Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  Sonja slowly reduced her time at Menlo and stopped attending partners’ meetings. In addition to Broadway Angels, she had started a nonprofit to support at-risk teenage girls. The nonprofit, Project Glimmer, was inspired by the online beauty site Eve, and gave gifts of jewelry and makeup at Christmas, reaching more than 125,000 girls and women a year.

  Broadway Angels was Sonja’s platform to bring recognition and opportunity to women and to amend the history books to include more of her peers. Project Glimmer was her way to inspire the next generation, by making young women feel valued and loved.

  MAGDALENA

  The giant steel doors opened slowly as lunch recess ended. As the other students returned to class, Magdalena, in first grade and wearing her Catholic school uniform, stared at the open entranceway to the school. She thought, I’ll just go across the street to the chocolate man and get a chocolate bar. The doors had never opened during the school day. Magdalena headed out and across the street.

  The man who owned the shop across the street was surprised to see Kevork Yeşil’s daughter before him. Magdalena told him, “I would love to have some chocolate.” The shopkeeper, friends with Kevork, sold radios and fans and other electrical appliances. He smiled at the precocious girl with her chubby cheeks and big hazel eyes. He reached into his stash of chocolate bars.

  Magdalena thanked the kind shopkeeper, peeled back the wrapper, and devoured the chocolate. Walking back through the big open doors at the school’s entrance, she was intercepted by a nun, who didn’t look happy. Magdalena was led straight to the office of the head nun.

  “Why did you escape?” the head of school demanded.

  Magdalena analyzed the question. “I didn’t escape from school,” she replied. “I came back to school.”

  The nun asked the question another way: “Why did you think it was okay to leave school without permission?”

  Magdalena answered, “The door was open. The chocolate man works across the street. I went to get chocolate.”

  Magdalena’s father was summoned to the school. She was being dismissed from school early—another bit of good fortune, to her mind. Her father arrived and apologized to the nuns. He looked sternly at his daughter.

  Out on the street, Magdalena tried to explain to her father that she had seen the open doors as a good opportunity to get some chocolate. It made perfect sense to her.

  Today, so many decades later, Magdalena stood across the street from the school where the shop had stood. She could picture her father: smiling, squarely built, with white hair. He always had candy in his pockets for kids who cried on the ferry and for orphans who called him Keyif Amca, “Uncle Joy” in Turkish.

  The school looked far more impressive than she remembered. It was now a cultural institute, offering theater and music. She had toured inside the building earlier in the day, returning to the classrooms she remembered, and the upstairs room where she and the other students had taken naps in small chaise longues. The beautifully carved marble trough she remembered was still in place.

  Magdalena spent a few more minutes studying the exterior of her school. In her youth, the draw of America had been undeniable, more magnetic than a thousand chocolate bars. But recently she’d felt the tug of home. She loved this mystical, imperial, and cosmopolitan land with its intricate history that was both Christian and Islamic. The smells and sounds were engraved in her mind. If growing up here had a sound, it was the sounds of boats. Ferries were a feature of everyday life, like taxicabs in New York. Her father had taken the ferry across the Bosporus twice a day. The horns of the ferry announced arrivals and departures and sent commuters scurrying to the docks. Small boats sputtered with one- or two-stroke motors. The other sounds she remembered came from the street vendors who made their way through her quiet neighborhood. The cry of the yogurt man was different from the harsh yell of the vegetable vendor.

  The smells tended to be seasonal, though the smells of saltwater and seaweed were omnipresent. In the fall there was the smell of roasted chestnuts, and in the summer, fresh corn on the cob boiled and sold at the beach. Not all the smells were good, however, in a dense city where people lived flesh to flesh without deodorant. Magdalena remembered getting onto crowded buses as a girl and trying not to breathe.

  On this trip back to Turkey, Magdalena went to Fethiye, a port city in the south, before returning to her neighborhood of Moda, on the Asian side of Istanbul. Her cousin still lived in the same house, five minutes from where Magdalena grew up. Magdalena wandered into the bedroom where the two had once played. The flower and animal stickers they’d put on her dresser were still there.

  She visited the ice cream parlor she used to go to as a child, and ordered her favorite ice cream, sour cherry. And she stopped by the church her grandmother attended. Her father had passed away decades earlier, but to her, his presence remained strong here. Magdalena’s older sister had been her mother’s to mold and shape; Magdalena was her father’s daughter.

  She walked over to the public beach in Moda, where she once swam and played. It was where the other kids threw sand in her face after learning she was Armenian. But even when those kids pushed her away, she hadn’t run away and cried. She’d said to herself, How can I play their game? How can I get them to make a seat for me?

  Today, much of the beach had been turned into a promenade. But for Magdalena, it would always be the place where she began to understand the game of life.

