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Alpha Girls

The Women Upstarts Who Took On Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime

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Hardcover
$28.00 US
6.35"W x 9.53"H x 1.08"D   | 19 oz | 12 per carton
On sale Apr 30, 2019 | 304 Pages | 9780525573920
An unforgettable story of four women who, through grit and ingenuity, became stars in the cutthroat, high-stakes, male dominated world of venture capital in Silicon Valley, and helped build some of the foremost companies of our time.

In Alpha Girls, award-winning journalist Julian Guthrie takes readers behind the closed doors of venture capital, an industry that transforms economies and shapes how we live. We follow the lives and careers of four women who were largely written out of history - until now.

Magdalena Yesil, who arrived in America from Turkey with $43 to her name, would go on to receive her electrical engineering degree from Stanford, found some of the first companies to commercialize internet access, and help Marc Benioff build Salesforce. Mary Jane Elmore went from the corn fields of Indiana to Stanford and on to the storied venture capital firm IVP - where she was one of the first women in the U.S. to make partner - only to be pulled back from the glass ceiling by expectations at home. Theresia Gouw, an overachieving first-generation Asian American from a working-class town, dominated the foosball tables at Brown (she would later reluctantly let Sergey Brin win to help Accel Partners court Google), before she helped land and build companies including Facebook, Trulia, Imperva, and ForeScout. Sonja Hoel, a Southerner who became the first woman investing partner at white-glove Menlo Ventures, invested in McAfee, Hotmail, Acme Packet, and F5 Networks. As her star was still rising at Menlo, a personal crisis would turn her into an activist overnight, inspiring her to found an all-women's investment group and a national nonprofit for girls.

These women, juggling work and family, shaped the tech landscape we know today while overcoming unequal pay, actual punches, betrayals, and the sexist attitudes prevalent in Silicon Valley and in male-dominated industries everywhere. Despite the setbacks, they would rise again to rewrite the rules for an industry they love. In Alpha Girls, Guthrie reveals their untold stories.
A revelatory, riveting journey into a part of Silicon Valley's history that has been overshadowed for far too long. Through vivid prose and artful story-telling, Julian Guthrie brings to life the nuanced tales of the struggles and successes of women in the technology industry."
–Ashlee Vance, bestselling author of Elon Musk
 
“Julian Guthrie is a mesmerizing storyteller, weaving the life stories of four dynamic women into a page-turning yarn. We don’t just read of but feel the outrageous and often clueless male slights and insults, the double standards and blatant sexism endured by women in the blustery, male-dominated world of Silicon Valley. Yet Alpha Girls leaves you awed by their resilience and their professional feats. A stirring tale of triumph.”
–Ken Auletta, acclaimed author and New Yorker staff writer
 
“An extremely important addition to the literary canon of Silicon Valley, told through the honest and specific stories of a handful of individual women. Beautifully done.”
–Po Bronson, #1 New York Times best-selling author of What Should I Do with My Life?
 
“The women of Alpha Girls had to grow some thick skin to survive and succeed. And succeed they did. Alpha Girls will reshape how you look at women in finance. A must read for women and girls interested in changing the world.”
–Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest 
 
“The story of four women who entered the tech industry to follow their dreams and managed through hard work and creativity to make those dreams come true. I’m glad Julian has written this book; we need to tell the success stories of women in tech."
–Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and investor at Greylock Partners
 
 “If you read one book about women in business, Alpha Girls should be the one. Julian Guthrie has written another dazzler." 
–Peter Diamandis, New York Times Bestselling Author, Founder and Executive Chairman of XPRIZE
 

"An intimate and addictive homage to the fearless female pioneers who made Silicon Valley blossom. Julian’s vivid portrayals of once-hidden risk takers and mavericks will leave you heartbroken, hopeful, and hungering for more.”
–Brian Keating, Professor of Physics UC San Diego, and Author of Losing the Nobel Prize 
 
“Finally, it’s here: a book about Silicon Valley as seen through the accomplishments of the powerful women who, against all odds, made their mark there. Alpha Girls offers an inside look at the true meaning of grit and drive and upends the myth that it is only men who create and build tech companies. For any young woman in search of a role model, or any young man too, Alpha Girls is a must read."
–Caroline Paul, Author of The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure.
 
