Raising Venture Capital—And Standards

Sequoia Capital’s Jess Lee knows how to close a deal. But many women in the industry still face challenges.

- Sarah McBride and Lizette Chapman

In 2017, shortly after becoming a venture capitalist, Jess Lee attended a startup conference in Los Angeles. Her badge identified her employer as Sequoia Capital, an Apple Inc. and Google backer that was gearing up to raise more than $12 billion in several new funds. Under most circumstances, that’d be enough to get a VC mobbed, but the crowd largely ignored Lee, the first female investing partner at Silicon Valley’s most prestigious firm. “No one was even looking at my name tag,” she recalls. In lieu of standing around, she retreated to the bathroom for a while to answer emails on her phone.

Lee’s experience underscores the sexism that runs through much of the clubby tech industry. It also showed her that “this classic networking method of getting deal flow is probably not going to work for me.” To succeed in venture capital as a youngish Asian woman, she’d need her own approach, one that took her uphill battle into account. “If you are underestimated, you can use that to your advantage,” she says.