Alpha Girls

by Julian Guthrie

  As she drove away in her aging Pinto—now truly on its last legs—MJ had the same feeling of excitement she had when she first arrived in California. She didn’t mind being the girl next door with the midwestern values. She would always respect her mother, who loved to say, “It doesn’t cost anything to be nice.” And she was proud of her family. But as she again thought of Sandy Kurtzig, with her pink briefcase and red Ferrari, MJ knew she wanted more. She wasn’t settling for hamburger. She wanted steak.

  THERESIA GOUW

  At Oliver’s, a popular watering hole in Providence, Rhode Island, Theresia Gouw ordered a beer, greeted the blue-collar and student regulars, and headed to the foosball table. It was time to kick some butt.

  Theresia hated to lose—whether at foosball or anything else. At the foosball table, with her best friend Sangeeta Bhatia playing defense, Theresia went quickly on offense. Her unwitting opponents saw her permed and teased hair, stirrup pants, and oversize sweater and thought she’d be a patsy. But she had a killer spin shot, a great pull shot with the middleman on the rod, and a surprise bank shot. In short order, cocky contenders came and went, dispatched with ease before they knew what had hit them.

  Standing five foot three and still looking like a teenager, Theresia was constantly being underestimated. It had been no different at the bar a few blocks from Brown University, where she arrived in 1986 to study engineering. Theresia had grown up in the tiny working-class town of Middleport, an agricultural crossroads about forty miles northeast of Buffalo, where many students dressed for school in camouflage, read Soldier of Fortune magazine, and skipped school on the opening day of deer hunting season. Graduating seniors typically enlisted in the military or went to work in the local General Motors factory or at the sprawling Farm Machine Corp. plant that manufactured pesticides.

  For the Gouw family, however, education was everything. When Theresia got an A minus in Spanish, her father was furious, telling her, “I know you’re smart enough to get A’s in everything you do.” He did not believe in the concept of extra credit. “It’s not extra credit for you. Anything your teacher gives you is required.” Theresia lost sleep over tests and became depressed if she got anything less than 100 percent. Her mother, more relaxed than her father, would tell her, “Ninety-five is an A—it is enough. One hundred is for the good Lord.”

  * * *

  The Gouws didn’t have it easy. For many years, they were the only Asian family in town. They had emigrated from Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1971, to escape persecution as ethnic Chinese and to make a better life for Theresia and her younger sister, Andrea. In Middleport, some of the kids in school made slant-eye gestures at Theresia; the family came home from spring break to find a swastika on their mailbox and GO HOME CHINKS spray-painted on their driveway. One night when they went out to dinner in a neighboring town, locals stared at them, seemingly startled to see Asians among the patrons.

  Theresia’s father declared that cheerleading was out; sports, however, were in. Theresia became captain or co-captain of the high school field hockey, volleyball, and track teams. She was elected homecoming queen and prom queen. She and her dad had season tickets to the Buffalo Bills, and Theresia memorized the stats on all the players. Oblivious to the freezing temperatures, father and daughter rooted for running back Joe Cribbs in his breakout rookie season and later Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelley and wide receiver Andre Reid. Theresia’s favorite player was defensive end Bruce Smith, perennially one of the best in the league.

  Theresia’s first paying job, outside of babysitting and cleaning instruments at her dad’s dental office, was working at Burger King. She was responsible for putting the patties on a conveyor belt and adding the ketchup, mustard, pickle, and cheese. From her spot at the back of the fast-food restaurant, she plotted her move to the better positions—working the cash register or the drive-through. Only the girls who had seniority got those jobs.

  * * *

  Over time Theresia’s parents worked their way up from waitress and dishwasher to nurse and dentist, and the community of Middleport came to accept them. Steve Gouw’s dream had been to be a family dentist in a small American town, where he would know his patients by their first names. His wife, Bertha, became his office manager. Determined to assimilate, Theresia grew up speaking English; for a long time, she refused to eat rice or ethnic food, especially in public. She ate so much American food—Hostess Ding Dongs and Sno Balls were her favorites—that she ballooned from petite to hefty, and other kids started calling her Theresia Souw.

  When it came time for college, Theresia applied to Brown, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, the University of Rochester, and Rochester Institute of Technology. She was elated when her acceptance letter came from Brown. But soon after she mailed her commitment letter back to Brown, she got an acceptance letter from Carnegie Mellon, offering her a presidential scholarship of $10,000 a year in financial aid. That night Theresia showed her father the letter. “This is worth forty thousand dollars over four years,” she explained, “and it’s a great school. We’ll lose our deposit at Brown, but we’ll save a lot of money.” Her father looked at her and said, “No. You were clear that Brown was your first choice. We will take out a second mortgage on the house and make it work. This is your dream.”

  Theresia was one of the first Middleport graduates to attend an Ivy League school. But at Brown, she felt like a “country bumpkin” compared with her elite prep school classmates. Theresia’s father told her, “You can beat everyone in Middleport, but not at Brown. If you try to be the best, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Just be your best.”

