SILICON VALLEY’S HIDDEN FIGURES

Apple, Google, and Salesforce are household names, and so, too, are Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, their leaders—men who, according to legend, once upon a time started their world-changing companies with a combination of brilliance, luck, and, above all, swagger. But that’s not the full story. Women played a major role in creating the tech giants of today, and perhaps no one had a bigger impact than—and has been as overlooked as—the pioneering female venture capitalists of Silicon Valley.

In this exclusive excerpt from Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took On Silicon Valley’s Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime, author Julian Guthrie introduces us to Mary Jane Elmore and Magdalena Yesil, at one time the only female partners at their venture capital firms, who invested funds, intelligence, and countless hours in the startups they worked with. These women (and the rest of the book’s trailblazing characters) had an outsize influence on the success of their companies, even as they and their cohort faced the blatant sexism of the day: unequal pay, harassment, and the proverbial glass ceiling—often while juggling family responsibilities. As if building a tech startup today weren’t hard enough, little of this has changed.

Here are their stories.

MARY JANE ‘MJ’ ELMORE UNAFRAID TO DROP THE AX

MJ parked in her usual spot in the back lot at the Institutional Venture Partners offices and walked past the sprawling oak tree. It reminded her of a tai chi practitioner, its limbs long and purposeful in their reach. She had finally got rid of her Ford Pinto, selling it online. On rare occasions when she spotted an old