All the Alpha Girls—Magdalena, Theresia, Sonja, and MJ—in their own ways had adopted the unknowable. That was the only way they could survive and thrive in the competitive, high-stakes world. They had arrived in Silicon Valley as young women, seeking opportunity from uncertainty. Always outnumbered as women in a man’s world, they tallied victories more numerous and greater than they’d ever imagined. They had sacrificed and suffered setbacks, but they had never given up. The Alpha Girls had created their own paths, had made their own history. And as Magdalena knew, they’d only just begun.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea for Alpha Girls has roots in my last book, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight. As I traveled around the country talking to groups of engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists, I kept asking myself one question: Where are all the women? In crowds big and small, there would be only a handful of women.
I began to research the many fields where women are underrepresented, and I soon homed in on venture capital as an industry that is not well known but has enormous influence. Venture capital matters more than just about any other part of tech, and the people who control the cash are men. Venture capitalists invest in the ideas of entrepreneurs. Successful start-ups shape and change how we live, from the way we communicate to the technology we use, from the cars we drive to the breakthrough medical treatments we may one day need.
When I started my research in late 2016, just 6 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms were women, and about 2 percent of venture dollars went to companies founded by women. Of the $130 billion that venture capital firms invested last year, a paltry $2.6 billion went to women. I wanted to know: What do such hidden inequalities mean for the rest of the world?
Melinda Gates put it most succinctly when she told me, “If venture doesn’t diversify, tech won’t diversify.” Gates, an engineer and co-chair with her husband of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, recently turned her attention to improving diversity in tech. Her focus on diversity came after doing extensive work in the developing world, where she saw how empowered women transform societies. She began to wonder, “How far has the United States come on these issues?” The answer was “not far enough.” In her mind, reforming tech would have to begin with venture capital.
In the cloistered good old boys’ club of Silicon Valley, male VCs invite other male VCs in on deals and fund male founders. The male founders go on to hire men who look like them. When big companies acquire start-ups, the male-heavy workforce is absorbed into a bigger male-heavy company. This means that the software, hardware, apps, social media, AI, and more are being created, funded, and run by men.
But improving the gender balance is not only about equality—it’s also about a better bottom line and a thriving global economy. Women represent half of the world’s population and half of its potential. Research shows that companies with more diversity, particularly with more women in leadership, offer higher returns on capital and greater innovation than firms without this leadership. Companies with more women at the executive and board levels perform better. Start-ups with at least one female founder see a better return on their investments. Companies that do the best with gender diversity on their executive teams are statistically more likely to have above-average profitability.
Before I tracked down the women of venture capital, I wanted to understand the industry itself. Much has been written about Silicon Valley, and I was a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, so the Valley was hardly foreign to me. But I wanted to see for myself how this dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem came into existence. I wanted to learn how it took root along a quiet stretch of land known as Sand Hill Road. I wanted to form my own opinions about how venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have changed the world. I started out by meeting with many of the founding fathers of venture capital—yes, they are all men. I spent hours talking with industry legends, including Arthur Rock, Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson, Reid Dennis, Irwin Federman, and Don Valentine (years ago, I also had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Perkins, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). I met with lawyer Larry Sonsini, who has been the consiglieri to the tech world for decades. I talked with many younger male VCs, including John Fisher of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who began to point me in the direction of the real unicorns of his industry—the women who succeeded. Remarkably, I found that their stories had never been told. In this way, though, they are like women everywhere whose contributions have been underplayed, diluted, or simply overlooked. (Even Frida Kahlo was referred to as “Diego Rivera’s wife” in her New York Times obituary.) I talked with Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners and the co-founder of LinkedIn. I interviewed historians, gender experts, and entrepreneurs. Slowly, I began to find my trailblazers, my “Alpha Girls,” the women of venture who worked in silos as the only female general investing partners at their firms. They were among the first women in the United States to become partners at major VC firms. They succeeded in a world decidedly stacked against them.
