I’m pleased to announce that I’ve succeeded in coordinating a number of Sand Hill Road’s most prestigious venture capital firms, including First Round Capital, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins, to form the first-ever Venture Capital Diversity Outreach Program. I could not have done this alone (obviously) and I want to thank all of my bros (and fembros) in Menlo Park and Palo Alto for making this happen.
In response to negative press surrounding this storied industry and its supposed culture of sexism (which we deny) we held a round-table discussion last weekend on Lake Tahoe, on the topic of rehabilitate our industry’s image. We’re hurt by the perception that we have a sexist, exclusionary, “frat boy” culture, so we decided to form a program to prove that we aren’t sexist. It was easy to agree on the first step: start funding and promoting women.
This idea, though brilliant and revolutionary, raised a difficult question: which women? Based on our back-of-the-envelope calculations, we estimated that there are between 3 and 4 billion women in the world! We had to narrow the pool. One venture capitalist who, unfortunately, declined to be named, said, “we need to fund young women.” Echoing Mark Zuckerberg, he said, “Young people are just smarter.” And so it was agreed that we will be funding 25 women under 23. Each will receive $25,000 worth of seed-round funding in exchange for a mere 15% of the business, along with unlimited one-on-one mentorship opportunities from the Valley’s leading venture capitalists.
We’re extending this opportunity outside of Northern California. In fact, you can apply from anywhere in the world. All pitches must be in video form, each lasting no more than 4 minutes. Which VC you should submit your pitch to depends on where you are applying from. Submissions from Eastern Europe will go to one VC for appraisal, Latin American submissions will go to another, and submissions from Asia to another. We have to match the judges with their specialties, you see. Don’t worry. We’ll have this all sorted out by this evening. Full-body pitch videos only. Face-only submissions will be rejected.
Based on the all-important and objective metric of cultural fit, the submissions will be stack-ranked and the winners will be notified within three days. We recommend that the winners, upon receiving funding, drop out of college to pursue this program. College may be necessary for middle-class people who want to become dentists, and it’s good for propagating Marxist mumbo-jumbo, but it’s so unnecessary if you have all of Sand Hill Road on your side. Which you will, if you’re a woman who wins this contest. Until you’re 28 or so, but that’s forever away and you’ll be a billionaire by then. We find that, in the magical land of California, it’s best not to think about the future or about risk. Future’s so bright, you gotta wear shades!
On a side note, being a venture capitalist is freaking awesome. No, the job doesn’t involve snorting blow off a hooker’s breasts– that actually stopped about 10 years ago, some HR thing. But nothing quite beats the thrill of playing football, in the midst of adiabatic para-skiing, while playing Halo on Google Glass!
Keep the Faith, Don’t Hate, and, above all, Lipra Solof.
