Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  In weighing Sonja’s decision, a partner told Bredt he didn’t like the idea of her working part-time. He wanted people in the office. It was quite a statement coming from a guy who was a member of the all-male Bohemian Club, who spent half the summer away at the Bohemian Grove. A behind-closed-doors meeting was called, where a vote was taken. The partners—all men—decided not to allow Sonja to work part-time. In effect, they were telling her there was no longer a place for her at Menlo. The girl who had believed obstacles were her allies had finally hit an obstacle that was not her ally.

  Sonja could have stayed on at Menlo full-time, but ultimately decided to begin her transition out. She would continue with her board seats and investments made through Fund X, and she would continue to come in for Monday partners’ meetings during a lengthy period of transition. But she would not be involved in Menlo’s future investments. She had expected to stay at Menlo her entire career and now cycled through a range of emotions. She was frustrated by how few women there were in such an important industry. At the same time, she hadn’t forgotten the lack of support from partners during her months of chemotherapy. One day she arrived at Menlo and found that Shervin Pishevar had moved into her office.

  Tom Bredt described the denial of Sonja’s part-time status as “really misguided” and said the decision to let her walk away was “dumb and stupid.” Before joining Menlo in 1986, Bredt had worked at Hewlett-Packard for nearly a decade; HP was a model of diversity. Many of the managers were women, including Carolyn Morris and Nancy Anderson, and they were outstanding executives. He backed women CEOs for companies he invested in and had done hugely successful deals with MJ at IVP. He had watched Sonja grow into a formidable thinker and investor.

  As Bredt told Sonja in the aftermath, “You can’t be partners with someone who doesn’t want to be your partner.” Sonja, trying to remain positive, adopted a saying of her own: “The best revolutionaries are not the people who hate the dictators but [those] who empathize with the victims.”

  Andy Ory, the founder of Priority Call Management and Acme Packet, was upset when he heard that Menlo and Sonja were parting ways. He had arrived at Menlo as an awkward and exhausted young entrepreneur, just as Sonja was starting out as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. She had believed in him when everyone else turned him down. He’d recently gone with Sonja to one of her radiation sessions in San Francisco, as it fell on a day they had been scheduled to meet. Sonja had suggested they continue their conversation after she had her treatment. In those moments at the hospital—as Sonja talked business with her usual clarity and optimism—the normally loquacious Ory was speechless. What her Menlo partners apparently thought was a weakness, Ory saw as a strength. She was stronger and more determined than ever.

  In the end, Sonja felt as though the universe had staged an intervention. She had been outed as a woman—and turned into a feminist, overnight.

  MJ

  Months after MJ’s divorce became final, MJ and her ex-husband, Bill, took their youngest daughter, Hanna, to Duke University for the start of her freshman year. When MJ had first considered what it would be like to be divorced, she thought about her own pain and worried about the kids. What she didn’t think about, what hit her now, was how divorce destroyed a family unit. This wonderful thing called the Elmore family no longer existed. To her, that felt like the biggest loss of all.

  Hanna loved her dad and knew he was an impressive man in the business world and a successful venture capitalist. But she looked to her mom as her guiding light and the family glue, the one who had taught her to ski and got her through acne, braces, and boys. Her mom had set the rules around her first boyfriend in middle school, saying she could see him only in groups. It was her mom who—despite Hanna’s refusals, protests, and slammed doors—had insisted on getting her help for her teenage stress. It had put her on a successful track for high school and now for Duke. Her mom always appeared so composed and calm, even in this awkward and emotional situation, as her parents were together in her dorm room, saying goodbye to her. But they were no longer together as a couple.

  When MJ returned home, she made a detour to Whole Foods. Emotionally drained, she began piling things into her cart: bagels and cream cheese for the kids, bread, bagel dogs, chocolate chip cookies for Bill, veggies, and salad mix for the “mommy salad” that Hanna loved.

