How We Talk When We Talk About Ambition

Many many years ago I got a call from a VC friend who was passing on an investment I’d sent him. This isn’t unusual. Most VCs pass on most things most of the time.

What was unusual to me then, and remains with me now, is the reason for passing. The company, which will remain nameless, was a software business that was sold to large and small companies. Sales was an important part of their business and culture. So, when I was told that the CEO was too “aggressive and sales-y” I was a bit surprised. I knew the CEO was an excellent sales leader and had built a strong sales culture within the company. That should have been a good thing.

So I asked a question that I felt would at least address the elephant in the room- “if she were a dude, would you value those attributes differently?”

Silence. Followed by awkward silence. Followed by “let’s catch up soon.” Click.

I couldn’t fault him. But, I couldn’t let it slide. 

This was a very driven CEO, very hungry to succeed running a company that was meeting, and exceeding, the high performance standards she’d set for the team. 

VCs pass on these kinds of companies every day. There are many valid reasons to pass. 

But not this reason. 

Not this time.

When we launched our Indie.vc experiment back in Jan, Marci Dale wrote a piece about why it seemed to resonate so strongly with female founders (Marci notes her own massive generlaizations, but this feels relevant):

Many women hate the bombast required for a typical VC pitch — and that bombast is typically received differently when delivered by a woman. Women have no trouble thinking big and absolutely no problem working hard — but generally prefer to under-promise and over-deliver.

Maybe, just maybe, women entrepreneurs are every bit as ambitious as their male counterparts but the language they use to describe their ambition is lost in translation. Yet, when they co opt the bombast, it comes across as inauthentic, “sales-y”. 

Unfortunately, lost in translation isn’t exclusive to women.

I am fortunate to get to work with Angie, the secretive founder of The Shade Room. On a call a few weeks ago, we were talking through a new product she had in the works. To put a fine point on her deep conviction for it, she exclaimed “this is going to be big, I can feel it in my soul!” 

If her track record is any indication, she will be right.

But how do you think “I feel it in my soul” goes over to a room full of white, Asian or Indian men with little or no religious affiliation?

Now, what if Angie had said, “this is going to be big, I can feel it in my gut”.  

Both words are meant to convey a deep sense of conviction. One is well understood and accepted as the lingua franca of ambition within Silicon Valley, the other, despite being understood and accepted in Angie’s black community, is not.

No one understands the language of Silicon Valley better than Sir Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Arguably, he was the pen that helped shape the language of Silicon Valley’s ambition to the world in its most formative days. What was then an exercise in opening the Silicon Valley mindset to the outside world, has become walls that prevent those who speak or work differently out.

I note this in light of his recent interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg where she broached the subject of why so few women are on the investment team at Sequoia. 

if there are fabulously bright, driven women who are interested in technology, very driven to succeed and can meet our performance standards we’ll hire them all day and night.

It is great to see that Sequoia is wrestling with issues of gender diversity within their firm. This is messy difficult stuff with deep cultural roots and I’m sure more partners than Sir Michael will taste the flavor of their own foot in their mouths as they wrestle with it.

The words used to define the ideal Sequoia candidate- driven, hungry high performance standards are gender, race and academically neutral. Anyone, anywhere can embody them. But, they mean different things, to different people in different contexts.

Unless we’re mindful of those differences we can’t actively do the work to translate across the language barriers that exist outside the inner circles of Silicon Valley. And we’ll continue to tug our collars and shrug our shoulders and convince ourselves this is about “lowering bars” while the walls continue to get higher.