Women turning VCs
Sequoia Capital recently hired its first investment partner in US, a bright woman called Jess Lee for whom I have heard several times in my own community circles in Chicago.
This was applauded and long expected move in an “institution” which is said
to be dominated by white man for almost as long as we can talk about Silicon Valley.
What is notable to me at least around the whole event is the commentary of Michael Moritz around why he has hired Jess which goes something like this:
But if there are fabulously bright, driven women who are really interested in technology, very hungry to succeed, and can meet our performance standards, we’d hire them all day and night.
There were such women and there always will be, but someone will have to decide to look out for them intentionally.
Where was that intent so far? Why was it missing?
Maybe because of Sequoia Capital’s inherent definition and choice of hiring people with who master extraordinary levels of tech knowledge.
In that case however Sequoia higher management should ask itself — what exactly are they funding — technology or innovation?
The two are definitely not the same because innovation has nothing to do with new emerging technology. Innovation can happen within existing technologies while finding new ways to use them in order to unlock new value.
As Audra Wolf eloquently puts it:
The problem … is we think technology can only be new. By confusing the history of innovation with the history of technology, we not only miss this labor, but also we misunderstand the work of scientists and engineers.
If innovation is not inherently connected with new technology or with technology itself, we can safely assume and see from tons of real world examples that innovation has never been gender specific task but rather domain specific at the most.
For example, more than 90% of all design driven startups I am aware about here in India are founded by women. And we know the importance design is getting in creating successful companies.
Perhaps women should stop fighting for a green card to the extraordinary elite of Sequoia and the likes.
Perhaps they should stop waiting for approval of their capabilities and merely focus on creating success stories that will do the talking on their behalf.
