You're Never Too Anything

Who remembers the birth of the Internet? It sort of exploded onto the scene in the mid 1990’s. Kind of felt like it took off overnight. One day we were using DOS drive computers and AOL accounts, and the next day we were ordering groceries from Webvan and books from Amazon, “Earth’s biggest bookstore.”?

The tech boom was crazy out here in Silicon Valley – innovation and start-ups galore, overnight millionaires, and all that jazz. The birth and rise of the internet was something to behold.

Or so I’m told.?

I was living in a mud hut in West Africa at the time.?

True story! I spent two and a half years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa. We worked all day trying to help build businesses and teach people how to save money. We lived simply and with zero conveniences. It was the antithesis of modern. So it’s a little ironic that I went from there to enterprise technology, right? But that time kicked off the most important lesson of my life and career. More on that later.?

Growing up in an immigrant household

My parents are immigrants; they worked tirelessly to build a life here in America and raised my sister and me to be deeply passionate about hard work, global perspectives, and equality. (Hence my desire to join the Peace Corps.) But only two careers were “acceptable” in our immigrant household – law and medicine, and neither appealed to me.?

I returned home from the Peace Corps in 1998 to a changed world. I’d had very little outside contact when I was in Africa. There was no WiFi. There were no cell phones, AI, or TikTok. There wasn’t even a landline. So returning to the U.S. was strange and overwhelming and exciting and scary. Very Rip Van Winkle. I was intrigued by this exploding new field – “technology” – But I had missed the tech boom. Was I too late to make a career of it? No, I jumped right into it as a Product Manager in various exciting startups, and I’ve spent most of my career in enterprise technology.?

The question of equal pay

In early 2008 I joined Salesforce to build and run the AppExchange. Salesforce was about 1800 employees at the time, and the company was at about $500M ARR. When I left, 12 years later, it was 52K people and $17 billion ARR. That’s a lot of growth, and as the leader of the AppExchange, Desk and then Salesforce Mobile, I was right in the thick of it.?

I was one of the only women on the product team, and I noticed a lot of things… One thing was that it seemed like the men were making a lot more money than I was. Here’s an example: In meetings they were all talking about how they were on the waitlist to get a Tesla. This was before Teslas were readily available, and they were crazy expensive at the time. And I was wondering, “How do they all afford that?”?

Many of them were taking extravagant vacations and buying second homes. When bonuses were handed out, every woman on my team said thank you, while every man on my team asked for more. There were other signs, too, but it seemed to me that something was rotten in Denmark.?

So I went to a friend, another woman named Cindy Guerra Robbins , and we made a plan to bring up this disparity with the CEO, Marc Benioff. Some of our colleagues thought we were nuts – too brash, too loud, too ambitious. But we did it anyway. And Marc honestly didn’t believe there was an issue; he had always strived to build an equitable company. But to his credit, he agreed to do an audit.?

And the results showed we were right. There was a pay gap in what Salesforce was paying men versus women. Salesforce pledged to rectify the difference, and the company continues to advocate for equal pay.?

Why don’t more women invest??

During my time at Salesforce, I helped them buy a lot of companies; we did the diligence, determined value, and made the purchasing decisions. I knew what worked, knew the process, and had the experience. Yet with every purchase, I watched the (usually) white male founders stay two years to vest their options, and start up another company or go into venture capital. They surfaced dozens of opportunities – and they always called my male colleagues to invest, never me. Why? I had just as much experience, if not more. Why wasn’t I included??

So when my friend Mallun Yen called to tell me about a venture capital fund she was starting, I was intrigued. It was called Operator Collective, and my friend had a goal to build a fund focused on women tech operators looking to get involved in venture capital. There were plenty of women operators and executives who wanted to invest, but were not receiving the opportunities to do so. I was one of them.?

Together we built a $50 million fund that was 90% women and 40% people of color. We deployed the fund through COVID, an incredibly successful time for enterprise technology.?

Bringing diversity to venture capital?

Operator Collective was a tremendous learning experience for me – but it also surfaced another glaring hole in venture capital. If women were scarce, Black people were even more so. Literally there were about 75 enterprise VCs at the time – total. 75 check-writing Black investors in all of enterprise venture capital. Now that I was in venture capital full time, was there something I could do, or was I too insignificant to make a difference??

I called a friend who’s a business school professor at Cal, and pitched the idea of creating an intensive course to teach Black executives the ins-and-outs of venture capital. He said, “Great, but that’s gonna cost money,” so I went to Salesforce Ventures, and they agreed to fund it.

Our goal was to triple the number of Black investors within three years. We started in 2020, and to date we’ve had 6 cohorts of Black Venture Institute, graduating more than 300 fellows into the venture ecosystem, many of whom have started their own funds.?

You’re Never Too Anything

The internet boom started when I was living in that mud hut in Mali, West Africa. I missed two and a half years of seeing, learning, observing. Did that prevent me from a successful career in tech? No. On the contrary, my time away gave me unique and valuable experiences I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. So if someone ever tells you you’re too old, too young, too inexperienced, too , too loud, too late, too shy, too small, too foreign, too ANYTHING, ignore it. You’re never “too” anything. People will try to put you in a box – it’s how we as humans understand things. We frame things in the perspectives we ourselves know. But don’t let their limits contain you.?

Be true to who you are, my friends. Do that thing you’ve been wanting to do. I’m here to tell you: You’re not too anything. You’re just right.