  As she neared the checkout, MJ stopped herself and stared at her cart. What am I doing? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. For the first time in decades, she had no one to shop for but herself. As shoppers pushed past her, her eyes welled with tears. She didn’t need any of this food. She thought, God, I don’t even know what I want for myself at the grocery store. Then she asked herself, What on earth do I want for myself?

  PART

  NINE

  The Awakening

  2010–2018

  SONJA

  On her rooftop deck in San Francisco, Sonja looked up as the navy’s Blue Angels buzzed the sky in their F/A-18 Hornets. It was the city’s annual Fleet Week; Sonja was hosting a party to give her friends a front-row seat for the dazzling air show.

  But Sonja had much more on her mind than jet plane maneuvers. She was still saddened by her parting of the ways with Menlo Ventures. Menlo’s website now featured a picture of five guys, including one palming a basketball. Investing teams at other top VC firms in the Valley were the same, with row after row of interchangeable men in plaid untucked shirts, dark denim jeans, and the occasional puffy vest. It wasn’t just that the men of Menlo Ventures had moved on, she realized; women were being written out of the history of venture capital—and the history of so many key industries. Something had to change. Women needed to come together to be heard.

  As the F/A-18 pilots roared overhead, Sonja and fellow venture capitalist Jennifer Fonstad ducked downstairs to have a private conversation.

  “You’d think there are no women in venture,” said Jennifer, who was considering leaving Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where she was a partner.

  Sonja shook her head in frustration. “We’ve been at the top of our field for a long time, and no one has even heard of us! We need to showcase the top women in venture. We need to be unified. Instead of hiding the fact that we are women, we should celebrate what we do. We need to inspire women and girls to become venture capitalists.”

  That day the two women hatched a plan that could make them money, create more networks for women, and begin rewriting the history of venture capital.

  Not long afterward, Sonja sat down with Magdalena to talk about starting an all-women’s investing group. The organization would feature the most successful women investors in Silicon Valley, women who had founded and funded companies that employed hundreds of thousands of people and shaped industries. Women who had made a mark in the Valley, even if they weren’t always being included in the history books.

  Magdalena, standing in Sonja’s kitchen, knew that Sonja was not participating in Menlo Ventures’ new fund. After a period of soul searching, Sonja was intent on founding a VC investment platform with other women.

  “If we inspire people and fund great deals as a venture group made up entirely of women, there will be more women who want to be venture capitalists,” Sonja said. In turn, she went on, those women will fund more female entrepreneurs, who will then hire more women, changing the power dynamic in Silicon Valley once and for all.

  Sonja told Magdalena, “You don’t have a platform for the investing you are doing.”

  Magdalena replied, “I have enough of a brand name that I really don’t need one. Why do I need a platform?”

  Sonja stressed the advantages of an all-women investing group. There was strength in numbers from a financial standpoint. The women could rely on one another to source deals and do due diligence. There would be an all-female “debate society,” as Magdalena had called the partners’ meetings at USVP. As a bonus, they would enjoy th
e female camaraderie they’d experienced during their Hawaiian weekends.

  “You will still write your own checks,” Sonja said, “but we can share our experiences with each other. I may be good at one type of investing, while you’re good at another. We can capitalize on each other’s strengths.”

  Sonja had come up with a name for the group—the Broadway Angels—because of the neighborhood where she lived.

  The more Magdalena thought about Sonja and Jennifer’s idea, the more it made sense. Now out on her own, she missed the camaraderie of USVP. Angel investing was more difficult without others to bounce ideas off. And she had to admit, she had loved the Hawaiian getaways with experienced, like-minded women.

  And so Magdalena agreed to be a co-founder, with one caveat: “I want to do things that will make money. I don’t just want to sit there and socialize.”

  Sonja grinned. There was no danger of that. Like the Blue Angels pilots, she intended to run the Broadway Angels meetings with military precision.

