Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  The looming custody questions put Theresia in crisis mode. Moreover, her imminent divorce made her feel like a failure—she had failed herself, Tim, her family, and his family. Her mother would probably tell her she worked too much. Theresia regretted that she hadn’t tried harder to remain close to Tim over the years. He had claimed to be happy as the at-home parent, but she could see he really wasn’t. She was a perfectionist, she knew. She had made the mistake of trying to manage how Tim managed the kids. She should have relaxed more and worried less. She needed to rethink how she spent her time. Everywhere she turned, she felt as if society were telling her she needed to be less of a success at work to be more of a success at home.

  SONJA

  Sonja returned to Menlo Ventures six months after going on medical leave, with thirty days of radiation ahead of her. She now had a new routine: She left her home in San Francisco early, received radiation treatment, and then made the hour-long drive to Menlo. Outside of a small circle at work, no one knew she had cancer. She didn’t want to compete for a deal only to have another VC whisper to the entrepreneur, Oh, you didn’t know? Sonja has cancer.

  Being back at Menlo was wonderful in many ways: The work was rewarding, and having a routine felt good. But there were unsettling elements. Sonja was struck by how few women there were at work. This, of course, was hardly a news flash, but she felt it more acutely now.

  She returned to her seat at the partners’ table on Mondays, a world away from her time in the hospital with Bruce the Almighty. A series of impressive companies came in to pitch. Ellen Levy—who met her future husband at Sonja’s fortieth birthday party—brought LinkedIn to Sonja. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, long a champion of women and diversity in tech, told Ellen that he hoped to have a woman investor for this round of funding. Sonja loved LinkedIn but failed to get the support of her partners, who had questions about the market and thought the company’s valuation was too high.

  Palo Alto Networks, a network and enterprise security company, was brought in by Menlo partner John Jarve. Sonja knew Palo Alto Networks’ co-founder and CEO, Dave Stevens, from the University of Virginia, and thought he ran a phenomenal company. Stevens’s co-founder was Nir Zuk, who had been an early employee of Shlomo Kramer’s at Check Point. But again, Sonja couldn’t convince the Menlo partners of the merits of the deal.

  Diapers.com was pitched to Menlo at around the same time. Again, Sonja loved the company and thought co-founder Marc Lore had brilliantly figured out shipping logistics. He had set up warehouses around the United States close to post offices to ensure that items reached customers within a day. But Sonja’s partners weren’t convinced of the market for Diapers.com. She was 100 percent convinced, as she used the company every day for diapers, wipes, baby clothes, and more.

  Sonja began hearing of another start-up called Uber, which was launched in June 2010 in San Francisco. The company was already being studied by her partners Shawn Carolan and Shervin Pishevar, who had been newly hired as a managing director. Sonja told Carolan and Pishevar that this was a deal to take seriously. While some of the other Menlo partners questioned whether people would get into a car with a stranger, Sonja, who regretted not having been more aggressive with LinkedIn and the other start-ups, said, “You should really pound the table on this one.”

  Sonja had spent countless hours under the tutelage of her father, who had been a professor of civil engineering and the director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Virginia. Sonja told Carolan and Pishevar, “Point-to-point public transport is the holy grail of public transportation. Uber enables point-to-point public transport using existing resources and creating jobs.” She was relentless this time in sharing her views of the importance of the company. Menlo succeeded in landing a deal with Uber and led the Series B investment with $26 million of the $39 million round. (Other Series B investors included Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs.)

  Around the same time, Sonja helped engineer the sale of one of her earlier investments, Q1 Labs, to IBM. Q1 had been preparing to go public when it was acquired, and it extracted a hefty purchase price. Sonja had been on Q1’s board since 2003. She had also made investments in Flurry, a mobile analytics company, and in Minted, an online marketplace for independent artists and designers, which was started by one of her favorite entrepreneurs, Mariam Naficy, who had co-founded Eve, the first major online cosmetics company.

  In 2011, the year after she returned from battling breast cancer and adopting a child, Sonja was named Menlo’s Investor of the Year. The recognition was based solely on returns on investments. While she appreciated the recognition, and the pitch meetings were exciting, she found herself missing Tess. And no matter how much Sonja liked work, it was stressful, and stress wasn’t good for her, given her health. Her prognosis was good, but cancer was slippery. She didn’t know how far into the future to plan. She had to have her blood tested every six months and await the results.

  She loved the deals, ideas, and entrepreneurs. But as she sat in the partners’ meetings and scanned the room, looking from one investing partner to the next, she couldn’t shake the memory that while she had been home alone, fighting cancer while caring for Tess, she had never heard from a single one of them. They hadn’t called, they hadn’t visited. Not once.

  THERESIA

  In the fall of 2012, Theresia shared with her partners at Accel in Palo Alto the news that she was getting divorced. She told them she needed to take a sabbatical starting in the first quarter of 2013. Accel offered three-month sabbaticals to employees who had been partners for at least seven years. Theresia had been a partner for thirteen of her fourteen years at Accel and had never taken a leave of any kind. She had taken only three weeks of maternity leave with each child. Accel co-founder Jim Swartz had taken a four-month sabbatical and joined a master’s ski racing program. Swartz called sabbaticals “a great concept” and a “very healthy thing to do every five or ten years.” Jim Breyer had taken a sabbatical, and Kevin Efrusy, who had brought in the Facebook deal, was out on a yearlong sabbatical, traveling the world with his wife and kids.

