Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  Be an inclusive, big tent kind of person.

  Approach each day with thankfulness, savoring the small moments of joy. Keep a joy journal. It might surprise you what gives you those moments.

  Be a person of your word.

  Be yourself, everyone else is taken (Oscar Wilde).

  Be “everyday brave” (MJ) and “do one thing every day that scares you” (Eleanor Roosevelt).

  Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle (Plato).

  It doesn’t cost anything to be nice (Mom).

  God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy (Billy Currington).

  In addition to reevaluating her life journey, MJ was taking a new approach to investing. She had first heard of Broadway Angels over lunch with venture capitalist Aileen Lee, a Broadway Angels member who had founded her own firm, Cowboy Ventures, in 2012 and co-founded an important new nonprofit called All Raise with Jess Lee, the first woman investing partner at Sequoia Capital, to bring more women into venture capital. MJ knew Sonja and many of the other members of the group. As soon as she joined Broadway Angels, she found herself gravitating to companies that were aligned with her hobbies and passions, with those things that felt like “flow.” Instead of enterprise software, semiconductors, and networking, she began investing in food, fashion, travel, art, and music.

  MJ invested in The RealReal, a high-end consignment shop founded by Julie Wainwright. MJ admired the resilient Wainwright, who started The RealReal in her early fifties and figured out how to grow the business from zero to $500 million in six years. Wainwright had been the CEO of Pets.com, and became a pariah when the dot-com boom went bust. By Wainwright’s own admission, she became “totally unemployable.” Her solution was to start her own company to control her own future. MJ also invested in FoodyDirect, which offered door-to-door delivery of iconic regional specialties such as Chicago’s deep-dish pizza and New York bagels and lox. And she was impressed by the young women founders of Argent, a company reimagining clothes for working women with the tagline: “Finding workwear you love shouldn’t be revolutionary. But it is. Kind of like equal pay.” MJ loved seeing Argent founder Sali Christeson at her shop in San Francisco, juggling work, meetings, and calls while holding her baby boy.

  When MJ came in to San Francisco for a Broadway Angels meeting, she never tired of seeing a big group of women investors seated around the long glass conference table. Many founders who came to pitch admitted that they rarely saw a woman VC, let alone a whole group of women VCs.

  Inevitably, the Broadway Angels meetings set aside some time to discuss relevant news of the day. When allegations of sexual harassment and assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein filled the news, the women again talked about living through a moment in history when they hoped life for women would change for the better. They discussed the importance of the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, which were implicating hundreds of high-level executives in every industry around the globe. All Raise would be the political arm of the women’s VC movement, while Broadway Angels remained the investing platform. Men who behaved badly were being put on notice, and many firms in Silicon Valley were hiring more women as principals and partners. That marked progress. But the real work, the heavy lifting, was more challenging. It was the deeper problem of bias.

  MJ knew that the “bro culture,” and stories of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, were an everyday reality, but she also knew that was not the entire story. She had worked with ethical partners at IVP and elsewhere who looked past gender and always treated her respectfully. She had found Silicon Valley an amazing place to work. She had blazed trails and built game-changing companies. Her problems around gender had been closer to home. Even when she was working full-time, she didn’t ask Bill to step up and do more. She didn’t ask him to reduce his work hours. No one in her life told her to keep her foot in the door at IVP instead of walking away.

  Returning home from her latest Broadway Angels meeting, she smiled when she saw the sign for the Sand Hill Road exit. She was older and wiser than when she’d first arrived in Silicon Valley and seen that sign. She was now driving a BMW X1 instead of a rusted-out Ford Pinto, and she had the latest smartphone instead of a CB radio. But she still had the spirit of that adventure-seeking girl looking at a future full of promise.

  As she told Sonja at the meeting, “I feel like I have something big still to do.” Whizzing by Sand Hill Road, she cranked up the music. Tim McGraw was singing “My Next Thirty Years”:

  I think I’ll take a moment, celebrate my age

  The ending of an era and the turning of a page.

  The lyric captured MJ’s feelings perfectly. It made her reflect on her own path and think about how to make her journey even more rewarding. In 2016 she had attended the memorial service of Intel CEO Andy Grove. The focus had been on Grove not as a hard-charging and brilliant manager but as an adoring husband and father. MJ had wrongly assumed that because of his intensity at work, he was less of a family man.

  For years, she had convinced herself that it was impossible to balance a demanding career with a satisfying home life. Her mother had always chosen hamburger while everyone else enjoyed steak. MJ, despite her own best efforts, had, at times, opted for hamburger, too. Her adult life was far too often about being a martyr and tamping down her expectations, just as her mother had. The truth had washed over MJ in that moment of reckoning in the aisle of Whole Foods, when she realized she didn’t know what she wanted. Finally, for the first time in her life, the girl from Indiana realized she needed to invest in herself.

  THERESIA

  Theresia felt like celebrating again. As 2018 approached, Aspect, her new firm, was thriving. Forty percent of Aspect’s investments were in women-founded firms. And she and Matthew were engaged. After showing up that night for the Accel mediation, he’d never really left. Now, whenever she was receiving an award or speaking at an event, he was front and center. And she remained close with her ex-husband, Tim, who had remarried and lived four blocks away. In fact, she and Matthew attended his wedding. And they all celebrated the holidays together with their kids.

