APRIL 2018 FORBES ASIA | 61won’t raise money from an all-
white-male irm ever again.
Headspace’s pledge is a
warning shot. But All Raise’s
partners—capitalists to the
core—know that it’s more ef-
fective to motivate with greed
than with fear. Without a di-
verse partnership, they argue,
investors run the risk of miss-
ing out on the next Katrina
Lake, the founder and CEO of
e-commerce company Stitch
Fix. Lake has been lauded for reaching near-
ly $1 billion in revenue and taking her com-
pany public despite raising only $42 million
in venture cash, but she says that wasn’t all
by design. She would’ve have happily raised
more money. Problem was, no one was of-
fering it. Lake says, “Let’s be honest, this was
the situation we were forced into, and we
made the best of it.”
Women-led businesses are one of the
fastest-growing segments
of entrepreneurship. Be-
tween 2007 and 2016
the number of wom-
an-owned businesses in-
creased 45%, according
to an American Express
report. But women still
have only a small piece of
the VC pie. Female-co-
founded startups repre-
sented only 15% of capital
raised last year, Pitch-
Book says. In a 2014 Har-
vard study, men and women pitched the
exact same ideas for funding; men were far
likelier to get investment ofers.
One of All Raise’s solutions is to meet
founders earlier and get them support fast-
er. Its most public efort so far has been
the popular series Female Founder Oce
Hours, which matches women entrepre-
neurs and investors in one-on-one meet-
ings to share startup fears and fundraising
tips. Since November, it has hosted events
in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San
Francisco (twice). At the irst two events
more than 800 women signed up for 80
slots. Ursula Mead, founder of North Caro-
lina-based InHerSight, a job-ratings site for
women, turned around and made immedi-
ate changes to her pitch deck ater attend-
ing the February Oce Hours. “It gives you
a lot of conidence that what you’re choosing
to include is the right stuf,” she says.WHEN ALL RAISE’S members irst answered
Aileen Lee’s call to action, Harvey Weinstein
still reigned in Hollywood and Matt Lauer
ruled the airwaves at NBC. So as industries
like entertainment and media come to terms
with their own patterns of harassment and
sexism, All Raise has a head start.In March, members pitched limited
partners—the institutions and endowments
that invest in VC irms—on creating their
own diversity plans. hey’re creating Fe-
male Founder Oce Hours video sessions
so founders anywhere can get access to the
same support. And in the fall, they hope to
host a big conference for women across all
venture roles.
For now they’re working ater-hours as
volunteers, but All Raise will have to evolve
in order to last. Burnout is a real concern
when people are working what can feel like
a second job, something Spark Capital’s
Megan Quinn calls a “gender tax.” Enter Sil-
icon Valley Bank and Melinda Gates. With
the $2 million already pledged from inves-
tors and more in the works, All Raise plans
to hire an executive director and full-time51 Andrew Braccia /64
ACCEL
Slack
52 Yuri Milner /15
DST GLOBAL
Airbnb
53 Aydin Senkut /51
FELICIS VENTURES
Adyen
54 Je Horing /83
INSIGHT VENTURE PARTNERS
Darktrace
55 Ann Miura-Ko /77
FLOODGATE
Lyft
56 Gaurav Garg /4 8
WING VENTURE CAPITAL
FireEye
57 Jim Breyer /10
BREYER CAPITAL
Etsy
58 David Weiden /95
KHOSLA VENTURES
Instacart
59 James Mi /NEW
LIGHTSPEED VENTURE PARTNERS
Rong360
60 Frank Rotman /NEW
QED INVESTORS
Credit Karma
61 Erhai Liu /RETURN
JOY CAPITAL
Mobike
62 Beth Seidenberg /RETURN
KLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS
Flexus Biosciences
63 Fred Wilson /4 2
UNION SQUARE VENTURES
Coinbase
64 Hurst Lin /50
DCM
58.com
65 Jerey Lieberman /
RETURN
INSIGHT VENTURE PARTNERS
DeliveryHero
66 Klaus Hommels /RETURN
LAKESTAR
Spotify
67 Peter Thiel /12
FOUNDERS FUND
Palantir
68 Ben Horowitz /47
ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ
Okta
69 Joel E. Cutler /4 9
GENERAL CATALYST
Lemonade
70 Bryan Schreier /97
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
Dropbox
71 Todd Chaee /61
INSTITUTIONAL VENTURE PARTNERS
Twitter
72 Kevin Comolli /36
ACCEL
SimpliVity
73 Yi Cao /NEW
SOURCE CODE CAPITAL
Bytedance
74 Jenny Lee /69
GGV CAPITAL
YY
75 Michael Eisenberg /RETURN
ALEPH
WeWorkRANK Name /2017 RANK
FIRM
INNOVATION FACTORIES Notable DealJEFF HORING
Data Diver
Horing, a Goldman Sachs and MIT
alum, focuses on data, analytics and
enterprise software businesses. He’s
put money into Wix, a platform for
building websites, and Shutter-
stock—both are now public—and
in July led a $75 million Series D
round for Darktrace, the cyberse-
curity firm created by Cambridge
University mathematicians. —I.B.BETH SEIDENBERG
Rx for Success
Since joining Kleiner Perkins 13 years
ago, Seidenberg, a physician and former
chief medical oicer at Amgen, has be-
come the firm’s in-house biotech expert.
Some of her big finds: Flexus Bio sci ences
(eventually acquired by Bristol-Myers
Squibb in 2015 for $1.25 billion) and rare-
disease specialist True North Therapeu-
tics (sold to Bioverativ for roughly $400
million last year before Sanofi acquired
its new parent company). —I.B.