth of her daughter. They had decided to name her Tess. When Sonja was finished with the chemo—it was not something that could be rushed—she drove straight to California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Tess made her entrance into the world that night, healthy and weighing seven pounds. She had blue eyes, fat cheeks, and a smile that immediately won Sonja’s heart. Sonja thought Tess’s smile was somehow wise and knowing, with a hint of Hee hee—I am exactly where I want to be.

  Not long afterward, Sonja faced a glaring dichotomy: She was struggling with her health while her baby was thriving. To compound the situation, Jon went to Europe. He was on a competitive sailing team and had signed up for the races months earlier. He had also been working nonstop at the restaurant and was eager for time off. Sonja understood—to a degree. But she needed him to be with her and intended to take the issue up with him when he returned. For now, she
couldn’t deal with another crisis.

  Not knowing how her body would handle the chemo sessions to come, Sonja set up around-the-clock backup care for Tess. She found two Irish nannies who worked as a pair. They seemed ideal at first, but before long, one of them arrived hungover and grumpy, more than once. She took naps when Tess took naps instead of cleaning and helping out with the house. Finally after her eighth chemo treatment, Sonja had to fire them. She gave them two weeks’ severance but asked them to leave immediately.

  She put an ad in Craigslist: “Nanny position available for upwardly mobile business professionals.” With the economy still in a recession and the unemployment rate rising, Sonja received more than two hundred applications. She hired two nannies, each to work three days a week. She wanted them to have time to pursue their own careers. One young woman she hired would go on to attend Harvard, and another would work her way through medical school.

  The nanny crisis behind her, Sonja felt lonely. Life had been reduced to the joy of her baby and the pain of chemo. She spent most of her days in the house, alone with Tess. She couldn’t wait for Jon to return.

  While a few close friends did little to help her, other friends who were not as close stepped up in amazing ways. Jenny Saling, who had started at Menlo as her executive assistant but was rising through the ranks, came to see her every week, bringing notes from the weekly partners’ meetings and taking her on walks. Jenny proved to be a lifeline, strong, constant, and cheerful. Sonja’s parents helped as well, and she had support from her former mentor, Tom Bredt, and his wife, Polly. Tom had left Menlo in 2004 after suffering a mild heart attack.

  The chemo took a toll on Sonja. She grew weaker with each treatment, and she had trouble sleeping. One day she fell and broke five ribs. She landed in the hospital on several other occasions as well. Shots of Neulasta, a synthetic protein that was supposed to stimulate the growth of white blood cells, made her feel pain she had never experienced before, deep in her bones. She tried to look at chemo the way she viewed taxes: It wasn’t fun, but it needed to be done. But this was brutal. She focused on healing and was careful with what she ate, eliminating sugar and red meat. She went to acupuncture, chelation therapy, and massages, and she tried to walk every day.

  Brought up Presbyterian, Sonja became interested in Buddhism. She was friends with the Tibetan monk Orgen Chowang Rinpoche, who taught the importance of finding happiness within rather than linking happiness to outcomes. Rinpoche liked to ask, “We exercise our bodies, we fix our hair, but do we do anything to enhance the mind?” The storm clouds would soon pass, he told Sonja, and blue sky would be revealed. Sonja adopted a Buddhist prayer and recited it daily:

  May our lives be long and may all of our wishes come true;

  May obstacles not impede us but arise as allies;

  May purpose, fortune and abundance occur naturally without effort; and

  May the light of Manjushri, the Buddha of Wisdom, enter our hearts.

  Jon finally returned home, for good. Later, when Tess began crawling, he and Sonja came up with a game called Teddy Bear Tag. Sonja would put two teddy bears at the end of the L-shaped couch, and Tess would have to crawl as fast as she could to touch one of the bears. If Tess was caught before reaching a bear, Sonja could tickle her. Tess’s giggles were Sonja’s anodyne. They had a way of easing her pain. Beautiful Tess seemed to know what those around her needed. She was a happy and easygoing child, and she somehow understood when her mom was too sick to get out of bed.

  During her six months at home, Sonja had time to reflect on who she was and what was important in her life. She was a mother and she had breast cancer.

  THERESIA

  After appearing on the cover of Fortune, Theresia became a fixture in top-ten-women-in-tech lists of the most powerful women, the most influential women, the most successful women, the women to watch. She was featured in Time alongside Susan Wojcicki at Google, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Virginia Rometty of IBM, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, Safra Catz at Oracle, and Sheryl Sandberg. Theresia was one of only two women on the Forbes Midas list of top one hundred venture capitalists, where she was lauded for “bringing in more than a billion dollars in capital gains through her savvy investments.”