  THERESIA

  In February 2013, Theresia reluctantly agreed to co-host an “Un Valentine Valentine’s Party” with one of her best friends. Theresia and Tim had filed for divorce, she was on family leave from Accel, and friends were telling her to start looking to the future. But Theresia had no interest in a relationship. She was comfortable with her life of kids, friends, and career.

  She told everyone who tried to play matchmaker that she had “zero interest in dating anyone who has anything to do with my world.” She also questioned her interest in dating, period. She was recently in a swanky hotel bar in San Francisco with two girlfriends when a group of guys came and sat down with them. It was happy hour on a Saturday night and the guys proceeded to set their Google ID badges on the table face up, in an apparent effort to impress.

  Theresia figured that if she did eventually start dating, years down the road, she’d have to find a talented starving artist. Several of her women friends in business and academia found that their successes at work caused problems at home. American men, she decided, were raised to be the breadwinners and had a hard time adjusting when a woman made more money or was more successful than they were professionally. When Theresia returned to work at Accel, she had no intention of becoming any less successful.

  The “Un Valentine” party took place at the San Francisco home of a business school friend, Laura Sanchez, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who was going through a divorce herself. Sanchez and Theresia hosted the event with a couple of divorced friends from Stanford. Theresia, wearing a red dress and high heels, noticed a tall, good-looking guy in jeans and a gray sweater walk in. He was holding a bottle of rose champagne, her favorite drink.

  The two struck up a conversation, and as they talked, Theresia kept thinking, Handsome, very handsome. His name was Matthew McIntyre. When she got past his good looks, she was even more impressed by what he said to her. He told Theresia he had to leave the party early to pick up his daughter and ex-wife at the airport. They were flying in so that the three of them could attend a mutual friend’s wedding. His daughter was the flower girl. Theresia thought, Maybe someday my ex-husband will pick me up at the airport.

  Theresia was almost afraid to ask Matthew what he did for a living. Anything in tech or finance would be the kiss of death. She took Xerox CEO Ursula Burns’s comment, made at a tech conference, to heart: “The secret to success is to marry someone twenty years older.” Burns’s husband had retired as her career was ascending. Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard, was married to a neurosurgeon. Totally different careers.

  “I’m a firefighter,” Matthew said, bringing a smile to Theresia’s face. Before he left the party, she learned he was a fire captain in San Jose. He was on FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, specialized in large building collapse rescues, and had been boots on the ground following the attacks of 9/11. Before departing, Theresia and Matthew made plans to see each other again.

  Theresia returned to Accel from family leave in the spring of 2013. She told her partners she wasn’t going to be a part of the next fund. She felt as if she’d given Accel fifteen years of blood, sweat, and tears, only to be bullied into calling investors—many of whom she barely knew—to tell them she was getting a divorce. She admired Accel’s founders, Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz, and remained friends with her London colleague Bruce Golden. She would always be grateful for the opportunities the firm had given her and impressed by the outstanding work of many of her colleagues. But she couldn’t forgive the actions by some of the newer partners at the firm, at the very time when she had most needed their support. They would never have asked a male partner to do the same.

  Theresia’s exit from Accel involved a final negotiation session in San Francisco. Matthew offered to take her to the meeting. By this time, the two were dating casually. The negotiations at the downtown office tower started in the late afternoon. Theresia told Matthew that it would probably last a couple of hours. At eight P.M., she texted him to apologize that things were moving slowly and that he should head home if he hadn’t already. She could take Lyft or Uber.

  “I’ll wait for you,” he insisted.

  The mediation went on past nine P.M. Then ten P.M. Then eleven P.M. Then midnight. Theresia hadn’t had time to look at her phone. She figured that Matthew was long gone. Emerging from the building exhausted, she stopped in her tracks. There, still waiting in the car, was Matthew.

  MJ

  MJ looked at her life in stages, in terms of lessons learned. During her childhood in the Midwest, she was free to roam and explore creeks, trees, and cornfields. As the middle child, she was often called upon by the other kids to be the tiebreaker. Her opinion mattered.

