Guthrie - Alpha girls: the women upstarts who took on Silicon Valleys male culture and made the deals of a lifetime

SAND HILL ROAD

MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA

Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasnt driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.

A pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Mary Jane had graduated from Purdue University in 1976 with a degree in mathematics. She paid for her car by waitressing during college summers, wearing a small orange romper that prompted oversize tips. Her beat-up Pinto, which leaked radiator fluid and still had its original Firestone 500 tires, had taken her nearly two thousand miles, from Kansas City to northern California, where she had landed a job at an eight-year-old technology company called Intel.

Although Sand Hill Road was the center of the venture capital world, no bronze statue of a charging bull, no Gilded Age architecture, and no artificial canyons towered over by gleaming skyscrapers commemorated it. At that time it was a stretch of rolling land laced with scrub brush, sprawling oak trees, big pink dahlias, and buildings that stretched long and low like an old Lincoln Continental. The midcentury modern structures, with outer skins of cedar, redwood, and masonry, featured numbers but no names. Unlike other centers of commerce, Sand Hill Road is intentionally inconspicuous; it consciously resists contemporary symbols of money and power. Instead, it is country club hush. To Mary Jane, it was a world away from the tall cornfields where she had skittered about as a child, playing hide-and-seek, moving three rows up and four rows over, strategic and mathematical in her decision making even then.

Her aptitude in mathnot to mention a prescient feel for the marketswould make Mary Jane particularly well suited for this new California frontier. And in the 1970s, that was exactly what Silicon Valley felt like, a frontier, steeped in the aggressive and hungry spirit of the Gold Rush, of adventurers and fortune seekers risking everything for a glimmer of gold, aware that only a lucky few walked away winners. The original Gold Rush days of 1849 were dominated by mining companies and merchants hawking overpriced goods. It was ruled by men: Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo. Women, outnumbered and overmatched, were mostly reduced to entertainers, companions, wives, or housekeepers. Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff.

Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firmsthe financial decision makers shaping the futureare men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner. Less than 2 percent of venture dollars go to start-ups founded by women (less than 1 percent to women of color), and roughly 85 percent of the tech employees at top companies are men. Yet technology is pervasive, and it is changing our lives. When Mary Jane first drove up Sand Hill, women made up barely 40 percent of the overall American workforce. Less than a handful of those women were venture capital partners.

But Mary Jane Elmore, the unflappable, fresh-faced girl next door, would go on to become one of the first women in history to make partner at a venture capital firm. Like the bold pink dahlias flourishing in one corner of Sand Hill Road, she and the other pioneering women venture capitalists, the Alpha Girls, would figure out a way to take root and thrive.

They made their way west like early-day prospectors during Silicon Valleys headiest days, as enormous mainframe computers gave way to minicomputers, personal computers, and the Internet, just as punched computer cards had at one time set the stage for computation. Through the start-ups they would discover, fund, and mentorfinancing the ideas of entrepreneursthese women venture capitalists would play a critical role in shaping how people around the world work, play, communicate, study, travel, create, and interact. Venture capitalists influence many of the most important new inventions in drugs, medicine, and technology.

In addition to Mary Jane, there is Sonja Hoel, a blond, blue-eyed, doggedly optimistic southern belle whose investments at the white-glove Menlo Ventures on Sand Hill Road would focus on making the Internet safer and more reliable; Magdalena Yeil, a feisty Armenian outsider reared in Istanbul, who loved getting in where she wasnt invited; and Theresia Gouw, an overachieving daughter of Chinese immigrants, who went from flipping burgers at Burger King to chasing down some of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley history. There are other Alpha Girls, too, such as the first investor and board member of Tesla; the woman who started the first venture fund in India; the first woman to take a tech company public; the first women to build an online beauty site; and today a whole new generation of young women financiers and entrepreneurs. These women share a determination with Alpha Girls everywhere, transcending vocation and location, working in Hollywood, academia, economics, advertising, politics, the media, sports, automobiles, agriculture, law, hospitality, restaurants, and the arts.