  She had hit one home run after another. In 2011, Shlomo Kramer’s data-security-software company, Imperva, went public, raising $90 million. Theresia, with Kramer and the team on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, was reminded of the days when she and Kramer went around to Wall Street banks to market-test his idea. Theresia looked at IPOs as graduations that sent companies on to their next phase of life in the public markets. A year later Trulia, which had grown to more than 22 million users, went public. Again, Theresia was there for the ringing of the bell on the NYSE. As Theresia stood on the dais with founders Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, she realized that one of the things she loved the most was seeing entrepreneurs mature and succeed. Flint was there with his wife, who was holding their baby girl. When she met him, he was a graduate student. Theresia knew the sacrifices required to build a company from idea to IPO and to keep going from there. For many founders and employees, an IPO was a life-changing event, a before and after, when they knew they could buy that house they always wanted and make important strides in their lives and contribute to the lives of others.

  Theresia was invited to speak on a panel at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where she talked about trends she saw in mobile and the Internet. She noted that she was seeing more and more companies bypass creating websites to go straight to mobile apps. After the talk, Theresia was approached by a man who asked for examples of companies doing mobile apps rather than websites. As she looked down at the man’s nametag, she was stunned to see it was Tim Berners-Lee. The inventor of the World Wide Web was asking her about Internet trends.

  Not long afterward she was interviewed by Willow Bay for a new hour-long Bloomberg TV show called Women to Watch, along with Jessica Herrin, CEO of Stella & Dot; Carolyn Everson, VP of global marketing for Facebook; and Selina Tobaccowala, VP of product and engineering at SurveyMonkey.

  When Theresia returned home after the show aired, Tim was not happy. The show had used photos of Theresia and their daughter, Sarah, but none of him. Theresia explained that she had submitted a bunch of family photos, but the selection had been up to the producer. They probably picked the images they did because the show was about women, she said.

  Theresia and Tim had been in and out of couples therapy for several years. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be working. Tim, who was still between start-ups, routinely told her, “I’m married to Don Draper. You travel 150 days a year!” referring to the character from the television series Mad Men. Although Tim was the one who had made their first million, Theresia had been the primary breadwinner for years.

  The growing divide between them was impossible to ignore. She eventually stopped asking Tim to any work dinners and events. Then she stopped mentioning the awards and recognition to Tim altogether. On one occasion when he attended an event with her, he said to her afterward, “No one asked me the entire night what I do!” It was what women said all the time when they were written off as a man’s armpiece. Tim still served as the family CFO, managing their money, except for the 10 percent of her bonus that she gave herself so that she didn’t have to smuggle new shoes into her closet. Theresia had handed the running of their finances to him as a peace offering, a way to affirm that he was the man of the house. But she realized it had been a mistake. There was even a phrase for Theresia’s gesture: “manning up and womaning down.”

  Theresia and Tim had been peers when they started out together after college. They had been Stanford MBAs with similar dreams and career goals. They had both worked in the world of finance and start-ups. But along the way, it was Theresia who became the star; it was Theresia who made the family millions. She felt like he had tacitly been k
eeping score. She realized that after all their years together, she should have looked at his own family upbringing. She was asking Tim, who grew up in a traditional family where the man worked and the woman stayed home, to be happy in a nontraditional marriage. The wives of his three brothers had given up significant careers when they had children. Theresia was the square peg in a round hole, unwilling to be knocked off the professional ladder because she had children.

  After twenty years of marriage, Theresia and Tim filed for divorce. Sarah was nine and Luke was three. Theresia’s greatest fear was that if this headed to court in a custody situation, she would be seen as an absent Don Draper. She didn’t anticipate a battle—Tim was a good guy. But she wasn’t taking any chances. Without a job, Tim could be home all the time, even though they always had a full-time nanny. Theresia was clear that she needed to show she could pick up the kids and drop them off and do all the traditional mom things. She had never been one to volunteer at Sarah’s school, and she had been on only one of Sarah’s school field trips, to Intel. She couldn’t love her kids more—but she also loved her job. And she knew her male colleagues worked similarly long hours without being questioned.

  As Accel co-founder Jim Swartz acknowledged in an interview, he worked “six and a half days for sure” and said his “normal routine was Monday through Friday traveling and dinners in New York three, four nights a week, and on Saturday for half a day or three-quarters of a day. Then you’d start again Sunday afternoon reading and preparing.”