  THERESIA

  Theresia and Jennifer Fonstad sat down at the café of the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford campus. The terrace overlooked the Rodin Sculpture Garden, featuring the French sculptor’s various interpretations in bronze of the male nude form. Theresia and Jennifer had met what felt to both like a lifetime before, when they’d worked at Bain in Boston after college. Jennifer, another woman who was becoming a voice for change in Silicon Valley, had announced she was leaving Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venerable firm where she was a managing director.

  Theresia and Jennifer talked about angel investing opportunities. As Theresia was stepping away from Accel, she would now be free to join Broadway Angels.

  But Jennifer had her own idea to float. “Instead of just doing angel investing,” she said, “we should join forces and start a firm of our own.”

  By the end of lunch, Theresia was sold. Jennifer was someone she knew and trusted. Like Theresia, Jennifer was a divorced working mom who embraced the importance of career and kids. She believed it was possible to excel at both. As Theresia had always said, “If you want to get something done, hire a working mom. They feel guilty about everything and are hyper efficient.” The two women had other things in common as well: Jennifer had landed on the Forbes Midas list, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and closed a deal while in labor. And they both had demanding fathers who had driven them to succeed. When Jennifer was twelve, her dad had asked her to write out a five-year plan and goals and explain how she’d accomplish them.

  Theresia left the lunch feeling excited about her work for the first time in far too long. Much that she had cherished in her life had ended. Now something important, something worthwhile, was about to begin.

  In 2014 Theresia and Jennifer announced the formation of their new firm, Aspect Ventures. Combined, the two women had created $10 billion in public market value, helped lead fifteen merger and acquisition transactions, and raised more than three hundred rounds in follow-on capital for their portfolio companies. Trulia, one of the more recent companies Theresia had invested in, was in the news as it was being acquired by Zillow for $3.5 billion. Theresia and Jennifer planned to start by investing their own money, then raise funds from limited partners. They opened offices in San Francisco’s South of Market district and in Menlo Park.

  When the story on the founding of Aspect broke, Theresia told a reporter she wanted to invest in great companies, regardless of whether they were founded b
y men or by women. But she also said she wanted to be a part of creating more stories of successful women who raised capital and built companies. At Accel, about 20 percent of the pitches had been from women founders. Aspect aimed to double that, with a goal of one day seeing entrepreneurs and VCs look more like the general population.

  In 2015 Aspect raised a $150 million debut fund, focused on Series A investments in software companies. And Theresia remained invested in one of her longtime companies, the cybersecurity firm ForeScout, which was finally looking to go public and getting attention as a possible unicorn—one of those rare start-ups that achieve a billion-dollar valuation. She had worked with co-founder Hezy Yeshurun and the ForeScout team from their beginning in the summer of 2001, and the company had pivoted and persevered and become successful.

  She also invested in a new cybersecurity start-up, Cato Networks, founded by her friend and entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer of Check Point and Imperva. Before long, Theresia and Jennifer began attracting high-profile investors, including Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates had quietly turned her attention to the world of venture capital after learning about the dismal numbers of women in venture and in tech.

  Theresia and Melinda Gates met for breakfast at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road. Melinda wanted to apply what she had learned from the Gates Foundation’s work in global health to improving conditions for women in tech.

  The boys’ club of Silicon Valley, as Melinda saw it, was both harmful to society and bad for business. If tech and Silicon Valley shaped the future, Melinda asked, what happened when there were so few women?

  As Gates began to study the issues, she had to decide whether to put her money and energy into helping to advance entrepreneurs or venture capitalists. She decided to focus on venture because it was the start of the food chain. If venture didn’t diversify, tech couldn’t diversify. She believed that women were more likely to fund other women and that more women were needed at the decision-making table.

  Once she defined the focus on venture, Melinda wanted to understand what was keeping women out of the industry and what were the pathways in.

  Melinda had been drawn to tech personally because of an outstanding woman math teacher who was able to get ten Apple II computers into her Catholic girls’ school. She remembered the teacher asking the girls whether they wanted to learn to code in BASIC. Melinda took to coding immediately, finding it like solving a puzzle, something she’d always loved. She then got a summer job teaching kids how to program in LOGO. She attended Duke because the university had a grant from IBM for two big computer labs. She had worked at Microsoft for nine years and loved her job.

  “I’ve always been interested in how tech serves all of society,” Melinda said. “I am a big believer in disruptive innovation. But if we want more innovation and better products, we’ve got to put more money behind women and minorities.”

  Theresia was impressed by Melinda, finding her engaging, impassioned, and down-to-earth. Theresia offered her ideas on how to increase the number of women in tech in general as well as women investors and women founders. The two women talked about what it’s like when a firm only has one woman, and that woman is under pressure to assimilate into the boys’ club rather than change it. Melinda said, “When you put several women on a board, the questions asked of the business become different. Change begins. VC firms have to wake up to that.”

  The two parted ways that morning with an eye to working together to shake up the status quo.

