by Lucie Greene
Talk to women startup founders, and familiar themes and frustrations emerge. These include funding and implicit bias in the venture-capital world. “If I were a guy, people would shower me with money,” says Cleaver. “I have raised money, but men in my space, who were nowhere near as good as I am, have raised way more. I’m better than most other people in my field but meanwhile there are really young white guys with no experience who are getting all the funding.”
Cleaver says the biases, gender politics, and social dynamics that affect women in all industries’ senior positions are highly prevalent in Silicon Valley. “I had someone say to me once: ‘It’s clear that you’re really confident.’ I just looked at him because in my head I had to count to ten before I could answer. When I finally answered him, I said: ‘I’m pretty confident that the past thirteen years of success that I’ve had are due to something other than luck.’ Of course I’m fucking confident.”
She adds: “He kept saying things like, ‘That seems too ambitious.’ I replied, ‘Too ambitious? Anything less than that is inadequate.’ He was an older white guy, probably sixty years old. If I were a young man he’d be thinking: ‘I see myself in you.’ But I’m not a young man, I’m a middle-aged lesbian.”
For Cleaver a lot of it is about the subtleties of tone and language. “Lots of VCs will talk about founders when they are not in the room. If it’s a woman, they say to each other, ‘I don’t know if she can pull this off. I don’t know if she has the connections. If it’s a man they say, ‘We’re gonna have to introduce him to A, B, and C and help him.’”
Amber Atherton is founder of Zyper, a new ad tech company (ad tech refers to making digital brand placement and advertising more impactful). Zyper’s aim is to help brands connect with their most devoted fans on social platforms and incentivize them to share more with brand rewards. Atherton recently received additional backing from Y Combinator, relocating from London to Palo Alto to take part in its program. “We had traction and I had a track record,” she says of getting funded (Atherton also created and sold an online fashion jewelry company in the UK). “So while I’m not going to say it was easy, it took us four months to close.”
Atherton was drawn to the Valley for its atmosphere of ambition and optimism. “I came here because I wanted to look at things through a Silicon Valley hyper-growth perspective, which I don’t think you have in the UK. There’s not the ambition or blue sky thinking that they encourage in Silicon Valley.”
Atherton thinks one reason for the funding disparity between male- and female-backed companies is the types of things they’re typically pitching. “The majority of female entrepreneurs are coming up with consumer-led companies. Brands. There are very few female entrepreneurs coming up with ad tech, for example. Or software companies. Or AI. Which is what they [VCs] are used to.”
Atherton, a highly ambitious entrepreneur, has experienced other biases, especially as a solo founder of a rapidly growing company. “I often get asked: ‘Oh, so you’re the only founder?’ And I say, ‘yes.’ And then they say, ‘Do you not want a cofounder?’ and I say, ‘No!’ . . . They assume that I would need somebody.”
What are we missing out on by not funding all these women-founded companies? After all, women are the dominant consumer base in most markets. When it comes to health, personal care, and more, men are creating, devising, and marketing the products aimed at women. The female perspective is often missing. And products being launched by women to fill the gaps often receive resistance to investing.
Eva Goicochea is the founder of Maude, a new direct-to-consumer condom and sexual-health brand, with ambitions to disrupt the global condom industry with sleek, beautifully designed products marketed to both women and men. Her brand, with understated packaging and pithy language, is in the same vein as Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s, Everlane, and Warby Parker, which have disrupted shaving, clothing basics, and eyewear with hip, new alternatives. (Goicochea actually worked with Everlane, among brands including Herschel, Shinola, and Squarespace.)
Goicochea said she initially struggled to get backing, in part because VCs did not understand the insight into why she was launching—that women, and people in general, don’t like shopping for condoms in stores. They’re all marketed to men in black and gold packaging anyway, and are therefore highly outdated. And, while the category (like the shaving vertical, which was recently disrupted by Dollar Shave Club) was very successful before, that’s not to say it didn’t need rethinking. “The first thing was them recognizing that the culture around sex products needed to be changed. Then there were other people looking very much at it as an industry that is so monopolized that it’s hard to change it,” she says.
“Because my idea is not tech-based and because I didn’t lead with the business model, I lead with the brand and the culture angle, I was also met with way more pushback. I think that many brands by men have been funded, and they’re shitty brands, and the business model is not as strong as mine. I had all the numbers, I just didn’t lead with that. They assume that men are business savvy and business minded. And they’re more willing to listen to the other parts of the story.”
Goicochea also highlighted lack of diversity in VC companies. “I pitched to white guys, Indian guys, or Asians. There’s nobody else. There are no African Americans. And then when I pitched to women, they were way harder on me than men.” (Suffice it to say, Maude has now been enthusiastically funded and launched in 2018.)
Naomi Kelman, CEO of Willow, the award-winning breast pump, faced less difficulty when Willow first started. “We were very fortunate in getting our funding for Willow. I think part of it was that we were clearly reinventing a category that had been sleepy and hadn’t had a lot of significant innovation in a long time. And so what we were solving for was clear enough, and we got a lot of advocacy and support from the VC community.”
