I’m a woman and a three-time CEO who started my career in tech in the ’80s (yes, another century). In my first job, as the first female coder among a department of 300, I experienced a very odd thing: waves of engineers doing the slow-walk-and-stare past my cube to get a look. Check out the new zebra in the zoo!
That was the first indignity (and yes, just a small one). In the decades since, there have been many more. Remind me to tell you sometime about being told to wear a bikini for my first performance review. I sucked it all up. I’m a pragmatist, and it felt like part of the price that had to be paid to make progress.
So fast-forward to 2017, and it’s both shocking and exhilarating to see the wave of exposure about sexual harassment and general bias in the VC/startup community. And one of the most interesting reactions has been that of men who weren’t part of those events: “Wow, is that what you have to go through?” Yuuup. And the ally thing: “Hey, we’re with you.” How so?
I realize now that I shouldn’t have just sucked it up. I should have spoken up more often, and louder, like the tough women who’ve gone on the record, ignoring both non-disparagement clauses and online trolls, to air out the sector’s dirty laundry.
Now come the inevitable good-guy stories that follow media exposure of corporate bad behavior; this time of well-intentioned efforts by VCs to show their understanding. Flybridge Capital just announced the formation of a special investment fund only for women founders, with an all-women panel to help make the investment decisions.
A three-million dollar fund, when the average VC fund size is 50 times bigger? Be still, my heart. Flybridge is a good firm with smart partners, and I know they mean well. It certainly won’t hurt anything to have a few more bucks set aside for women-led startups. But after my own experiences getting on the radar of VCs to fund a startup, and being horrified to learn just recently that my company was very likely judged by a provably tougher set of criteria, the Flybridge initiative feels to me a bit like if the MLB offered to sponsor a Little League team for girls.
So let’s get serious; let’s do this, as VCs like to say, at venture-scale. All you sympathetic folks can do a lot more, and it doesn’t take a special ghetto, I mean fund. It just takes data. The answer is right there in the Boston Globe story about the Flybridge fund: “Over the past six months, [partner Chip Hazard] said his sourcing meetings, including pitches, have shifted from being 90 percent male, to 55 percent men, 45 percent women.”
Exactly. So which VC firms will start publishing the key data from all their interactions with women- or minority-led startups? By fund? How many ask to pitch them. How many get to pitch. How many are funded. How much time it takes. How much they get. How well-funded their follow-on rounds are. And how all those figures compare to the same stats on firms led by men.
There’s a useful precedent here. Google, Hubspot and others have swallowed hard and said, in effect, ‘We’re not happy with the lack of diversity of our team, and to help fix it, we’ll publish the data.’ Guess what? Their numbers stink. Importantly, the firms own it and continue to publish the numbers.
I was wrong to suffer in silence, and I owe this generation of bad-ass women an apology for that. It kept some people from being shamed, and too many more from understanding what disadvantaged individuals have been up against in our sector. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
So here’s my thought for the New England Venture Capital Association — take the lead here. You already have a public commitment to diversity. What about inviting a few of your members to help determine what key metrics to collect, and then aggregating those across your membership and publishing them regularly?
That will tell us the real story in the big leagues. Then, VC firms who want to push themselves as Google or Hubspot do could publish their individual stats on diversity in funding relative to a NEVCA benchmark. Women and minorities who want a fairer shot could then approach those firms first… leaving laggard VCs to explain why they can’t attract as many diverse founders. And LPs who care about this topic can make a more informed choice from among them all.
Can women and minorities get anything close to proportional access and equivalent decisions in our community? If not, guess we’ll need more ghetto funds.
This piece was originally published on Medium. We republish it with the consensus of the author.
