Alpha Girls by Julian Guthrie

ALPHA GIRLS by Julian Guthrie profiles four women who succeeded in the male dominated culture of Silicon Valley, specifically in venture capital, “an industry that is not well known but has enormous influence.”  Guthrie shares events - both professional and personal - at various times in these women’s lives.  She begins in the 1980s when they were studying engineering or business at elite universities like the University of Virginia, Stanford, Purdue, Harvard, and Brown. The women’s backgrounds are different: Theresia Gouw’s family is from Jakarta, Indonesia, Magdalena Yeşil grew up in Turkey and is fluent in four languages, Sonja Hoel Perkins had worked briefly at the London Stock Exchange and later joins Menlo Ventures, and MJ Elmore is from the Midwest but stays in Menlo Park, California after getting a job at institutional Venture Partners (IVP) also on Sand Hill Road. The next section of the book deals with the mid to late 1990s and the opportunities that technology and the Internet offered. Guthrie injects a great deal of “name-dropping” and life style description (e.g., annual Hawaiian getaway for women of venture capital).  She also stresses how over time, and for various reasons, each woman struggles with belonging. The text continues through 2018 and Guthrie makes additional observations in her author’s note, saying, “research shows that companies with more diversity, particularly with more women in leadership, offer higher returns on capital and greater innovation.” 

Guthrie defines an Alpha Girl as “a woman of any age who refuses to give up on her dreams.” As a reader, it is interesting to observe the inter-generational differences and the author’s “surprise” at how hard it was for these women to share. Guthrie and the even younger women who are just starting out today do face discrimination, but thanks to the many conversations and changes that have occurred, their more recent experiences are certainly different - and hopefully less lonely - from those faced by the “pioneers” profiled in ALPHA GIRLS. It is fascinating to look at the changes that have occurred and to continue the discussions about future change: to view more about “The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime” see the videos and interviews which are available on Julian Guthrie’s web site. I will be recommending this text (and Melinda Gates’ The Moment of Lift) as a possible independent read for our business classes, although its main audience will be older. ALPHA GIRLS contains some photographs and a helpful index, but no bibliography.     

Jump-Starting America and Loonshots

Here are two books that discuss ways we can make the economy grow faster and promote innovation.  Both of them refer to Vannevar Bush and his inspirational push for research beginning in the 1940’s and continuing through his work with the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development.

JUMP-STARTING AMERICA is written by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, professors at MIT of Economics and of Entrepreneurship, respectively.  They make a robust argument for more government funding of research in order to stimulate private spending and to grow the economy, saying, “the major – and now mostly forgotten – lesson of the post-1945 period is that modern private enterprise proves much more effective when government provides strong underlying support for basic and applied science and for the commercialization of the resulting innovations.” Beginning with a summary of Amazon’s search for an HQ2, they note that by choosing already successful cities “the potential for Amazon to transform lagging communities remains unfulfilled.” Therefore, Gruber and Johnson also discuss geography of localized benefits of investment, with an entire chapter titled “America: Lands of Opportunity.” This is similar in some ways to Steve Case’s and JD Vance’s efforts with “The Rise of the Rest” bus tour which was recently profiled on 60 Minutes. Gruber and Johnson point out the high cost of housing, barriers to increased supply, and differences in mobility rates for college and high school graduates, contributing to a “continued divergence between the most and the least educated in our society.” However, they also look at rankings for quality PhD programs and undergraduate institutions to explore why so few “superstar cities” emerge, offering anecdotes about both Microsoft and Amazon independently choosing Seattle over Albuquerque. JUMP-STARTING AMERICA is a fascinating look at past patterns and future potential for investment in education and research; roughly a third of this well-researched book is filled with appendices, notes and index.  

LOONSHOTS by biotechnology entrepreneur Safi Bahcall deals with “How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.”  Bahcall writes about how small changes in structure can transform a team.  Both in the book and in his March 2019 talk at SXSW he uses the example of combining a molecule of water either with a glass of water or with a block of ice – that same molecule will react differently in different circumstances. Hence, Bahcall advocates for applying the science of phase transitions, essentially crafting life at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, supporting innovators and doers equally, plus managing the transfer, not the technology.  One chapter uses examples from new drug development to discuss the surprising fragility of loonshots and he quotes Nobel Prize winner Sir James Black as saying, “it’s not a good drug unless it’s been killed at least three times.” Bahcall list several lessons:  beware the false fail; create project champions, and LSC: listen to the suck with curiosity, noting “I find it’s when I question the least that I need to worry the most.”  Other sections of his book stress the value of spreading a system mindset and draw on examples dealing with Edwin Land and Polaroid, with Xerox’s PARC and even with James Bond or Star Wars films. Diagrams are interspersed and approximately a fourth of the book is devoted to appendices, notes and an index. The concluding section of LOONSHOTS poses an important question: “any large organization develop[s] deeply held beliefs, sometimes consciously, often not, about both strategies and products – and loonshots are contrarian bets that challenge those beliefs. Perhaps everything that you are sure is true about your products or your business model is right, and the people telling you about some crazy idea that challenges your beliefs are wrong. But what if they aren’t? … How much risk are you willing to take by dismissing their idea?”