At the 2015 NAV.VC annual investor conference, four female portfolio company CEOs discussed their experience and the special challenges they face as women. You can find a comprehensive report on the panel in a post from my partners Thanasis and John to the NAV.VC blog. I will focus on the new and unexpected learnings. [Disclosure: I am a partner in NAV.VC, a venture capital fund. The fund has investments in the four companies mentioned below, and through the fund I have a financial interest in these companies.]
Our panelists were
• Susan Aplin, CEO of Bambeco. Susan has over two decades of experience in home goods, eCommerce, and retail. She ran the catalog and on-line businesses of
• Deborah Nicodemus, CEO of Moda Operandi. Deb is a fashion industry veteran who held several senior positions at LVMH.
• Lisa Maki, CEO of Pokitdok. Lisa is a tech industry veteran who held several senior positions at
• Soraya Darabi, CEO of Zady. Saroya is a younger entrepreneur, but she has experience at the New York Times and is a veteran of two successful start-ups: drop.io and Foodspotting.
Several surprising themes emerged in the discussion, starting with the behavior of venture capital investors towards female CEOs. Susan Aplin remarked that she could not think of a situation where being a female was a disadvantage raising money. [She had just closed a $20 million B round for her company at a nice valuation step up.] She remarked that female VCs were way tougher on her than male VCs. Disagreeing with Soraya Darabi, she thinks it is OK for male VCs to ask their wives for advice about her business: "it's helped me [understand my customer better], and some of the wives have become loyal customers."
Deborah felt that the balance of power in discussions with VCs is pretty even: "When I meet investors, I am interviewing them too, and the power is fairly balanced. I am looking for a partner who shares my passion for the business." Lisa remarked that people in Silicon Valley are not against women, they just don't have enough success examples.
Age and generational differences turn out to be more of a challenge than sexism. Lisa made this point strongly: "no one believes that an older person can define the future. [By old she seemed to mean someone over 40.]" Deborah added that a lot of stereotypes about women are generational: younger people don't react that way. And, Susan cited understanding her millennial customers as one of the things that keeps her up at night: their importance in her customer file is growing rapidly.
A company's industry context makes a big difference to how males and females work together. Both Bambeco and Moda have a large percentage of women in their executive ranks; this reflects the strong prevalence of women executives in their industries: home goods and fashion.
Both Bambeco and Pokitdok reported a high percentage of female engineers on their tech teams: 30% for Bambeco and 37% for Pokitdok. They attributed this mainly to interest in and openness toward finding women technical professionals who meet the highest standards. I think that having a female CEO also helped here: it sends the message that the interest in hiring women is heart-felt and there is no glass ceiling.
Not all the remarks were at odds with what you read in the press. The panel raised quite a few concerns about the challenges facing female CEOs:
• "No one thinks a woman can understand what an API is" (API is the acronym of application programming interface).
• Women don’t get invited to the Thursday night poker games where a lot of deals get done.
• Women are under-represented in tech because so few women go into computer science (CS).
• It takes extra effort to find investors who are both gender and age blind, esp in Silicon Valley ... but once you find the right ones it makes you that much better.
• A panelist described a situation in which she met an investor to discuss raising money, and he appeared to believe they were having a date.
Clearly we have a long way to go to achieve gender balance in tech. But the panel gave me a strong basis for optimism. Gender bias arises partly because we lack experience with female leaders, a solvable problem. Behavior gets much better when the discussion stays focused on the business issues, and our seasoned female CEOs are clearly adept at keeping it that way. Having women at the top helps bring talented women into the company at multiple levels, especially in the tech team, despite the shortage of female CS graduates. And everyone agreed that having a diverse team increases the IQ of a company. Who in tech can turn his or her back on that?
