Venture capital is taking it on the chin for fostering a boys' club culture. Women's share of the partnership at VC firms has actually declined over the past 15 years: The Diana Project at Babson counted 6 percent in 2014, down from 10 percent in 1999. Michael Moritz's foot-in-mouth December interview with Bloomberg made Sequoia the latest firm to blame it on a shortage of women in tech entrepreneurship and engineering.
That could be a circuitous argument. A couple of weeks ago, we pointed to recent research that suggested that women-led startups have a lower exit rate than men-run ventures, and a lack of women partners at venture capitalist firms could be to blame.
Many VCs have expressed frustration (Flybridge's Jeff Bussgang was the latest in Boston, on the most recent Tech In Boston podcast.) This week, we decided to scrutinize Boston’s VC ecosystem to see who's putting their money where their mouth is: Which of the most active VC firms in the nation's third-largest venture economy actually provide startup funding to women founders?
We started with a list of the most active firms in Boston - the ones who closed the most VC deals (including both new deals and follow-on investments) with companies based in Massachusetts in 2015, according to deal-by-deal data from the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers' MoneyTree report. Then, we went through each firm's portfolio page, looking at investments they made globally. We used company websites and other sources to find the companies that list at least one woman among their founders and determined what percentage of each firm's portfolio is composed of female-founded ventures.
Why did we scrutinize the firms' portfolio pages for data? We wanted to be sure that all information was coming from the VCs themselves, so there'd be no question about the companies in which they did and did not invest. All of the raw portfolio data comes directly from the firms. We reached out to each of them for comment. We got no response from any of them.
We present you with our findings ranked by percentage. In general, we're talking slim pickings across the board.
Atlas Venture
The top spot was secured by Atlas Venture, which deals specifically with startups in the life sciences. Based on the list of portfolio companies featured on the firm's site, 20.5 percent of its investments are women-founded ventures. Out of the 44 investments featured, 9 of those companies had at least one female founder. Among the lady-launched companies backed by Atlas is Intellia Therapeutics, whose technology allows for genome editing and who includes Jennifer Doudna. There's also Spero Therapeutics, a venture developing medicines to combat infectious diseases founded by scientist Laurence Rahme.
As you'll see further down the list, Accomplice also comes up. Just for background: In fall of 2014, Atlas split into two firms. The part of the firm dealing solely with life science ventures kept the name Atlas, while the portion focused on tech in general took on the name Accomplice. Atlas and Accomplice have separate portfolio pages, so we treated them separately.
Highland Capital Partners
Coming in a not particularly close second was Highland Capital Partners. 11.6 percent of its listed investments (9 out of 69 ventures) had female founders. A couple of examples are Rent the Runway, an online rental marketplace for high-end clothing developed by Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman. Ellen Rubin's ClearSky Data, which helps businesses store their data, is also in the Highland portfolio.
Accomplice
It looks like on the tech side, Atlas hasn't been as female friendly. Out of the 132 portfolio companies presented on Accomplice's website, 12 (9 percent) had women founders. Some notable names from that small proportion of investments are Startup Institute - the startup skills bootcamp Katie Rae helped found - and Soofa, whose public benches outfitted with chargers are brought to you by Sandra Richter and Jutta Friedrichs.
General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst closely follows Accomplice with 12 of its 150 presented investments being women-founded ventures. That 8 percent of its portfolio include Helen Greiner's Cyphy Works - a drone robotics venture - and DataGravity, a data storage intelligence company co-founded by Paula Long.
North Bridge Venture Partners
Last among the most-active VCs in Boston is North Bridge, with 6.6% (or 9 out of 137) of its portfolio-page companies having women as founders. Elena Silenok's Clothia - an online fashion marketplace - and Aquto - a venture bringing us sponsored mobile data started by Susie Kim Riley - are a couple of companies that we can point to for female representation in this portfolio.
What does this mean?
To start with the obvious, these percentages show that Boston's most active VCs aren't investing as much in women-founded startups than in those launched by men. As to why firms are giving such a lackluster performance, it's not black and white. Some VCs may stick with the company line of "There are no female entrepreneurs for us to invest in." But few people are buying that anymore, and the objective shortage of female partners could be a more likely culprit.
Image via Corey M. Grenier, CC BY-SA 2.0.