My reporting for this book was already under way when the Me Too movement began, outing men in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and just about every other industry imaginable. An international dialogue was stirred around gender, bias, power, abuse, and bad behavior in the workplace. The Me Too movement had an interesting effect on my reporting. My Alpha Girls became braver in sharing their important stories. There is power in the collective.
Still, it was at times excruciatingly difficult to get the women of this book to be candid about their failings and vulnerabilities, and about their betrayals at work or at home. These women made their careers by being strong and unflappable, by wearing their Teflon suits and playing by rules established by men. They were brilliant in navigating the minefields of being a woman in an all-male field: knowing when to ignore an off-color joke or when to take it seriously, when to join a networking event and when to pass, when to be a team player and when to compete for a deal. There are so many lessons learned in this book.
I realize now that I asked these women to take big risks in sharing their successes, failures, and regrets. They shared painful chapters in their lives; this wasn’t easy for them. Venture capital is an industry where connections and relationships matter. Today, while there has been a bump in the hiring of women, about three-quarters of U.S. venture firms still have zero women investing partners. Of the firms that have hired women as check-writing partners, most have just one woman partner, not multiple. It is rare to find top VC firms with more than one female investing partner.
You may wonder how I chose my primary characters. Certainly, there are other female trailblazers who were entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and many of their stories are told in part in this book. I wanted to find a small group of women who had deals that were irrefutably theirs; who had played a key role in shaping an industry, whether hardware, software, e-commerce, cybersecurity, or social media; and I wanted women of different generations, personalities, and backgrounds. I wanted to tell their stories at work and at home, as women live complicated lives. I wanted to explore questions such as: How do men support us or hold us back? How do we women limit ourselves? I wanted to see how Silicon Valley looks from a woman’s point of view.
This may be unexpected, but as I was writing Alpha Girls, I often thought of the television series Sex and the City, based on the book by Candace Bushnell. Just as readers and viewers personally identified with either Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, or Charlotte, my hope is that readers of Alpha Girls will find commonalities with Theresia, Magdalena, Sonja, or MJ. They will say, “I’m just like MJ” or “I’m just like Theresia.” The women of Alpha Girls just happen to be great at math, engineering, finance, computers, and business. But like the fictional characters of Sex and the City, the real-life Alpha Girls were also trying to find their way in the world.
When women see other women in posit
ions of leadership or success, it reframes what they think is possible for them. Alpha Girls gives us the female phenotypes we need. These are regular women: daughters of immigrants, dentists, teachers, and merchants. They are women who invented, funded, and helped build companies that changed industries. They are women who made bucketloads of their own money. Now they are working to rewrite the rules for women in venture and beyond. A rebellion is under way in Silicon Valley, but it is just beginning.
While there are men in this story who behaved badly, there are also wonderful men who were great allies to women and never considered gender an issue. They have much to teach. Overall, I look at the venture industry as one of the most important and dynamic around. It is where the future takes shape. It’s a great place for men and women, but I can now see how women are particularly well suited for venture. Women are the most powerful consumers in the world economy, driving up to 80 percent of all consumer purchases. The women VCs I know are smart, data-driven, and intuitive.
Finally, I wanted to share my thinking around the term “Alpha Girls.” Yes, these are women I’m writing about. But I love the word girl. In my mind, the word has power, pluck, and determination. Girls are formidable, caring, hopeful, brave, smart, and strong. Look at Theresia Gouw, Sonja Perkins, MJ Elmore, Magdalena Yeşil, and many of the other women in this story. My research also inspired me to revisit stories of well-known Alpha Girls, women such as the tennis player Billie Jean King, the jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the activist Malala, to name a few. I researched the Alpha Girls of history, whether the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, the young black girls of the civil rights movement, or the formidable peasant woman in World War I who became Russia’s first female army officer.
Today, there are Alpha Girls everywhere, and their stories need to be told. These are the first women to command assault ships in the Persian Gulf; an all-women’s drumming group in Brazil that is breaking gender boundaries; the female farmworkers fighting sexual abuse and discrimination; the Citadel’s first female regimental commander; the Iranian women who are breaking the law by shedding their head scarves; the millions of women in South India who stood shoulder to shoulder on New Year’s Day to protest sexism and oppression.
