Alpha Girls

March 25, 2019
Journalist Guthrie (How to Make a Spaceship) serves up a much-needed, if fluffy, look at some of the first of those all-too-rare women who made it as venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. She profiles Mary Jane Elmore of the firm IVP; Sonja Hoel of Menlo Ventures; Magdalena Yeşil, the first investor in cloud-based computing company Salesforce; and Theresia Gouw, cofounder of Aspect Ventures. She relates their experiences of hard-won survival, humiliation—Yeşil, needing time off for childcare during a divorce, was forced by her Accel partners to call the firm’s main investors to tell them one by one—and triumph. Guthrie also explores the omnipresent “second shift” and, most poignantly, shares stories of the first time, out of many, that her subjects found themselves the only woman in the room. This is a worthwhile story, but it’s disappointing that Guthrie often describes the women primarily by appearance, such as a “fresh-faced girl next door.” Her storytelling is winningly energetic, and it’s easy to see this narrative making for a successful film or TV series—and indeed, film and TV rights have already been sold—but the book would have been stronger without its off-putting strain of condescension.