Alpha Girls by Julian Guthrie

Author:Julian Guthrie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

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Theresia and MJ had been invited to the weekend but couldn’t attend. Theresia was about to have a baby, and MJ was overcommitted at work and home.

Kate Mitchell, in subsequent years, loved telling the story of the first time she had attended one of Silvia’s off-sites. She boarded the plane in San Jose, and even before it took off, Maha Ibrahim, who was sitting toward the front, pulled an electric breast pump out of her bag and waved it at her friend and fellow VC Amanda Reed, who was a dozen rows back. Reed then pulled out her breast pump and held it high. The women burst into laughter.

Over the years, Kate had met many remarkable women at the annual weekend getaway, including Jennifer Fonstad, Karen Boezi, Patricia Nakache, Carla Newell, Catharine Merigold, Cindy Padnos, and many more. They told each other stories of female entrepreneurs like Katie Rodan, a Stanford-trained dermatologist who self-funded two start-ups after being turned down by male VCs. Both of her start-ups—Proactiv, which revolutionized acne treatment, and the skin care line Rodan + Fields—grew into hugely successful companies. Katie’s dad had told her early on, “Katie, be your own boss. Make your own money so you don’t have to rely on anyone to take care of you.”

As the night wore on that weekend, the women’s stories became more personal. They talked about their favorite songs, and the craziest places they’d ever “done it.” Silvia suggested they share their most embarrassing moments.

For Silvia, it was her wedding day. She was having the time of her life, drinking and dancing and wearing a vintage wedding dress that looked beautiful but fit imperfectly. In the midst of her reverie, there on the dance floor, she looked down and realized her strapless dress had fallen, and her breasts were fully exposed.

“What did I do?” Silvia asked the other women. “I pulled up my dress and kept dancing!”

The women also shared stories of some of the boorish behavior of the men they worked with. Heidi Roizen told about making a pitch to VCs for her early software company T/Maker, founded by her brother. As she made the pitch in the glass conference room, she noticed men in an adjacent room making sexually explicit gestures at her. Heidi finished her presentation and took her pitch elsewhere.

But there was often a point to the stories the women told each other. “I was in my twenties and working in the pretty much all-male corporate banking group at First Interstate in San Francisco,” Silvia began. “I somehow got promoted at age twenty-four to a vice president position that I was not qualified for. I was calling on CFOs of Fortune 500 companies, including Bechtel and Transamerica Corp., and putting together lines of credit. One day we learned that the president of our bank was coming in—this was in the eighties—and I was to go out on client calls with him that day. I look down and see I’ve got a huge run in my pantyhose.

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