As I see it, an Alpha Girl is a woman of any age who refuses to give up on her dreams. She ignores what others insist is impossible and shows what is possible. As Magdalena Yeşil, the girl who loved her hammer and nails more than any doll, was told by her father in Istanbul, Turkey, “You must decide in life what is right for you. You don’t have to obey all the rules.”
I am excited to meet the rule-breaking Alpha Girls of the world, to hear your stories and stir discussions around how we succeed, why we fail, how we get back up again and make things better for the women around us and for the next generation of boys and girls.
I hope you will share your stories with me, and let’s make sure Alpha Girls past, present, and future get their place in the history books.
Connect at:
julianguthriesf.com
E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @JulianGuthrie
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlphaGirlsStories/
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My mother, Connie Guthrie, is an Alpha Girl. She was twelve years old when she watched the first United States Women’s Open Golf Championship held at the Spokane Country Club in Spokane, Washington, in 1946. She was inspired watching the female trailblazers of golf who established the Ladies Professional Golf Association: Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, Betty Jameson, and Louise Suggs.
After taking up golf at age twelve, Connie won the Spokane Area Women’s Golf Championship for the first time at age sixteen in 1951. (She was runner up at age fourteen, the first year she played, losing in sudden death on the thirty-seventh hole.) She went on to win the Spokane championship fifteen more times, “retiring” from the competition on her sixteenth win.
She won the Idaho State Women’s Amateur Championship in 1951 and 1952, and the Washington State Women’s Golf Association Championship in 1951 and 1980. Her wins in 1951 were especially remarkable given she was sixteen years old. In 1953, she was the first—and last—woman to play on the men’s varsity golf team at Gonzaga University, where she had a full scholarship.
At the time, opportunities for women in sports were limited, so she went out for the men’s team and easily made the cut, having already won the city and state championships. There were occasions when men on competing teams walked to the first tee, learned they were matched against Connie—who was as gorgeous as she was talented—and declared, “I’m not competing against a woman.” These wins against disdainful men were especially satisfying. But the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) declared the same year that women were not allowed to play on men’s teams. The NCAA banned my mother from playing on the men’s team, leaving her with no other options, as there were no women’s college sports teams. She thought the decision was “pretty rotten.”
My mother was also named Miss Spokane in 1953 and served as the city’s official hostess. She then took time off to raise her family, returning to golf decades later. She returned because she missed the challenges of competition, and she wanted something that was just for herself. In 1984, she refocused her energies on the sport she loved and staged a storybook comeback. She pulled off extraordinary wins, becoming the top senior amateur golfer in the United States, winning the United States Golf Association Senior Women’s Amateur championship in 1984 and in 1986.
She also won the Pacific Northwest Golf Association (PNGA) Women’s Amateur championship in 1984, the Western Senior Women’s Amateur Championship in 1986, and the PNGA Senior Women’s Amateur in 1993. She found her age was an advantage, saying, “Being older helps in some ways because your attitude and mental toughness are better.” She was named by Golf Digest as one of the best-dressed women in golf. She was inducted into the Gonzaga University Hall of Fame; the Inland Northwest Hall of Fame; and the Pacific Northwest Golf Association Hall of Fame. That’s my mom—my best friend, a great role model, and an original Alpha Girl.
Finally, I extend heartfelt thanks to my literary agent, Joe Veltre; my talented editor at Crown, Roger Scholl; and my friend and editor David Lewis. Thank you again to Theresia, MJ, Magdalena, and Sonja for trusting me with your important stories. Thank you to Martin Muller, to my brother, David Guthrie, and to my son, Roman.
Roman, you are my pride and joy. Remember that strong people stand up for themselves, and stronger people stand up for others. I know you will always do both.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JULIAN GUTHRIE spent twenty years writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she won numerous awards and had her writing nominated multiple times for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of three nonfiction books: The Grace of Everyday Saints, The Billionaire and the Mechanic, and How to Make a Spaceship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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