Hidden Figures

Female entrepreneurs get short shrift from Silicon Valley’s VC giants. Jenny Abramson’s Rethink Impact sees that as an opportunity to profit

- Ashlea Ebeling

Venture capitalist Jenny Abramson is holding her once-a-month open office hours at Hera Hub, a women’s co-working space in Washington, DC. She deftly jots notes with a stylus on an iPad while maintaining eye contact as Kimberly Linson tells her about Leaderally, a new professional learning site for teachers.

Linson, 46, is clutching a Dream/ Believe/Achieve notebook and understandably seems a tad nervous about the site’s planned January beta launch. She and her two female co-founders quit their management jobs at a tutoring company to take the entrepreneurial plunge. After peppering Linson with questions, Abramson declares herself “thrilled” with the Leaderally concept but suggests the women market initially to charter school teachers, who typically have less experience and more flexibility to adopt new methods than their public school counterparts. Abramson knows this space; she serves on the board of DC Prep, a high-performing local charter, and worked in programme strategy at Teach for America between studying genomics as a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Economics and earning her Harvard MBA.

“The oracle has spoken!” declares a grateful Linson, as she makes way for the next mentee.

Abramson, 40, is founder and managing partner of Rethink Impact, which in March closed on a $112 million fund investing in womenled, tech-driven startups with social impact. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s the biggest VC pot in the US dedicated to female founders. Just 8 percent of partners at the 100 largest US venture firms are female, and 58 of those firms have no women partners at all, CrunchBase reports. Moreover, companies founded solely by women have snagged just 4.4 percent of VC deals—and less than 2 percent of VC dollars—since the start of 2016, according to data compiled by Pitchbook.