  In late 2018 Theresia was recognized by Forbes magazine as “America’s richest female venture capitalist,” with an estimated net worth of $500 million. She had hesitated when asked to be a part of the story but realized that she could use the exposure as an opportunity to shine a light on things she cared about. She also felt that women needed to do a better job of owning their success. The reaction to the story was particularly effusive among the men in her industry. The article’s focus on money seemed to give her a sort of street cred she hadn’t had before. For years, she had heard guys talk about a certain measurement that mattered: getting into the “three comma club,” a Silicon Valley term used to refer to those who had made a billion dollars. Theresia was halfway there.

  Always a networker, Theresia was helping to build a network for women in the Valley, with Aspect Ventures, Broadway Angels, and All Raise, and through her role in advancing women in tech. In the past, when the women who worked in Silicon Valley had gathered at small dinners, salons, or Hawaiian getaways, they had returned home to their silos. Not anymore.

  Theresia and her friends Emily White and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy had a tradition of taking turns hosting an all-women’s Christmas cocktail party. Seventy-five women had attended the first year in 2011. This year three hundred women—including MJ, Sonja, Magdalena, Robin, Kate, Laurie Yoler, and Maha Ibrahim—gathered at Theresia’s house.

  The party was about networking and fun, but it also benefited several charities. This year’s beneficiaries were DonorsChoose, an education website connecting individuals to teachers and classrooms in need, where Theresia served on the board, and Project Glimmer, the nonprofit started by Sonja to inspire and embrace teenage girls.

  That night, as music played and drinks flowed, the
women took turns posing in the photo booth, donning costumes and holding signs like I LIKE BIG BUCKS, I’M WITH HER, and NAUGHTY OR NICE.

  Theresia’s daughter, Sarah, a freshman in high school, had expressed interest in attending the party. Theresia was half convinced that the draw for Sarah was not her mom but her mom’s friends, such as Emily White, the COO of Snapchat, and Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube.

  But Theresia noted a deeper change in her daughter. When Sarah was in elementary school, she had asked her mom why she wasn’t a room parent or a field trip chaperone. Theresia was the mother who would buy baked goods and put them in a homemade container to pass them off as her own. But recently, when she and Sarah were in the car together, Sarah had asked whether the stories about gender discrimination in Silicon Valley were true: “So basically you worked with all guys?” Theresia nodded. Sarah had chosen to attend an all-girls middle and high school after seeing how the boys around her acted—the way they raised their hands far more than girls, the assumptions made around who would lead, who liked sports, and who was good at math and science. It alarmed her that she might be seen as a second-class citizen at school. Sarah said to her mom that day in the car, “I’m really proud of you.”

  In another moment she would not soon forget, Theresia received an e-mail from the principal at her son Luke’s school. Luke was now eight. The e-mail read:

  Dear Luke,

  I just wanted to say thank you. This afternoon I had the opportunity to pop into your classroom and listen to your class conversation about what makes an invention. When the discussion turned to the term “human-made” rather than “man-made,” [your teacher] asked the class to explain the difference. You quickly raised your hand and shared that human-made made more sense because, “Not only men make things, women can make inventions as well.” This sparked a conversation about how women create and innovate. Thank you for thinking with an open and inclusive mind, Luke!

  These moments with her children brought Theresia enormous joy, and these days she made sure to savor them. She wanted her kids to have a better life, just as her parents had wanted for her.

  Her days at Accel and her divorce from Tim had changed her. She no longer felt the need to check every box, to take every meeting, to speak loudly and interrupt often. In establishing Aspect, Theresia had found her comfort zone: She was doing the work because she loved it.

  SONJA

  On March 26, 2018, Sonja reached an important milestone. She had been free of cancer for ten years. She celebrated with a girlfriend, who treated her to dinner at Zuni Café in San Francisco. She began putting together a presentation that she called “The Girls’ Guide to Winning.” She had winnowed her lessons learned down to ten points, ranging from “Don’t look for discrimination” and “Do the work that men do” to “Own your story” and “Have thick skin.”

  The girls’ guide made Sonja think of pioneering women in different fields. Marissa Mayer had developed a specialty in artificial intelligence and mapping at Stanford, became Google’s twentieth employee, was hired as Yahoo!’s CEO, and left to run her own tech incubator. Taylor Swift, at fourteen, had convinced her parents to move to Nashville because she was determined to be a music star. Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize winner, had been shot in the face but refused to back down from her belief that girls should be educated.

  In May, Sonja organized a birthday party for her daughter, Tess, who was turning ten. Sonja’s own birthday was approaching; inevitably, she was asked what she would change in her life. Her reply: “I wouldn’t change a thing. You don’t know if the one thing that was negative made you who you are.”

  But when she looked to the future, she had a guiding image: a group of smart, fun, engaged trailblazing women taking seats around the Broadway Angels table, a table that stretched across the globe, like a strong and beautiful banner too large to ignore. To date, 50 percent of Broadway Angels’ investments were in companies founded by women.

