Navigating Silicon Valley as a Female Founder

I get numerous asks a week from women who are building a company and want my guidance on how I do it. This is the advice I give.

As always, one person’s experience does not speak for an entire gender - these are generalities and speak to my experience alone. I am also building a rather unconventional company, which likely colored many of my experiences. I hope this is helpful for women who want to build and men who want to support.

You do not fit the pattern - so understand the pattern & play into it

I was not taken seriously when I first moved to the Valley. More than that - I could tell many people thought I was unintelligent. I eventually realized that my issue was that I sounded and acted differently than the Silicon Valley standard. My solution was to listen to 100s of podcasts, mostly from YC and other ubiquitous voices. I was educated on the common history and culture of the Valley, but more importantly I picked up on the subtleties of its communication style. I recommend every newbie to the Valley do this if you are not already familiar with startup culture.

Here are the most common traits: apathetic, very logical, quantitative and concise sentences, fast-speaking, use and identify their models in their speech, a dash of academic prose, direct eye contact, infallible confidence.

Here’s the worst bit: don’t smile too much and don’t be too friendly to people you are pitching or are otherwise assessing you. Unfortunately, these traits are subconsciously read by many as a sign of unintelligence or naivety. This was one of my biggest challenges. I come off as more of a grump now, but I am a grump who has the money she needs to build her company.

To be clear, I am not suggesting you change yourself - I am suggesting you intimately understand what patterns are broadly fit to and play into them as necessary. You can do this without losing your true self along the way. The pattern will shift with time, as these things always do, and more women in power will encourage it to shift to a newer, more friendly base.

The standards for you are higher.

This tweet captures this well:

Do not justify yourself to others. You are good enough; playing into this bias only validates it in their heads.

Equally, do not hesitate to sing your own praises. Sell yourself - no one will do it for you! Women tend to downplay their excellence to their detriment. I recommend having a concise, information-dense set of phrases memorized on why you are excellent for reasons that will pattern to even the most disparaging investor.

Diligence investors with other women.

There are skeletons in many closets. It can be difficult to get this information as female founders especially fear retribution or being labeled ‘a problem’.

Have a thesis around taking money from or working with people with a history of sexual harassment before you go out to raise. Many will be enthusiastic to fund you and very charming. Be wary - it is often a way for them to collect ‘badges’, using you as evidence of their changed nature. You can use this to your advantage but tread with caution around these types. In my experience these guys never truly change, they only get better at masking their inner selves.

It is normal to ref check with a male partner’s female founders. Ask for this. However, the founders may not speak candidly for fear of it getting back to their investor. Instead, ground truth it more often found from looking at the partnership first - is it a boys club? What have they actually done to champion diversity? Does the woman partner actually have any power? This can be a better signal of how you will be treated.

Overt sexism has been replaced with subtler iterations.

Nowadays sexism in the Valley mostly rears its head as existing biases and standards that are built on sexist frameworks, like a badly trained algorithm. Most dangerously - you probably hold these biases too. What do you picture when you think of a successful founder who just led their company to a billion dollar IPO?

While subtle, you need to be even more aware of these biases as it is these that will cause you to lose the deal or not close the round. You need to both be able to correctly predict and pre-empt these biases, and identify them as they emerge in the moment.

This can take so many forms that it is challenging to give all-encompassing advice here, so instead I’ll talk about a scenario I commonly encounter and how I compensate: Some investors have insinuated that I’m the ‘next Elizabeth Holmes’, presumably because I am a woman building a biotech company. I compensate for this potential bias in every pitch I take, assuming they are all thinking it and correcting it subtly and swiftly before the subconscious thought can become conscious. It’s frustrating and unfair, but you cannot control other people’s biases - but you can counter them quickly and efficiently.

You don’t have to run your company like a bro.

Many of the most glorified founders are men who are also infamous for their bad behavior, how they treat their employees, temper, and other unsavory traits. It can sometimes feel like you need to adopt these traits if you want to build a billion dollar company. Tread carefully:

1. Women cannot get away with this behavior. The “Series B Female Founder Takedown” is real, and while the behavior exposed in these articles is objectively bad, many male founders do much worse without having an article written about them.

2. In my experience being warm and tolerant is actually a competitive advantage for recruiting and running a team. This is an old model that a lot of people fit to but likely is not necessary for success.

Have women behind you.

It is invaluable to surround yourself with women who will back you and can pull from their years of experience building in a male dominated industry, both strategically and emotionally. It’s one of the best things I’ve done.