Sexism and Racism in Venture Capital

Physical violence

• Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch and founding partner of CrunchFund) has multiple allegations of physical and sexual violence towards past partners.
• Dan Bilzerian (venture capitalist and trust-fund child of corporate takeover specialist/ex-convict Paul Bilzerian) threw a model off a roof during a Hustler shoot and broke her foot.

Sexual harassment

• Pavel Curda (European angel investor) propositioned multiple women who pitched to him.
• CMEA Capital settled a lawsuit alleging "pervasive and severe" harassment by chief operating partner John Haag out of court. According to ValleyWag, "The allegations are not limited to Haag. The complaint also says that management was aware of the problem—the firm's founder warned that Haag was a "predator"—and that the women faced retaliation from CMEA employees after they reported the allege."

Racism and sexism

• Dave McClure (founding partner of 500 Startups and former O'Reilly Media conference organizer) called a woman a lying bitch at a talk.
• Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator) said he would probably not co-found a company with a young woman because she might give birth. Seems oblivious to the fact that women have used computers for as long as computers have existed. Famously panned CEOs with "strong foreign accents" but insisted this wasn't racist. Said that programmers in India "aren't real programmers".
• Peter Thiel (Facebook board member, LinkedIn investor, and Clarium Capital founder and president) said women getting the vote was disastrous for U.S. democracy.

Naiveté

• Jason Calacanis (founder and CEO of inside.com, Uber angel investor, and former "entrepreneur in action" for Sequoia Capital): claims racism doesn't exist in blogging.
• Marc Andreessen (cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of Mozilla predecessor Netscape) tweeted support of Tom Preston-Werner after he departed GitHub in the midst of a sexual harassment scandal. Claimed "technology driven change disproportionately benefits the poor". Blows off women who tell him that VCs overlook women who found startups. Claimed "Silicon Valley is nerd culture, and we are the bro's natural enemy" and "99.9999% of nerds I have known have zero frat in them."

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Alumni

• Tom Perkins compared the persecution of Jews under Nazi Germany to the "war" on the rich 1%. This incident made it into popular culture when it was referred to during season 5 of the TV show "The Good Wife," in the episode "The One Percent ".
• John Doerr said he looks for white male Stanford dropouts with no social life.
• Ray Lane allegedly advised a woman KPCB partner being harassed by another KPCB partner to solve the problem by marrying her harasser. Lane also married an employee who reported directly to him. Amity Shales wrote an op-ed on the lawsuit titled Women Win in Venture Capital When They Don’t Sue, which serves to remind us that not all geek women are feminists  and of accusations of harming the community as a silencing tactic.

Academic research and other systemic studies

• Women Are Disappearing From Venture Capital - Karen E. Klein for Businessweek, citing this research.
  • "The vast majority of U.S. venture capital investments go to companies led exclusively by men."
  • "Only 15 percent of nearly 7,000 VC-backed companies analyzed had a woman executive."
  • "The total proportion of women VC partners has dropped to 6 percent, from 10 percent in 1999."
  • "Women getting VC funding [in 1999] amounted to only 5 percent of the total, compared to 15 percent today."
  • "The continued gender gap in investment is especially puzzling in light of multiple studies released in recent years that have shown that companies with women in senior positions are more likely to succeed than those that are all-male."