  Sonja, the southern belle and eternal optimist, had always seen the world the way she wanted to see it. Where others saw bias, she had seen opportunity. For most of her adult life, she had refused to believe that men and women were different at work. Success trumped gender, she was convinced, and merit was what mattered. People were people.

  That view of reality had shifted when she was diagnosed with cancer and began to juggle work and family. For the first time, she was bumping up against the challenges so many working women faced. As she struggled, she imagined what it must be like for women who didn’t have her resources. If she could lose her professional footing in a moment when she was vulnerable, what did other working women face, who lived paycheck to paycheck? It made her feel a new sense of empathy and urgency.

  Sonja had spent her career investing in companies that touched people’s lives. Her investments had helped make the Internet safer and more secure. But along the way, she had also become a feminist. And even more to her surprise, an activist.

  MAGDALENA

  Magdalena was in Istanbul in the summer of 2018 to see friends and family, including her cousin and last surviving uncle. She spent two glorious weeks sailing in the Turkish waters off Datça, Bozburun, and Göcek with her younger son, Troy. Then she returned to Istanbul for several days of meetings with local entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

  She had a book out, Power Up—Marc Benioff contributed the foreword—and she was back in familiar start-up terrain, having co-founded an auto-financing company called Informed with her tech-savvy son Justin. One of her investors was Aspect Ventures. Magdalena had found her way back to her intellectual home, Silicon Valley.

  She headed out to meet with Dilek Dayinlarli, a woman venture capitalist whom she had advised from time to time over the past six years. Magdalena’s schedule was packed, so the two women met while Magdalena was commuting from the Asian side of Istanbul to the European side, and then back again.

  Dilek, thirty-six, lived in Istanbul with her husband and daughter. She had a résumé tailor-made for venture capital: a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, where she was one of five women in a class of 450 men; an MBA; and she was once a professional women’s basketball player, playing point guard. She also had worked as a director at Groupon. Dilek, who traveled back and forth between Turkey and Silicon Valley, had found Magdalena by asking investment bankers and entrepreneurs for names of successful men or women in the venture industry. Magdalena’s name came up repeatedly.

  The women hit it off right away. Magdalena shared her stories of juggling children and work and how she had to cut out everything else to do those things well. Dilek knew Magdalena was a great mom; she’d met her sons Justin and Troy.

  “Take it easy for a while, but don’t leave your job,” Magdalena told Dilek when Dilek became a mother. “Keep yourself in the loop. Work is a blessing. I hate hearing from women who have been blessed with the best education in the world say, ‘Well I don’t need to work.’ I say, ‘Okay, so you don’t need it financially, but maybe you need it for other things. Maybe you need it for you.’ ”

  The two women discussed the fact that women worked harder and were often paid less. As Magdalena told her, women in the United States earn eighty cents for every dollar earned by a man, a gap that widens when broken down by race. “This is reality. Don’t be upset. Don’t go off and die on the corner fuming with anger. Go and push for equality.”

  Magdalena had met Dilek not long after starting Broadway Angels. She had found that working with a group of women with similar experiences was transformative. Before, while Magdalena hadn’t hidden her gender, she hadn’t focused on it, either. She had done what she needed to build a career and win. Now she wanted to help the Dileks of the world win.

  This new direction had made her think for the first time about what it meant to be a feminist. To her, a feminist was someone who wants equal pay and equ
al opportunity for women. It didn’t mean demanding that women capture 50 percent of management jobs and 50 percent of board seats. She didn’t believe in quotas.

  Magdalena was getting her second wind in her career. Walking along the streets in Istanbul, she passed a Salesforce office. The company she had helped build was now global, with about thirty thousand employees, and her friend Marc Benioff was a billionaire many times over. Salesforce Tower in San Francisco had officially opened a few months earlier and was now the tallest office building west of the Mississippi. The company had reported $3 billion in revenue in its latest quarter, with $20.4 billion in future revenues under contract.

  As Magdalena headed back to Moda—her childhood home—she felt she had delivered on her father’s dreams for her. It was he who had set her on this journey of discovery, telling his young daughter that she could like hammers and nails and be a carpenter if that’s what she chose.

  Magdalena smiled, remembering something her father had said to her on that wonderful day when the doors of her elementary school opened and the chocolate beckoned. When she and her father were out of earshot of the Catholic nuns, Magdalena was about to explain her actions when her father stopped her. He knelt and said, “You saw an opportunity and you took it. You must decide in life what is right for you.” Then he told her, “You don’t have to obey all the rules.”

  Magdalena, and many women in tech and venture capital, had lived by this credo. She had told Dilek: “What I enjoy is what I don’t know.”

  In engineering class at Stanford, Magdalena had discovered the joy of the unknowable—the scary yet exhilarating notion that she could not rely on her brain alone with absolute certainty. The inscrutable had always been reassuring, even if it was beyond her perception and her sense of reality. One of the few times she hadn’t embraced the unknowable was when she’d left the Salesforce board too early. She had set unreasonable, perfectionist standards for herself. That decision, made out of fear, had been a mistake. It had gone against the grain of who she was: an explorer, an adventurer, a risk taker.