  In her years at Purdue, she was defined in part by her aptitude in math. That fluency gave her the confidence to solve problems in other fields. It had helped her when she was hired at Intel, where she learned to perform under pressure and work in close, cohesive teams, under the direction of visionaries Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, and Gordon Moore.

  During her graduate years at Stanford business school, she had met trailblazers like Steve Jobs and Sandy Kurtzig, who arrived driving a Ferrari and carrying a pink briefcase. She still remembered Kurtzig’s parting words: “You can’t play the game if you’re not in it.”

  Then she’d landed a dream job as a venture capitalist working for Reid Dennis. The people-loving, bow-tie-wearing Dennis set a tone of ethics and decency at the firm that continues today. Dennis, like his peers Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson, Dick Kramlich, Arthur Rock, Larry Sonsini, and a handful of leaders in the Valley, looked at talent rather than gender. It was at IVP that MJ learned to analyze the most important things about a business and a market. Her judgment became her greatest skill.

  And now she was in a new phase of learning: divorced, living alone, with three grown children. She was trying a new approach to life, one that was not based on assumptions. She had begun to tell herself, Don’t muscle your way through every problem.

  She wanted to tell the bright young entrepreneurial women she met some of the lessons she’d learned over the years: Don’t be a martyr; be more selfish about your own needs; keep your foot in the door of a job you love; and whatever you do, don’t leave to make someone else happy. The ecosystem of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley was a creative wonderland, she would say. Despite its faults, it was a place where an invisible economic hand rewarded those who worked hard, had great ideas, and wanted to make a difference in the world.

  MJ had begun to think about starting her own company or raising a venture fund herself. She no longer had to juggle husband, kids, and job. She hoped to work for another thirty years. She had been one of the first women to make partner at a U.S. venture firm, along with Jacqui Morby, Patricia Cloherty, Ginger More, Nancy Schoendorf, and Annie Lamont. Maybe she would now challenge Silicon Valley’s assump
tions about age.

  For those who knew her, this was a new MJ. She soon joined Sonja, Magdalena, and Jennifer Fonstad at Broadway Angels.

  SONJA

  As Sonja had promised, Broadway Angels meetings ran like clockwork. Entrepreneurs were introduced by a sponsoring Broadway Angels member, and the founders had twenty minutes to pitch, followed by ten minutes of discussion.

  Before the group found a permanent meeting spot at Comcast Ventures in San Francisco, it moved from place to place: in the women’s homes, at an office in San Francisco’s historic Presidio, on a boat. The group was a who’s who of Silicon Valley women, from MJ to Ellen Levy at LinkedIn; venture capital partners Kate Mitchell, Maha Ibrahim, Emily Melton, Robin Richards Donohoe, Jesse Draper, Claudia Fan Munce, and Karen Boezi; serial entrepreneurs Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and Kim Polese; Laurie Yoler, the tech veteran who had helped start Tesla; Amy Banse of Comcast Ventures; Katie Rodan of Rodan + Fields; Katherine August de-Wilde of First Republic Bank; and Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, among others. The women had MBAs, PhDs, and stellar track records. They were entrepreneurs, investors, and moms.

  At one of the first meetings, Sonja laughed when a male founder walked into the room, saw all the women, and said, “Whoa!” At another meeting, Sonja refrained from rolling her eyes when a male founder insisted on explaining technical details to his female co-founder.

  The Broadway Angels’ early investments included Rocksbox, a jewelry subscription service founded by Meaghan Rose, a mother, math whiz, and scrappy entrepreneur; Debbie Sterling, an engineer who founded the toy brand GoldieBlox to introduce girls to science and engineering; and UrbanSitter, co-founded by Lynn Perkins, a mother who wanted a better way than word of mouth to find a babysitter. Other investments included Hint Water, a beverage company founded by Kara Goldin, who started the company because she wanted to lose weight and get away from diet soda. Hint was now a $100-million-a-year business. Sonja invited Brad Stephens, a pioneer in blockchain technology investing, to talk about opportunities in the sector.