  When Aspect raised its second venture fund, it surpassed its target with $200 million, and Melinda was in as an investor through her company Pivotal Ventures. In an ironic twist of fate, Aspect moved from Menlo Park to the office in Palo Alto where Facebook had been located when it first got funding, where Theresia had presented the Series A term sheet and listened to a twenty-year-old Mark Zuckerberg talk about his cool college start-up.

  SONJA

  At a Broadway Angels meeting in 2017, Sonja and the group grappled with some ugly news about endemic harassment and sexism in Silicon Valley. The subject had come up in a more isolated way in 2012, when venture capitalist Ellen Pao sued her former employer, the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, alleging that she was discriminated against and sexually harassed. She lost the case but became an activist for equality.

  Now a flurry of stories, allegations, and lawsuits filled the news and was spreading from industry to industry. Female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were coming forward to say they had been afraid until now to report the misconduct of certain venture capitalists. Susan Fowler, an engineer at Uber, accused her company of fostering a toxic culture of sexism. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had quipped to a reporter in an interview years earlier that he should call the company “boober” for all the women he gets “on demand.”

  New allegations of abuse and bad behavior seemed to make headlines every day. Everyone at the Broadway Angels table knew someone who was accused of misconduct or worse. Shervin Pishevar, the Menlo partner and Uber investor who had moved into Sonja’s old office, was being accused of sexual harassment and assault by a handful of women. He has denied the allegations. Steve Jurvetson, a wunderkind venture investor who had funded Theresia’s start-up, Release Software—and was a friend—had left his firm DFJ (where Jennifer Fonstad was a partner) following allegations that he hosted sex and drug parties and had multiple affairs, including with female entrepreneurs. (Jurvetson has also denied the allegations.) Maha Ibrahim was seated on a plane next to a well-known male VC who confided to her that his firm would never hire another woman as an investing partner. The man told Maha that his firm didn’t want the trouble. As he put it, they didn’t want to be “Paod”—a reference to the lawsuit by Ellen Pao.

  The problems in tech mirrored problems in the broader American workplace. But Sonja had a hard time reconciling the Silicon Valley she knew with the Silicon Valley in the news. She could still remember her first day in venture capital, January 2, 1989, when she’d started at TA Associates in Boston and thought, This is the best job in the world.

  There had been a time when Sonja would do anything to prove herself. When she applied to Harvard Business School, she wrote about a lifeguard certification class she’d taken at the University of Virginia, with members of the UVA swim team as classmates. Every day she swam until her body shook from exhaustion and she felt like she was drowning, but she kept on swimming. Every week another woman dropped out. At the end of the class, she had to take the certification test. She was blindfolded in the dive pool, and a UVA swimmer nicknamed Moose—a huge guy—got into the pool to simulate a person drowning. He grabbed onto her, pulling her under. Sonja dug her nails into Moose, pulled his hair, and got him off her before “saving” him. She was the only woman in her class to pass the test.

  Now, looking back, Sonja wondered if her efforts to gain approval from her male colleagues had been misguided. But she concluded that she did what was right to stay in the game and succeed, and now to pave the way for other women to enter the field. It had been almost two years since she had walked away from Menlo Ventures, but a more important anniversary was approaching.

  MJ

  MJ had returned to Stanford as a fellow at the university’s Distinguished Careers Institute, a yearlong program offered to successful individuals “rethinking the concept of a life journey.” The fellows created a customized lesson plan and attended whatever combination of classes interested them. MJ signed up for a course taught by social psychologist Rod Kramer called Lives of Consequence: How Individuals Discover Paths to Meaningful Engagement.

  Students in the program were asked to think about finding purpose. They focused on something Kramer defined as “flow,” activities that make you lose track of time. The idea was the more flow, the greater your happiness. Students listed the things that made them lose track of
time. MJ hadn’t thought of this before, but wrote: “For me, flow comes from music. I like almost all genres, but with a nod to my mom, Dorothy, and her one LP, Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits, a country music lover was born.”

  She continued, “So flow happens to me through music, drawing and painting, making jewelry, watching Giants baseball, hiking, spinning, working out, cooking, having a great meal with people I love.”

  On another day, Kramer instructed the students, “Grab friends and talk about how to pick a mate, a partner, a spouse, of consequence.” MJ, decades older than the students in this second-year graduate-level business class, joined a group of three women and four men. They had to come up with ten traits they wanted in a partner. MJ looked at the group and thought, I’m not really doing this with twenty-somethings, am I? When it came time to reveal the top traits, all three women in MJ’s group listed “emotional intelligence.” When all four men asked, “What’s that?” MJ laughed.

  The class made MJ think about the future rather than dwell on the past. She wrote, “Lately I am on a new trajectory. I am evolving from a human doing to a human being. I believe in the power of the now and in living in the day and the moment.”

  She wrote out her “axioms to live by”:

  Love is a verb. Make your top relationships your top priority.

  Be more than generous in your dealings with others, like Reid Dennis was with me. Give people more than they ask for.