  Theresia was on a record number of boards—fifteen—including her two newly public companies, Trulia and Imperva. She and fellow Accel partner Sameer Gandhi, with Arthur’s direction and support, had single-handedly pitched and raised the firm’s new growth fund.

  And because of Accel’s past mistakes in not bringing partners up through the ranks and sharing economics fast enough, Theresia made sure that the newer partners were given equity stakes much sooner than in the past. She also sent great deals their way and made time to attend important meetings with them.

  So now, when she told the new partners—the very men she had hired, mentored, walked through their first term sheets, and teed up deals for—that she needed to take a sabbatical, she was entirely unprepared for the response. “Well, there’s no sabbatical policy,” she was told. “What do you mean there’s no sabbatical policy?” she responded. Kevin is out on a sabbatical now! She showed them a Word document on Accel’s sabbatical policy written by Jim Swartz.

  “That was years ago. We’re not going to honor it,” the new partners responded. In addition, they argued that although Kevin Efrusy was indeed out on sabbatical, he had given everyone proper notice. Theresia agreed that Kevin had done everything right: He had set up the sabbatical far in advance and told investors what would be happening in the next fund-raising cycle as he stepped away for a year. And the partners had told him it was fine for him to take a year instead of three months.

  Theresia shot back, “I couldn’t tell you a year ago that I’d be getting a divorce and dealing with issues around young children. I’m taking the time.”

  Because they were now away from day-to-day operations, Jim Swartz and Arthur Patterson were not involved in the conversation, and Theresia didn’t feel she could ask them to intervene. Jim Breyer was also stepping away
, shedding his seats on boards of Wal-Mart, Dell, and even Facebook, with plans to focus more on his personal investment fund. The new partners soon sent another partner—another guy Theresia had mentored—to again tell her that she would not be getting a sabbatical.

  Theresia saw the irony: She had empowered this cabal by flattening the management structure and making the partners more co-equals. Now that same cabal was attacking her. It was like boys playing dodgeball, thinking nothing of hitting someone in the head. Theresia had become a veteran over the years at handling the off-color jokes, handsy guys, and suggestive comments. She could brush off being overlooked, outtalked, and mistaken for an assistant. But this was different.

  The partners’ decision was that a sabbatical was not an option—but she could take family leave. Theresia questioned the intent of the offer. If she were granted a sabbatical, her job and her income would be secure, because there was a precedent for sabbaticals. But family leave was untested—no one at Accel had ever taken it. So her position would not be guaranteed upon her return. She was sure that the same guys who had benefited from her guidance and deals would go after her job, her companies, and her equity.

  What followed, though, went beyond avarice or apathy. Theresia was asked to do something that no man in her position would have been asked to do. She was told that if she wanted to take family leave, she would have to call Accel’s top investors and tell them one by one that she was going on leave because she was getting a divorce. Knowing her children needed her—she would do anything for them—she reluctantly began making the calls. Whenever the calls seemed unbearable, Theresia closed her eyes and thought of her kids. They gave her the strength to get through the humiliation.

  MAGDALENA

  Magdalena set out on her early-morning walk on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County north of San Francisco. After coming down with her mysterious ailments, Magdalena had turned her considerable energy and brainpower to what she called Project Magdalena. She walked, hiked for hours, ate well, and lost weight.

  For a woman who thrived on finding solutions, it had been a puzzling time, with few answers. She didn’t go to Sand Hill Road much anymore, though she always had at least one assistant working for her. Her boys, Justin and Troy, had grown up; they were now twenty and eighteen, respectively. Justin was graduating from Duke University with a computer science degree and had accepted a job as product manager at the video game company Zynga. And Troy was at Duke getting his bachelor’s degree in economics.

  Magdalena didn’t feel the empty nest angst that many parents feel, as her boys had established their independence as teenagers. Her time was now taken up by her mother, by her aging extended family, and by her nonprofit and civil society work. She had joined public policy and international diplomacy boards at Duke and Stanford, and the engineering board of Santa Clara University. International diplomacy was a brand-new field for her, and she was especially interested in working on efforts to open the border between Turkey and Armenia. Her work in Silicon Valley consisted of coaching young investors and entrepreneurs.

  She had slowly shed her USVP boards, reducing them from eleven down to three. She missed the camaraderie of going to the office and working with her partners, especially the very wise Rabbi, Irwin Federman. She had recently got a call from Sonja, who asked whether she’d step in and coach one of her entrepreneurs, Tim Young, who had a start-up called Socialcast. The company was based in San Francisco and provided enterprise social collaboration tools. Magdalena was happy to do the favor and was now counseling Young on how to develop a sales cycle and an enterprise sales organization.