Alpha Girls is about four women in a high-stakes, high-drama world. Each of these women’s stories is gripping, treacherous, heroic and entertaining. They are being pulled out from behind the gender curtain and given their rightful place in contemporary history."  
Cathy Schulman, President of Welle Entertainment, Academy Award winning producer, women’s activist
 
“Julian Guthrie is the best author writing about Silicon Valley today, and Alpha Girls is the book that the world needs right now. It's the real story behind the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. If you are a woman who works, or simply work with women, Alpha Girls is essential reading."
Adam Fisher, Author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley
 
“Once I started reading Alpha Girls, I couldn’t put it down. The story of these VC women trailblazers must be told, and Julian tells it brilliantly. The book stimulates reflections on how we must accelerate changes in ourselves, at home, and in the workplace.”
–Judy Vredenburgh, President & CEO, Girls Inc.
© Chris Hardy
Julian Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who spent 20 years at the San Francisco Chronicle and has been published by The Wall Street JournalThe Huffington Post, and others. She is the author of The Billionaire and the Mechanic, a bestselling account of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s pursuit of the America’s Cup. View titles by Julian Guthrie
PROLOGUE


SAND HILL ROAD
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA


Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.

A pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Mary Jane had graduated from Purdue University in 1976 with a degree in mathematics. She paid for her car by waitressing during college summers, wearing a small orange romper that prompted oversize tips. Her beat-up Pinto, which leaked radiator fluid and still had its original Firestone 500 tires, had taken her nearly two thousand miles, from Kansas City to northern California, where she had landed a job at an eight-year-old technology company called Intel.

Although Sand Hill Road was the center of the venture capital world, no bronze statue of a charging bull, no Gilded Age architecture, and no artificial canyons towered over by gleaming skyscrapers commemorated it. At that time it was a stretch of rolling land laced with scrub brush, sprawling oak trees, big pink dahlias, and buildings that stretched long and low like an old Lincoln Continental. The midcentury modern structures, with outer skins of cedar, redwood, and masonry, featured numbers but no names. Unlike other centers of commerce, Sand Hill Road is intentionally inconspicuous; it consciously resists contemporary symbols of money and power. Instead, it is country club hush. To Mary Jane, it was a world away from the tall cornfields where she had skittered about as a child, playing hide-and-seek, moving three rows up and four rows over, strategic and mathematical in her decision making even then.

Her aptitude in math—not to mention a prescient feel for the markets—would make Mary Jane particularly well suited for this new California frontier. And in the 1970s, that was exactly what Silicon Valley felt like, a frontier, steeped in the aggressive and hungry spirit of the Gold Rush, of adventurers and fortune seekers risking everything for a glimmer of gold, aware that only a lucky few walked away winners. The original Gold Rush days of 1849 were dominated by mining companies and merchants hawking overpriced goods. It was ruled by men: Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo. Women, outnumbered and overmatched, were mostly reduced to entertainers, companions, wives, or housekeepers. Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff.

Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner. Less than 2 percent of venture dollars go to start-ups founded by women (less than 1 percent to women of color), and roughly 85 percent of the tech employees at top companies are men. Yet technology is pervasive, and it is changing our lives. When Mary Jane first drove up Sand Hill, women made up barely 40 percent of the overall American workforce. Less than a handful of those women were venture capital partners.

But Mary Jane Elmore, the unflappable, fresh-faced girl next door, would go on to become one of the first women in history to make partner at a venture capital firm. Like the bold pink dahlias flourishing in one corner of Sand Hill Road, she and the other pioneering women venture capitalists, the “Alpha Girls,” would figure out a way to take root and thrive.

They made their way west like early-day prospectors during Silicon Valley’s headiest days, as enormous mainframe computers gave way to minicomputers, personal computers, and the Internet, just as punched computer cards had at one time set the stage for computation. Through the start-ups they would discover, fund, and mentor—financing the ideas of entrepreneurs—these women venture capitalists would play a critical role in shaping how people around the world work, play, communicate, study, travel, create, and interact. Venture capitalists influence many of the most important new inventions in drugs, medicine, and technology.