She also says the narrative about VCs is not clean-cut. “There’s been a lot of negative things written about some of the VCs and just as it’s inappropriate to stereotype women or stereotype men, I think it’s also equally inappropriate to stereotype VCs. I would say that the ones that I have interacted with I have found to be welcoming, understanding of women’s health and women’s issues, incredibly supportive of Willow and what we’re trying to do.”
The former CPG veteran (she worked at Johnson & Johnson for years as an executive) loves working in the Valley. “I love the very fast pace. Decision making is really quick. The organizations are super flat and I find people to be extremely collaborative, open, and very, very helpful. I quickly built a network of fellow CEOs and startups and we all try to help each other out . . . It’s been very different to corporate culture where I think the positives of corporate is that you have a lot of resources, you have a lot of clout, you have a lot of great talent, but corporate tends to be slower on decision making. Sometimes great ideas need to start out as small ideas and be nurtured to become gigantic businesses, and corporate cultures can sometimes judge ideas in terms of size only. They can sometimes shut down what could become a giant business very quickly.”
Kelman is excited about Silicon Valley’s awakening (albeit belated) to the massive market in women-oriented personal care, health, and fertility technologies. “I think that women’s health overall has been very underserved by companies and also by technology. It’s why Willow has gotten a lot of recognition, which I think is great and exciting. It’s also helping to open up the opportunities for women’s health in general. You’re seeing more interest in spaces like fertility monitoring and beauty. Health tech hasn’t yet fully entered into women’s health, and it’s very exciting to see that starting to open up. Women are the primary purchasers in life. They’re the primary decision makers if it relates to health care, and so to see companies recognizing the purchasing power and the need, the unique needs of women, is really exciting.”
Does she experience any of Silicon Valley’s sexist culture? No. But that in many ways comes down to the
fact that Kelman is in charge and has supportive founders and VCs. When it comes to overhauling industries generally, as Wennmachers points out, it’s being increasingly recognized that a board seat is just one thing. But real change will only come from women founders, CEOs, directors, and people with decision-making power behind the formation of a company.
“I’m the CEO of the company and so I can set the tone and the attitude toward gender, and clearly it’s established that Willow is a very positive, warm, involving culture. So it’s a very different circumstance. I am very committed to focusing on the nurturing and development of all kinds of talent, especially women. Because you hear the stories and you want to be part of the change, not part of the issue.”
Goicochea believes women have an innate understanding of culture and brands, which helps them create companies with longevity—they know how to define and build brands we believe in and care about, thereby experiencing longer-term loyalty from their audiences. And it is continually ignored by Silicon Valley. This can be seen in the subtle nuances in how female-founded companies are designed, run, and communicate, she says. Women founders are able to spot gaps in markets for female audiences and create products that resonate more effectively. “Look at [online supplements brand] Ritual, for example. It’s female founded and you can really see that in the product. You can tell they really care about their customer and they live and breathe the brand and connection with their customers.” Which contrasts greatly, she says, to other more transactional equivalents led by men. “You have to find ways to be culturally relevant and it can’t always be buy-my-product.”
The execution of Willow is also evidence of this: “A female CEO certainly brings a different perspective to things,” says Kelman. “But I would also say that one of the things that we do really well is touch base with moms and the consumer often. I think a big part of it is listening to your audience, as opposed to just designing in a vacuum and just taking technology for technology’s sake. We talk about Willow as a personal-care product for women because it’s something that a mom puts on her body.”
Emotion and brand equity are interesting points when it comes to Silicon Valley, and an area in which women might ultimately have the upper hand when it comes to creating long-lasting products. Recent research by BrandZ, a consultancy and brand equity research platform, supports this. In 2018 BrandZ measured Silicon Valley’s biggest brands by several axes. In a survey that asked people about Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Netflix, among others, tech brands had a lot of functional equity (in other words, we love them because they work), but all of them had comparatively low emotional resonance in the mind of consumers. This feels intuitive to the way we interact with these brands. After all, if there was a cheaper, faster shopping site, we’d probably switch away from Amazon. If there was a better version of Uber, we’d probably use it. Yet brands we really connect with become more embedded with the way we see ourselves. We shop at Adidas, or attend SoulCycle, or fly with Virgin Airlines not just because they’re functional, but because they create a bigger emotive meaning in our minds. Maybe Maude will be one of the next waves. Either way, there’s a disconnect between women’s track records in running businesses and the support and backing they receive from Silicon Valley.
Canaries in the Code Mines
Silicon Valley’s relationship with women is more complex than funding, products, and leadership. As a male-dominated industry with men at the top of every totem pole, it’s little wonder that the #MeToo movement, which has shattered several industries, is now creeping into tech, too.
The experience of whistleblowers in Silicon Valley now versus just a few years ago is in many ways prophetic of what changes might lie ahead for Silicon Valley’s women problem.
Ellen Pao, the former investment partner at legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sued the company in 2012 for sexual discrimination. She hit the headlines for claiming that she experienced sexual discrimination in the company’s promotional and pay practices. She also alleged workplace harassment after an affair with a male partner ended, and subsequent retaliation when she was abruptly terminated after raising a complaint. The company argued she was fired for performance issues, which she disputed. She very publicly lost the lawsuit.
