I took so many notes at the Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering conference that it’s taken me a while to pare them down. The Friday afternoon panel on Women’s Experience of Silicon Valley’s Entrepreneurial Culture was particularly rich. The panel included:
- Myra M. Hart, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard University (moderator)
- Joyce Chung, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures
- Ann Winblad, co-founding Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
- Diane Greene, President, CEO and co-founder of VMware.
Myra Hart is a Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute and collaborates on research with the Diana Project, a group of women researchers. She presented data from their work on women entrepreneurs and on the relationships between venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs. A sampling of what their research data shows:
- Women are entrepreneurial, but are clustered at the low end in revenue and venture capital investments. Fewer women than men receive venture funding, the amounts are smaller, and women are mostly funded in the Series A round (a startup’s first round of VC funding).
- Career migration numbers tell a negative story for women in the venture capital industry. Why did women leave? Their usual answer was “I had enough“, which meant many things: I have enough money. I had enough of being the only woman at the table. I’ve made partner and now want to spend time with my family. Hart noted that while these may be the right answer for an individual woman, it’s not good for the industry.
- They asked 20 women from the venture capital industry whether they do business with women. The answer was, “I don’t seek them out. Decisions are financially based and I don’t want anyone to think I lower my standards for women.” However, the data showed there were more women’s businesses in their portfolios, usually brought in by the men in the firm. So having women in a venture partnership is correlated (if not causal) to doing more business with women.
- VC investment today has a different focus than in the 1980s and 1990s. The health care, clean technology and biotechnology fields are hot. There are more women with degrees in these fields so they come in to VC firms as specialists in these new areas. This has the potential to change the industry.
Joyce Chung has over 10 years of operating experience in technology companies and 10 years of venture capital investing experience. Her company, Garage Technology Ventures, focuses on early seed stage investments. Hart asked Chung about sourcing deals and what role gender plays.
- The majority of deals come over the transom. The more interesting sources are from people you know. So you want to build and tap into a network in which you can be introduced as a qualified lead.
- It is more common (30%) to see women on the founding team rather than in the CEO role (less than 5%).
- All the VCs want is to make money, and they evaluate on specific criteria and don’t consciously factor gender into the process. Chung theorized that VCs learn to do pattern recognition on certain qualities of people or companies that usually do well, gut instincts that are fairly subjective. They don’t have that many female patterns to match to. (It was noted in later discussion that VCs are looking for innovation, so they do need to be willing and able to look beyond their usual patterns.)
Ann Winblad has over 30 years of experience in the software industry as a software entrepreneur, strategist, author and venture capitalist. Hummer Winblad Venture Partners focuses on software investing and has funded 110 software companies. Hart asked her what happens behind VC walls when evaluating entrepreneurs, and what might be different when the entrepreneur is a woman.
- The VC’s job is to help companies pace for a marathon of five, six or seven years. They are looking for large market opportunities and looking to make sure the right people are at the helm and will attract excellence to build their teams. Ideally, there is a founder who is in for the long haul.
- For those who want to launch companies, Winblad asks: Do you have what it takes? Can you stand naked in front of the mirror? Do you want to know what you do and don’t know? Do you need complete control or just want to build value?
- She sees control being an issue for a lot of women. It’s important to realize that once you are funded by venture capitalists, and again when you go public, your pool of stakeholders increases.
Before launching VMware, Diane Greene held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Sybase and Tandem, and was CEO of VXtreme. Her degrees include mechanical engineering, naval architecture and computer science. Under Diane’s leadership, VMware created the and still leads the market for mainstream virtualization. Hart asked her about the entrepreneur’s side of seeking capital.
- Before VMware, Green had been at two other startups where she found it hard to get people/VCs to have confidence in her as a woman CEO. Based on her previous startup experiences, she didn’t think a VC firm would share their vision for VMware. Instead they went out and found their own angel investors.
- Along the way she talked to various early-stage VC firms and got the feeling that the first thing they would have done would be fire her. In fact she went back later and asked some, and they agreed that would have been their plans. There were never any women in the VC groups she had talked to.
The panel was asked their recommendations for those who want to be entrepreneurs:
- Chung advised finding a mentor who is plugged into the right networks and can show you the ropes. Winblad thinks “this mentor thing is a crock”, although she noted that lots of people have given her great advice.
- Find your own voice and be confident and authentic in using it.
- You will be in a pack of men, but don’t aspire to be like the men. Be yourself.
- Don’t be afraid to ask friends and family for help, angel investments, etc. You’ll be surprised how many people will want to help in exchange for the investment opportunity.
- Find the thing you’re passionate about, believe in it, and believe in yourself (but don’t be cocky about it).
- Be a constant and voracious learner.
- Be ready to learn on the job; no one comes in with the complete package of technical, leadership and marketing skills.
- Have the capacity to both fail and succeed. Learn from your mistakes and adapt.
- When you achieve success you will be both over-praised and over-pummeled at any point in your career.
- You must balance your personal and professional lives. A meaningful personal life helps give you the drive to do the job.
- You can’t build a company by yourself; your founding team is extremely important.
- Women’s natural capacity for collaboration will serve them well as CEOs but they won’t have a very friendly environment in which to do it.
This event was presented by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. All sessions were videotaped and will be available through Stanford on iTunes U in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to catching the sessions I missed, including the Gender and the Environment panel with Kavita Philip and Sibongile Msuku Van Damme. There is also an associated book Press, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, now available from Stanford University.