In addition to Mary Jane, there is Sonja Hoel, a blond, blue-eyed, doggedly optimistic southern belle whose investments at the white-glove Menlo Ventures on Sand Hill Road would focus on making the Internet safer and more reliable; Magdalena Yes¸il, a feisty Armenian outsider reared in Istanbul, who loved getting in where she wasn’t invited; and Theresia Gouw, an overachieving daughter of Chinese immigrants, who went from flipping burgers at Burger King to chasing down some of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley history. There are other Alpha Girls, too, such as the first investor and board member of Tesla; the woman who started the first venture fund in India; the first woman to take a tech company public; the first women to build an online beauty site; and today a whole new generation of young women financiers and entrepreneurs. These women share a determination with Alpha Girls everywhere, transcending vocation and location, working in Hollywood, academia, economics, advertising, politics, the media, sports, automobiles, agriculture, law, hospitality, restaurants, and the arts.

History is rich with women rebels who have shined a spotlight from the outside—women such as Rosa Parks, whose one defiant act became synonymous with the civil rights movement. But it is also rife with what one academic calls “tempered radicals,” those who learn to play the game to perfection—whatever the game is—before trying to change the rules. Margaret Thatcher took elocution lessons to deepen her voice, to better be heard. Georgia O’Keeffe painted “low-toned dismal-colored” paintings like male artists, to show she could, before turning to the bright desert flowers that made her a giant of American modernism.

As Mary Jane drove up Sand Hill Road on that perfect fall day, she had little sense of the hard realities ahead. She could never have imagined juggling a high-stakes job, three children, a husband aggressively pursuing his own Silicon Valley dreams, and a junior partner with outsize ambitions. But she knew intuitively that this was the right place for her: Silicon Valley was the embodiment of breathtakingly bold ideas and inventions, a region awash in unparalleled ingenuity, originality, tenacity, optimism, and opportunity. It had given rise to more new companies and industries than anywhere else in the world, including such technology giants as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb.

But Mary Jane and the other Alpha Girls would need steel in their spines to stay the course, and they would pay a steep emotional price along the way. They would be betrayed when they least expected it. Silicon Valley, teeming with youthful testosterone, is a deceptively rough arena, where bullying, bias, dysfunction, and subjugation are part of the rules of engagement. In the end, the Alpha Girls—these resilient daughters of merchants, teachers, dentists, and immigrants—would come to realize there was only one way to shake up the industry they loved: by breaking and remaking its rules.

About

An unforgettable story of four women who, through grit and ingenuity, became stars in the cutthroat, high-stakes, male dominated world of venture capital in Silicon Valley, and helped build some of the foremost companies of our time.

In Alpha Girls, award-winning journalist Julian Guthrie takes readers behind the closed doors of venture capital, an industry that transforms economies and shapes how we live. We follow the lives and careers of four women who were largely written out of history - until now.

Magdalena Yesil, who arrived in America from Turkey with $43 to her name, would go on to receive her electrical engineering degree from Stanford, found some of the first companies to commercialize internet access, and help Marc Benioff build Salesforce. Mary Jane Elmore went from the corn fields of Indiana to Stanford and on to the storied venture capital firm IVP - where she was one of the first women in the U.S. to make partner - only to be pulled back from the glass ceiling by expectations at home. Theresia Gouw, an overachieving first-generation Asian American from a working-class town, dominated the foosball tables at Brown (she would later reluctantly let Sergey Brin win to help Accel Partners court Google), before she helped land and build companies including Facebook, Trulia, Imperva, and ForeScout. Sonja Hoel, a Southerner who became the first woman investing partner at white-glove Menlo Ventures, invested in McAfee, Hotmail, Acme Packet, and F5 Networks. As her star was still rising at Menlo, a personal crisis would turn her into an activist overnight, inspiring her to found an all-women's investment group and a national nonprofit for girls.

These women, juggling work and family, shaped the tech landscape we know today while overcoming unequal pay, actual punches, betrayals, and the sexist attitudes prevalent in Silicon Valley and in male-dominated industries everywhere. Despite the setbacks, they would rise again to rewrite the rules for an industry they love. In Alpha Girls, Guthrie reveals their untold stories.