But that was only half of it. It came amid a very public discourse in which her character, professional capability, and standing were attacked by the media and KPCB. Writing several years later in 2017 for New York magazine (to coincide with the publication of her book Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change), Pao described the experience as “a widely publicized case in which I was often cast as the villain—incompetent, greedy, aggressive, and cold. My husband and I were both dragged through the mud, our privacy destroyed.”
Pao’s reputation was smeared. She was described as a “poor performer.”
Meanwhile, a Vanity Fair story took aim at the sexual history of her husband. The issue created a wide debate about the treatment of women in tech and exposed many of the subtleties (and not so subtleties) of sexual politics, harassment, and discrimination in the VC workplace. Pao was given a wringing in the media. In just five years, while the incidents that took place might have been the same, it’s difficult to imagine she’d now receive the same response, both to her case and in the media.
Pao’s since gone on to become investment partner at Kapor Capital, the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and cofounder of the diversity consulting nonprofit organization Project Include. While formerly vilified over her lawsuit, Pao now enjoys adulation as a precursor to a sea change that is starting to gain momentum in the tech world. Many now credit Pao as a canary in a coal mine, her case a precursor to a much-needed debate about the treatment of women in Silicon Valley.
“She got the short end of the stick, but she’s on top of the world now . . . If she filed this lawsuit today, she would win. Everyone knows that,” says Debra Cleaver. “Things are changing faster, too. I think the rate of social change is accelerating and that includes things like Silicon Valley. It is changing, but it’s changing in the way that society is changing. All of these things are intertwined. It’s like watching what is happening in Hollywood. All of this is going to have trickle effects to everything else.”
Indeed. Fast-forward to 2018 and it’s a different scenario, from the global Women’s March to the #MeToo movement. And, hot on the heels of fourth-wave feminism making women’s empowerment central to the popular zeitgeist, Silicon Valley’s long history of how it treats women quickly discovers it has nowhere left to hide.
A series of highly public stories about Silicon Valley’s misogynist culture has come to light over the past few years. There was the explosive blog post written by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler that exposed the company’s culture of harassment and discrimination. Twitter erupted over Fowler’s story, written in February 2017, which said: “As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.” She outlined instances of discrimination, having experienced both nuanced and explicit unfair treatment and unwanted sexual advances from Uber management. The sensational story prompted then CEO Travis Kalanick to call a company meeting to apologize for its cultural failings. Amid this and other speculation about leadership trouble at the company, shareholders ordered Kalanick to step down in summer 2017. More important, Fowler’s blog post was followed by a tidal wave of additional complaints from others at Uber that were largely greeted with sympathy online, and Fowler experienced a flurry of support in powerful media outlets. Uber board member Arianna Huffington praised her, and the Financial Times named her its 2017 Person of the Year.
Instances like this followed, forcing Silicon Valley to address the issue. In July 2017, Da
ve McClure resigned as general partner of 500 Startups, an early-stage venture fund, in the wake of sexual harassment allegations. By way of apology, McClure wrote a lengthy confessional blog post on Medium: “I’m a creep. I’m sorry.” Toward the end of 2017, VC Shervin Pishevar stepped down from Virgin Hyperloop One and his venture firm Sherpa Capital in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Silicon Valley’s gender politics have been further exposed by Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang’s 2018 book Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. Chang’s heavily publicized tome reveals Silicon Valley’s culture of drug-fueled parties, orgies, and sexual favors (in return for professional advancement) with multiple accounts from bystanders, many so juicy the interviewees insisted on anonymity. She also describes how Silicon Valley’s dominant type—late-blooming tech nerd—has propagated a culture in which women are mistreated in relationships and viewed as disposable. This has come amid a wider power shift in which Silicon Valley billionaires have become more desirable than Hollywood actors thanks to their extreme wealth. All this, she said, has inevitably permeated into the wider business culture, creating an unwelcoming and often hostile environment for women and their contributions.
With this heightened awareness of misogynistic culture and companies’ poor regard for women in the workplace, is Silicon Valley male dominance finally running out of rope?
There are of course other complex gender issues driven by tech. Consider for example the technologies and business models that Silicon Valley puts forth. Human Resources departments at traditional firms may be rapidly brushing up on their employee education policies and bracing against further #MeToo cases, lawsuits, and more, but there are federal laws in place to protect against discrimination and harassment. This is in the world of traditional work, civic employee protections, and statutory rights. None of this exists in the gig economy, a Wild West for workers on multiple levels, and one with few rights for recourse, much less protections, against sexual harassment. The narrative of the gig economy is freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and flexibility. But for people dependent on it, mostly freelancers who sit outside the usual protections of traditional employment, it can be anything but. For women this is especially pronounced. And while current social movements may have enabled many to speak out about abuse, the gig economy’s reliance on user reviews to even remain part of a network (such as Uber, or on-demand cleaning company Handy) puts women in a highly vulnerable situation. They are subjected, and evaluated, after all, by unmediated and often unregulated reviews. The star system rules all.