Women, Venture Capital & Startups: The Great Debate

Have you been following the intense discussion this week regarding VC funding for female-led startups?  If for some reason you haven’t caught wind, a recent guest post on TechCrunch by Penelope Trunk set the great debate ablaze.  In her post, she suggests that we, as a venture capital community, are obsessed with the idea that there is an apparent lack of female entrepreneurs.  Ultimately, Trunk argues that there isn’t a problem and we should stop insisting that there is one.

These articles spurred many questions in my mind, but the one that echoed most loudly was a question I had been asked during a recent phone interview.

“How many women hold executive level positions in your portfolio?”

Granted, his question wasn’t necessarily about how many women entrepreneurs we’ve recently invested in, but I feel that he asked an equally important and probing question.  This week, I took some time to dive in to OpenView’s portfolio.  In my research, I discovered that we have more than a dozen female executives across OpenView’s portfolio, including two co-founders, four VPs of Product or Engineering, three heads of marketing and one VP of Services.  In addition, a handful can count females as their human resources lead.  I think this is notable, particularly given the fact that across all industries, startups or not, there is a clear lack of females in the C-suite.

Why is this important?

In many cases, organizations that have female execs are often linked to having a more gender balanced workforce.  Balance is important, particularly for high-growth and expanding organizations. Ultimately, balance can be found through diversity in gender, culture or experience level.  But since this post is about gender in the C-suite, there is a TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook that I think is particularly inspiring and interesting on this topic.  Sheryl explains why, in her opinion, we do have too few women leaders. She also offers her advice on how women can ultimately achieve success and “get a seat at the table.”

This is a topic that is clearly here to stay and will continue to elicit a raised brow or two each time it is discussed.  Since Trunk’s post was published on Monday, the blogosphere has erupted with discussion about gender inequality in regards to VC funding and startups.  Some posts agree, while the large majority of articles I have read seem to utterly disagree.  The most insightful article that I read was posted on Inc. on why companies, regardless of gender status, struggle to get VC funding.  Should we be concerned by the number of women in the C-suite of these startups?  As an industry, are gender ratios an issue we should be debating?

IMHO, yes!  Great debates are awesome.  They challenge us to see both sides of the coin and open our minds.  Often times, issues like this are not always staring us in the face while we go about our day to day.  It takes a controversial discussion to heat things up and bring awareness to the issue, forcing us to ask ourselves, what really is important? How many great ideas, perhaps even successful startups, have been created out of these disputes?  Let’s keep on debating!