Praise

A revelatory, riveting journey into a part of Silicon Valley's history that has been overshadowed for far too long. Through vivid prose and artful story-telling, Julian Guthrie brings to life the nuanced tales of the struggles and successes of women in the technology industry."
–Ashlee Vance, bestselling author of Elon Musk
 
“Julian Guthrie is a mesmerizing storyteller, weaving the life stories of four dynamic women into a page-turning yarn. We don’t just read of but feel the outrageous and often clueless male slights and insults, the double standards and blatant sexism endured by women in the blustery, male-dominated world of Silicon Valley. Yet Alpha Girls leaves you awed by their resilience and their professional feats. A stirring tale of triumph.”
–Ken Auletta, acclaimed author and New Yorker staff writer
 
“An extremely important addition to the literary canon of Silicon Valley, told through the honest and specific stories of a handful of individual women. Beautifully done.”
–Po Bronson, #1 New York Times best-selling author of What Should I Do with My Life?
 
“The women of Alpha Girls had to grow some thick skin to survive and succeed. And succeed they did. Alpha Girls will reshape how you look at women in finance. A must read for women and girls interested in changing the world.”
–Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest 
 
“The story of four women who entered the tech industry to follow their dreams and managed through hard work and creativity to make those dreams come true. I’m glad Julian has written this book; we need to tell the success stories of women in tech."
–Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and investor at Greylock Partners
 
 “If you read one book about women in business, Alpha Girls should be the one. Julian Guthrie has written another dazzler." 
–Peter Diamandis, New York Times Bestselling Author, Founder and Executive Chairman of XPRIZE
 

"An intimate and addictive homage to the fearless female pioneers who made Silicon Valley blossom. Julian’s vivid portrayals of once-hidden risk takers and mavericks will leave you heartbroken, hopeful, and hungering for more.”
–Brian Keating, Professor of Physics UC San Diego, and Author of Losing the Nobel Prize 
 
“Finally, it’s here: a book about Silicon Valley as seen through the accomplishments of the powerful women who, against all odds, made their mark there. Alpha Girls offers an inside look at the true meaning of grit and drive and upends the myth that it is only men who create and build tech companies. For any young woman in search of a role model, or any young man too, Alpha Girls is a must read."
–Caroline Paul, Author of The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure.
 
Alpha Girls is about four women in a high-stakes, high-drama world. Each of these women’s stories is gripping, treacherous, heroic and entertaining. They are being pulled out from behind the gender curtain and given their rightful place in contemporary history."  
Cathy Schulman, President of Welle Entertainment, Academy Award winning producer, women’s activist
 
“Julian Guthrie is the best author writing about Silicon Valley today, and Alpha Girls is the book that the world needs right now. It's the real story behind the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet. If you are a woman who works, or simply work with women, Alpha Girls is essential reading."
Adam Fisher, Author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley
 
“Once I started reading Alpha Girls, I couldn’t put it down. The story of these VC women trailblazers must be told, and Julian tells it brilliantly. The book stimulates reflections on how we must accelerate changes in ourselves, at home, and in the workplace.”
–Judy Vredenburgh, President & CEO, Girls Inc.

Author

© Chris Hardy
Julian Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who spent 20 years at the San Francisco Chronicle and has been published by The Wall Street JournalThe Huffington Post, and others. She is the author of The Billionaire and the Mechanic, a bestselling account of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s pursuit of the America’s Cup. View titles by Julian Guthrie

Excerpt

PROLOGUE


SAND HILL ROAD
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA


Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.

A pretty young woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Mary Jane had graduated from Purdue University in 1976 with a degree in mathematics. She paid for her car by waitressing during college summers, wearing a small orange romper that prompted oversize tips. Her beat-up Pinto, which leaked radiator fluid and still had its original Firestone 500 tires, had taken her nearly two thousand miles, from Kansas City to northern California, where she had landed a job at an eight-year-old technology company called Intel.

Although Sand Hill Road was the center of the venture capital world, no bronze statue of a charging bull, no Gilded Age architecture, and no artificial canyons towered over by gleaming skyscrapers commemorated it. At that time it was a stretch of rolling land laced with scrub brush, sprawling oak trees, big pink dahlias, and buildings that stretched long and low like an old Lincoln Continental. The midcentury modern structures, with outer skins of cedar, redwood, and masonry, featured numbers but no names. Unlike other centers of commerce, Sand Hill Road is intentionally inconspicuous; it consciously resists contemporary symbols of money and power. Instead, it is country club hush. To Mary Jane, it was a world away from the tall cornfields where she had skittered about as a child, playing hide-and-seek, moving three rows up and four rows over, strategic and mathematical in her decision making even then.

