Hatched At Twitter

Borrowing From The Bro Playbook, Six Former Colleagues Launch A Plan To Get In On Silicon Valley’S Billions.

- Jo Piazza

It all started at the Twitter salad bar. A handful of women who made up a good portion of the company’s top executives began talking about angel investing—when an individual swaps a chunk of his or her personal wealth for a slice of ownership in a company at its earliest stages—as they sprinkled their quinoa and cherry tomatoes with flaxseeds. Specifically, they asked, why were all the guys they knew getting asked to invest in early-stage companies, but not them?

The venture world tends to involve a lot of tribal knowledge traded among tight fraternal networks. It’s a group whose members make money by spending money, using their or others’ personal wealth to bet big. When their gambles pay off, they have even more money to shape the future of Silicon Valley—which, in many cases, means the future of the country. “When you think about how power structures are formed in the Valley, it’s the founders and investors who create multibillion-dollar companies who can go on to found more companies and form philanthropies and fund political campaigns and determine what products get made,” says Jana Messerschmidt, who left her role as Twitter’s vice president of global business development and platform in 2016 and recently joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a partner. “When you have such a concentration of that wealth going to white men, of course the world is shaped through their eyes.”