A thank you note?—?Or: On being a woman in Silicon?Valley

I frequently mention Nassim Taleb in my articles, since so much of his thought has shaped our worldview and investment decisions in BABEL Ventures. One of his most celebrated ideas talks about Hydra, a serpent-like creature that has numerous heads; each time one is cut off, two grow back. Hydra, thus, is a representation of antifragility: it gets stronger after each blow it receives.

That’s exactly how life is for a woman. Being female is like playing the game of life in hard mode: people try to cut us off, and just like Hydra, we grow stronger with each attack we withstand. Antifragility is the defining quality of alpha women — those that, despite all the headwinds that biology and society threw at them, manage to win the game.

I certainly strive to be a single, twenty-something, powerful alpha woman. But my identity lies elsewhere: I am a Latina, an immigrant, a full-of-attitude Brazilian (and thus, way too friendly for most people in the US). Every woman has her own identity, her own life path; every obstacle is unique for each of us. What ties us all together is, perhaps, only the fact that we all have to dodge the curveballs that life throws at us just because of our gender.

Which leads me to the issue that made me write today: the terrible sexual harassment scandal that shook Silicon Valley last week; it shocks me that events like this still happen, especially in such an intelligent community as the Bay Area.

A lot has been said about how tech culture needs to change to protect women from situations like these, and I don’t believe I can add much more to that. What I can do, as a woman building a VC franchise in the Valley, is to say to the women involved: thank you for the great courage to speak out. What happened to you is an affront against all women, and because of your bravery, we will become stronger. Even while all women need to be antifragile, you make us antifragile as a group.

With that said, I think it is important to share another perspective, too: those predatory men are very rare in our community. Most men that I know are, for the lack of a proper term, ‘true’ men: kind, authentic, and even, let’s say, respectfully disagreeable.

The idea of having a professional life completely dissociated from the personal one is bullshit — and entrepreneurial settings like ours, in which you are all-in and your life choices coincide with what your business will become, demonstrate that especially clearly. It takes sensibility to navigate tricky waters like these, and true men know full well how to do that.

All the Limited Partners of BABEL are men; after all their harsh criticism and tough due diligence, they believed in the dream and joined us. It takes bravery to listen to someone half your age about investment management when you are, say, a stock market tycoon — and true men see no distinction between hearing it from a man or a woman.

So, to all ‘true men’ friends, coworkers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, bosses, partners out there, I also want to say: thank you. I owe my success to the brilliance and bravery of great men that believed in my potential, who were not afraid to disagree, to challenge me, or even seduce me — and above all, to support me in my journey. Were it not for you, true men, I would have never faced the challenges I did — the ones that made me grow and learn, the ones that inspired me and those that made me feel proud of myself. Without you, it would be very lonely out here.

And I say that with a heavy heart.

I wish I could say thanks to all women that helped me achieve my goals — but other than my cofounder, there’s really not too many people to whom I would say that.

I wish I could say I had at least one woman investor in my first fund, but that would not be true. (In fact, having been in the investment business for a decade, and having pitched opportunities for men and women alike, I am yet to have one woman as my investor.)

I wish I could say at least one name of a woman that mentored me, that helped me and my cofounder build what we did, that challenged our ideas, but I can’t remember one. (The closest I can get is Ayn Rand, who died long before I was born, but whose ideas permeate everything I do and think.)

Where were all the women that could have supported me? Maybe they were busy with something else? Perhaps they were not ready to take an investment risk? Or even, they couldn’t spare the time to guide me? In their absence, this was all done by men — and they fully deserve this recognition. Hopefully the future is female, though, and I look forward to writing, 5 or 10 years from now, about how thankful I am for the women that helped me evolve.

In dealing with the topic of moral agnosticism, Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness: “when your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you — whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?” In this spirit, the grim moment that the Valley faces requires, I believe, two responses: first and foremost, the condemnation of the predators that still exist among us, but also the praise of the virtuous men and women in our lives. I hope I managed to achieve this. So, again, thank you, brave women and true men, for being who you are — you both make us stronger and better.