It's taken a series of scandals to get venture capital firms to (finally) hire female partners.
The venture capital industry, which last year doled out $84 billion to startups, manages a neat trick. While relatively new--and devoted to seeking out what's next for business and the world--it's as old-fashioned as it gets, comprising overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white partnerships who overwhelmingly do business with those who remind them of their younger selves.
As of last year, at the top 100 venture firms, only 8 percent of investing partners were women. Two percent of venture capitalists were Hispanic. Not even 1 percent were black. And almost a quarter of VCs with MBAs got those degrees from Harvard.
But some of that is finally changing.
In September 2017, General Catalyst hired its first female managing partner. Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, and FirstMark Capital soon followed. This year, BoxGroup, Redpoint Ventures, and Bain Capital did the same. In June, Andreessen Horowitz hired Katie Haun as a general partner to run a new $300 million cryptocurrency fund; in July, it promoted Connie Chan, an expert on the intersection of Chinese and North American tech, to general partner.
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