A Start-Up of Her Own
Meet the new generation of American CEOs: They're young, wired, fearless--and female
In the conference room at Oracle Corp.'s headquarters in Redwood Shores last January, Kim Fisher had no time to savor her status as a pioneer. Only minutes before the 31-year-old CEO of AudioBasket was scheduled to make her pitch at Springboard 2000--a landmark venture-capital fair focused exclusively on women-run firms--Fisher realized she couldn't carry all her props on stage. With her arms already full of magazines and newspapers intended to illustrate the information overload her customized audio-news service would supplant, she had no way to illustrate its range of unique delivery, from cellphone to Palm III. Then she hit upon the notion of clipping those devices to her belt. Fisher was well into her 17-minute pitch when she saw she was winning the attention of the 225 assembled venture capitalists in a way she had not intended. "I started unbuttoning my jacket," she says, "and people thought I was doing a striptease."
Despite that blip, Fisher was among the stars of Springboard 2000. Co-sponsored by the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and the Washington-based National Women's Business Council, the all-day event was designed to smash the single biggest barrier for women entrepreneurs in the new economy: their access to the megabucks of venture capital. To some like Deborah Naybor, who runs a land-surveying company outside Buffalo, the problem was a familiar story. A decade ago, she faced banks wary of granting women small-business loans. One gave her 30 days to pay back $70,000.
Now, banks have come around, but women are getting short shrift from venture capitalists. As a recent study led by Candida Brush of Boston University showed, out of the total venture funds invested last year--an estimated $20 billion--only 4 percent went to women.
"The venture world is probably the ultimate old-boys network," acknowledges Jay Hoag, the managing partner of Technology Crossover Ventures, based in Palo Alto, Calif. "Until a few years ago, you'd go to a venture capital event, and it was all guys." Over the past five years, more firms like his have welcomed female partners, with a predictable result. This spring, Hoag was surprised to learn that eight of the 40 companies his fund had backed were headed by women.
But in a field that boasts 2,375 men, the arrival of an estimated 100 women partners meant that less than 4 percent of the community was female. "There's still a lot of venture firms that are strictly male," says Susan Mason, one of three female partners at Onset Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif. "And they're proud of it."
Five years ago, Sona Wang, a Chicago venture capitalist, co-founded the first woman-focused fund, Inroads Capital Partners in Evanston, Ill., which targeted companies in technology and health care. "We're in a time when the constant challenge is to find more attractive projects," she says. "Yet there was this whole other market not being tapped." Since then, a half dozen other women's venture firms have emerged. But they still represent a tiny fraction of the entire venture-capital industry.
Wang and others knew more-radical measures were needed. One problem was the insider nature of the venture community, which operates on a complex web of personal ties. "A typical venture firm gets 5,000 business plans a year," explains Quihuis. "So they have this triage: never accept a proposal over the transom. You have to come in pre-screened--through an attorney, an accountant, or someone in their circle. Women have not had access to those networks, nor did they understand that's how it worked."
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