Her aptitude in math—not to mention a prescient feel for the markets—would make Mary Jane particularly well suited for this new California frontier. And in the 1970s, that was exactly what Silicon Valley felt like, a frontier, steeped in the aggressive and hungry spirit of the Gold Rush, of adventurers and fortune seekers risking everything for a glimmer of gold, aware that only a lucky few walked away winners. The original Gold Rush days of 1849 were dominated by mining companies and merchants hawking overpriced goods. It was ruled by men: Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo. Women, outnumbered and overmatched, were mostly reduced to entertainers, companions, wives, or housekeepers. Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff.

Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner. Less than 2 percent of venture dollars go to start-ups founded by women (less than 1 percent to women of color), and roughly 85 percent of the tech employees at top companies are men. Yet technology is pervasive, and it is changing our lives. When Mary Jane first drove up Sand Hill, women made up barely 40 percent of the overall American workforce. Less than a handful of those women were venture capital partners.

But Mary Jane Elmore, the unflappable, fresh-faced girl next door, would go on to become one of the first women in history to make partner at a venture capital firm. Like the bold pink dahlias flourishing in one corner of Sand Hill Road, she and the other pioneering women venture capitalists, the “Alpha Girls,” would figure out a way to take root and thrive.

They made their way west like early-day prospectors during Silicon Valley’s headiest days, as enormous mainframe computers gave way to minicomputers, personal computers, and the Internet, just as punched computer cards had at one time set the stage for computation. Through the start-ups they would discover, fund, and mentor—financing the ideas of entrepreneurs—these women venture capitalists would play a critical role in shaping how people around the world work, play, communicate, study, travel, create, and interact. Venture capitalists influence many of the most important new inventions in drugs, medicine, and technology.

In addition to Mary Jane, there is Sonja Hoel, a blond, blue-eyed, doggedly optimistic southern belle whose investments at the white-glove Menlo Ventures on Sand Hill Road would focus on making the Internet safer and more reliable; Magdalena Yes¸il, a feisty Armenian outsider reared in Istanbul, who loved getting in where she wasn’t invited; and Theresia Gouw, an overachieving daughter of Chinese immigrants, who went from flipping burgers at Burger King to chasing down some of the hottest deals in Silicon Valley history. There are other Alpha Girls, too, such as the first investor and board member of Tesla; the woman who started the first venture fund in India; the first woman to take a tech company public; the first women to build an online beauty site; and today a whole new generation of young women financiers and entrepreneurs. These women share a determination with Alpha Girls everywhere, transcending vocation and location, working in Hollywood, academia, economics, advertising, politics, the media, sports, automobiles, agriculture, law, hospitality, restaurants, and the arts.

History is rich with women rebels who have shined a spotlight from the outside—women such as Rosa Parks, whose one defiant act became synonymous with the civil rights movement. But it is also rife with what one academic calls “tempered radicals,” those who learn to play the game to perfection—whatever the game is—before trying to change the rules. Margaret Thatcher took elocution lessons to deepen her voice, to better be heard. Georgia O’Keeffe painted “low-toned dismal-colored” paintings like male artists, to show she could, before turning to the bright desert flowers that made her a giant of American modernism.

As Mary Jane drove up Sand Hill Road on that perfect fall day, she had little sense of the hard realities ahead. She could never have imagined juggling a high-stakes job, three children, a husband aggressively pursuing his own Silicon Valley dreams, and a junior partner with outsize ambitions. But she knew intuitively that this was the right place for her: Silicon Valley was the embodiment of breathtakingly bold ideas and inventions, a region awash in unparalleled ingenuity, originality, tenacity, optimism, and opportunity. It had given rise to more new companies and industries than anywhere else in the world, including such technology giants as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb.

But Mary Jane and the other Alpha Girls would need steel in their spines to stay the course, and they would pay a steep emotional price along the way. They would be betrayed when they least expected it. Silicon Valley, teeming with youthful testosterone, is a deceptively rough arena, where bullying, bias, dysfunction, and subjugation are part of the rules of engagement. In the end, the Alpha Girls—these resilient daughters of merchants, teachers, dentists, and immigrants—would come to realize there was only one way to shake up the industry they loved: by breaking and remaking its rules.