The portrait of a founder as a young man is finally coming to an end
A record number of women are remaking Silicon Valley in their own image.
They’re founding startups, joining top venture capital firms, and pushing back against a culture that has, traditionally, excluded them. They’re women like Silicon Valley engineer Tracy Chou who co-founded Project Include to help tech companies recruit more diverse employees; and Arlan Hamilton who rose from sleeping out of the San Francisco airport to raising millions as the founder and CEO of Backstage Capital, a seed-stage investment fund that’s investing in companies with at least one founder who is a woman, aperson of color, or LGBTQ; and Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, whose e-commerce startup went public for $1.4 billion last November.
Despite the progress, it will likely take decades before women reach parity with their male counterparts. The #MeToo movement, and multiple instances of prominent venture capitalists harassing women founders, has forced us to interrogate (yet again) the myth that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.
The portrait of a founder or venture capitalist as a young, white male having graduated (or dropped out) from a handful of elite schools is coming to an end.
www.qz.com
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