60 | FORBES ASIA APRIL 2018
beams with excitement as she schemes how
to replicate All Raise’s network with peers
in her more junior role. “All of these senior
women have done so much of the heavy lit-
ing for us,” she says.
hrough the networks created at such
events, All Raise is building a support sys-
tem for women like Agarwal that was miss-
ing from venture’s recent past. Former
Google Ventures partner Shanna Teller-
man lasted only two years in
venture’s boys’ club. “I sat in
for the irst [partner] meet-
ing and immediately felt
like something was of,” she
says. Tel ler man let to found
home-design startup Modsy
and won’t consider a return
to VC unless irms change
their gender ratios.
he struggle to retain
women isn’t just a venture
problem. In tech, women
leave their careers twice as
oten as men, with 56% out by the time they
reach a midlevel role, according to a Har-
vard Business Review report.
In inance, that problem is exacerbat-
ed by irms’ struggles to bring new women
in. Historically, venture irms have blamed
the pipeline problem, infamously articulated
by VC billionaire Michael Moritz in 2015:
Firms would love to hire women, he argued,
but lack qualiied female candidates. “What
we’re not prepared to do is lower our stan-
dards,” he said.
he women at All Raise don’t buy it, and
they’re taking action. A work group that in-
cludes Miura-Ko and Stephanie Pal meri of
Uncork Capital, a irm with $ 3 05 million in
assets, has built a conidential database of
executive women outside of the VC indus-
try who are privately interested in becoming
VCs. he work group is also tracking open
positions. It has received requests from ten
irms already and made 25 introductions to
women from the list. “We’re taking away the
question that you don’t know who to hire,”
says Rebecca Kaden, a partner at Union
Square Ventures, the New York irm known
for early bets on Tumblr and Twitter.
Another way to drive change: through
the customer. McDonald’s didn’t update its
menu until patrons voted for healthier op-
tions with their dollars, notes Jenny Lef-
court, a partner at Freestyle Capital, a seed-stage irm with $2 3 0 million in assets. More
recently, public outcry over school shoot-
ings pressured Walmart and Dick’s Sporting
Goods to change their rules on gun sales.
In venture capital the customers are the
entrepreneurs who take the checks, and
All Raise has been quick to seize on their
changing priorities. In January, Lefcourt
and Aileen Lee began recruiting founders
to talk publicly about emphasizing diversitywhen it comes to hiring, boards of directors
and funding. Over the week of March 18,
more than 400 entrepreneurs looded so-
cial media with matching black-and-white
photos declaring their support, including
billionaire Airbnb
CEO Brian Chesky
and Warby Parker
co-CEO Neil Blu-
menthal.
he results were
immediate. At Pat-
reon, the white-
hot artist crowd-
funding site, CEO
Jack Conte asked
its most recent in-
vestor, hrive Capi-
tal, to forgo a board
seat in favor of ap-
pointing an inde-
pendent director
who would add to
the board’s diversity.
hrive agreed, and
the job went to Chi-
cago Public Media
chief Goli Sheik-
holeslami. At pop-
ular meditation app
Headspace, CEO
Rich Pierson says he26 Tony Florence /75
NEW ENTERPRISE ASSOCIATES
Jet.com
27 Steve Anderson /4
BASELINE VENTURES
Stitch Fix
28 Bryan Roberts /58
VENROCK
10X Genomics
29 John Doerr /29
KLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS
Twitter
30 Sameer Gandhi /23
ACCEL
Dropbox
31 Rebecca Lynn /4 4
CANVAS VENTURES
Lending Club
32 Alfred Lin /22
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
Airbnb
33 Anton Levy /26
GENERAL ATLANTIC
Alibaba
34 Scott Shleifer /59
TIGER GLOBAL MANAGEMENT
Despegar
35 Vinod Khosla /RETURN
KHOSLA VENTURES
Square
36 Deven Parekh /99
INSIGHT VENTURE PARTNERS
Yex t
37 Shailendra Singh /NEW
SEQUOIA CAPITAL (INDIA) SINGAPORE
PT Go-Jek Indonesia
38 Marc Andreessen /27
ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ
Samsara
39 Jeremy Liew /32
LIGHTSPEED VENTURE PARTNERS
Snap
40 Mitch Lasky /4 0
BENCHMARK
Snap
41 Jeremy Levine /54
BESSEMER VENTURE PARTNERS
Pinterest
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DiDi Chuxing
43 Lee Fixel /79
TIGER GLOBAL MANAGEMENT
Spotify
44 Jim Tananbaum /52
FORESITE CAPITAL
10X Genomics
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ACCEL
Qualtrics
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LIGHTSPEED VENTURE PARTNERS
AppDynamics
47 Hemant Taneja /70
GENERAL CATALYST
Stripe
48 Jonathan Silverstein /55
ORBIMED
Ascendis Pharma
49 David Cowan /65
BESSEMER VENTURE PARTNERS
Twitch
50 Matt Cohler /57
BENCHMARK
TinderRANK Name /2017 RANK
FIRM
Notable DealALFRED LIN
What Shoppers Want
The former Zappos chief operating
oicer turned investor is on a hot
streak from big consumer hits. He’s
on the board of Airbnb, food-de-
livery app DoorDash and interior-
design website Houzz. All three have
raised massive amounts of capital in
the last year—$1 billion for Airbnb,
$535 million for DoorDash and $400
million for Houzz. —B.C.RAVI MHATRE
The Force Is
With Him
Mhatre soars up the
ranks from his invest-
ment in enterprise
software maker Mule-
Soft, which Salesforce
acquired in March for
$6.5 billion. He was also
a major investor in App-
Dynamics, an enterprise
software firm bought
by Cisco for $3.7 billion
last year. —A. Knapp