  Heading up the winding path near the top of Mount Tamalpais, she thought about her exit from Salesforce. There was no doubt that she had jumped the gun by leaving the Salesforce board. She could have waited to see how her health progressed. But at the time she was worried she might die or become disabled. At the very least, she would be less than perfect. And she hated to disappoint anyone. Now she was realizing that perfection was her enemy.

  Magdalena had been away from Silicon Valley long enough now to see that her whole technology career could be summed up in one sentence: She was good at projecting how people would use technology in the future. When she arrived at Stanford, she had fallen in love with the West, with the spirit of the Gold Rush and being a part of a frontier town. At Advanced Micro Devices, her first job out of Stanford, she had been responsible for getting local area networking chip sets designed into computers before anyone had really heard of the concept. When she joined Fortune Systems, the first Unix desktop computer company, she had seen the perils of the frontier life. Computer dealers couldn’t support such sophisticated machines, and the machines went unsold on dealers’ shelves. When she became a pioneer in electronic commerce, the Internet had just opened for business.

  She wrote a book in 1997, Creating the Virtual Store, but few people then bought what she was saying. A section in the book called “Johnny, Turn Off the PC!” had stirred derision. She wrote, “The PC has brought new complexities to these unsuspecting parents….Children have become the systems operators of the PC, having the ultimate say in its configuration and content.” Her prediction that kids would one day be more hooked on computers than on television was also met with skepticism.

  As Magdalena navigated the rocky path of the trail, she passed a steady stream of dog walkers, joggers, and women with babies snuggled into front carrier packs. Magdalena smiled. The years had flown by; her sons had grown up. One constant in her life, though, was her family unit. After all these years, she was still married. She had never made the relationship the kind of priority some women did, with date nights and weekends away. To her, marriage was cultural. It was about belonging to a tribe. Growing up in Turkey, she never knew anyone who was divorced. You married, and that was that. She had never looked for reasons why her marriage was working or wasn’t working, but she also hadn’t invested in it the way she should have.

  She had met Jim when she was twenty-two; he was thirty and had just returned from Brazil. Her first impression of him was that he talked too much. His intricate stories captivated everyone except Magdalena, who listened with an engineer’s approach. When Magdalena was invited to a picnic party at Jim’s ranch, a pipe broke and there was no running water. Many of the guests appeared scandalized by the lack of water. Magdalena merely watched with amusement. She had grown up in a country where water was cut off three to four days a week throughout the summer.

  Magdalena had liked Jim’s values and found him pure in many ways. Their biggest fights over the years had been over trivial things, like how to stack the dishwasher and clean the kitchen. And Jim was impressed by Magdalena’s calm. He fell in love with her because she was on a mission of her own.

  But these days, having been sidelined by health complications and assorted family health issues, Magdalena wasn’t as directed anymore. So she was intrigued by a recent call from Sonja, who mentioned that she had an idea she wanted to run by her. She hadn’t heard Sonja this excited in a long time. Sonja had said part of the inspiration for her idea had come from their all-women boondoggle weekends in Hawaii. The two made plans to meet at Sonja’s house.

  As Magdalena gazed out from the trail, looking at the spectacular waters of San Francisco Bay, she marveled at the natural beauty. The fog was still dense, spread out like a down comforter surrounding the brick-red cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. If she looked far enough, she might be able to make out the site where Salesforce was discussing taking over a development under construction at the former Transbay Terminal. Salesforce, which had nearly died a thousand deaths, had recently reported annual revenues of $1.3 billion. If plans went through, the company’s headquarters would be called Salesforce Tower, and it would be the tallest building in San Francisco and, in fact, in the western United States.

  At the moment, the tallest things near Magdalena were the redwood trees towering above her.
But as she walked through the redwood forest and took in the fresh air, she was finally getting a better sense of her future: She needed to get back and apply herself fully to Silicon Valley.

  SONJA

  Between work, home, and health concerns, Sonja sought more balance in her life. She was worried that she would not be able to complete her work and family obligations while staying cancer-free. To stay healthy, she needed to reduce her stress. She made the decision that she would not be investing in Menlo’s next fund.

  The Menlo partners were starting a new fund—Fund XI—which was often a time of transition, when younger partners moved up and were given more equity, and older partners sometimes pulled back and reduced their percentage of the profits. Sonja needed to make her health her top priority.

  She proposed to the Menlo partners that she work part-time. From her viewpoint, the timing was ideal: Venture firms and tech start-ups were opening offices in San Francisco almost every day, turning areas like South Park, in the bustling South of Market neighborhood, into mini Sand Hill Roads.

  Sonja also thought she could save time on the commute—more than two hours a day—by working remotely. She had been with Menlo Ventures for nearly seventeen years. Her investments had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm and created a number of legacy companies. McAfee Associates, which she had cold-called when she was an investment analyst at TA Associates, had recently been acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion.

  Sonja’s friend and former mentor, Tom Bredt, while no longer at Menlo and with no oversight responsibilities, followed the developments at Menlo from the sidelines. He had heard rumblings from some of the partners, after Sonja returned, saying that she couldn’t be counted on to do the work she had once done. She now had a baby to look after and was battling cancer. He knew that one partner thought Sonja was “pushy” and too aggressive.