  But to be her best, she had to overcome another disadvantage: The male students refused to invite her into their study groups, assuming that she wouldn’t do as well as the guys. Theresia found solace with her best friend, Sangeeta, who was also an engineering student, and the two women formed their own study cabal. Theresia’s engineering focus was in material science, while Sangeeta’s was in biomedical engineering.

  The women became roommates in Perkins Hall, a dorm located on the outskirts of the campus. Students who lived in Perkins Hall were said to develop especially close friendships, as visitors to the residence hall were few and far between. Theresia and Sangeeta shared their stories of being first-generation immigrants and dutiful daughters to exacting fathers. Each had a younger sister. And for both, their fathers had set them on their engineering path.

  The two friends loved rock ’n’ roll—U2, the Clash, the Eagles, Van Halen, Bowie—and were karaoke fanatics. (Theresia secretly dreamed of being a rock star.) But they were also clear on their priorities, making sure to do their studying before any partying began. They spent Wednesday nights at a fraternity where they had friends; they spent other nights at Oliver’s, drinking beer and destroying the opposition in foosball.

  When Theresia started at Brown, the campus was engulfed in protests, sit-ins, hunger strikes, and marches around the anti-apartheid movement. Students demanded that trustees divest their stocks in South African companies. There were massive pro-choice rallies in Washington as well, which Theresia and Sangeeta attended. But they found plenty of inequality closer to home. As freshmen, they had been heartened to see that almost half the students in engineering were women, but by their senior year, there were around a dozen women left in a class of one hundred. They looked into the drop-off and discovered that the academic performance of the women who had left was just as strong as that of the women and men who remained in the program. The female students had left because they didn’t know any women who were engineers in the real world. They had trouble seeing what they would do with their hard-earned degrees. Time and again Theresia and Sangeeta heard the women who’d dropped out say they didn’t feel as if they belonged. Conversely, the women who stayed in the program had one thing in common: a mentor in the field, or a parent, to encourage them. So the two friends joined the Brown chapter of t
he Society of Women Engineers, which they served as co-presidents.

  Theresia and Sangeeta recognized other impediments for women at Brown as well. The men in the engineering department were often members of fraternities that archived engineering tests and study guides from previous years. Nothing like that existed for women. So Theresia and Sangeeta assembled engineering problem sets, tests, and homework for future classes of women engineers. They set up peer mentoring for women, matching juniors and seniors with underclasswomen.

  And at the end of the day, Theresia and Sangeeta had each other. When they had to pull all-nighters and were afraid they would fall asleep and miss an exam, they took turns studying, napping, and waking each other up. During finals week, Theresia and Sangeeta set themselves up on the mezzanine level of the science library. They shared everything, from stories of their internships to stories of dates and obnoxious men they encountered.

  During a summer internship at General Motors, Theresia worked in an engineering research and design facility. Of the one thousand full-time engineers, only two were women. As she walked through the rows of cubicles, the men assumed she was a secretary and asked her to get them coffee and their mail. One day her manager, who was only a few years older than she was, took Theresia and another intern, a man, out to lunch—to a topless bar. Theresia found the experience sad more than anything. “It was just kind of uncomfortable to have lunch with boobs in your face,” she later told Sangeeta.

  As graduation approached, Theresia landed a job with Bain, the prestigious management consulting firm in Boston. She owed $42,000 in student loans and needed a job. Sangeeta headed to MIT for a joint MD/PhD program in biomedical engineering. On graduation day, Theresia, the former country bumpkin, learned that she was graduating at the top of her class, magna cum laude, the only honor Brown granted at commencement.

  The two friends remained in contact with each other, as Sangeeta began school across the Charles River. Theresia made friends with analysts who were a year or two ahead of her at Bain: Dave Goldberg, Jennifer Fonstad, and Tim Ranzetta, whose desk was right across from hers. Tim was tall, blond, and blue-eyed, and had played varsity baseball at the University of Virginia. Theresia arrived at work each day reading the National Sports Daily, and the two soon got into debates over whether the University of Virginia football team could hold on to its No. 1 ranking for the season. (Theresia said no, Tim said yes. Theresia was right.) Before long, Theresia and Tim were involved romantically.

  * * *

  In 1992 Theresia applied to business school at Harvard and Stanford. Accepted at both, she chose Stanford because of the school’s location in Silicon Valley, the heart of tech. Some of the men at Bain who had been turned down by the schools told her she only got in because she was a woman. She said little but quietly fumed. She had worked twice as hard as most to get where she was.

  Theresia had grown serious in her relationship with Tim, as they bonded over sports, a devotion to their families, and their shared goals in life. They both wanted to live in California. Tim hoped to work in banking, like his father. Theresia knew from her stint at GM that she didn’t want to be an engineer sitting behind a computer, creating CAD designs. She was more interested in being a product manager. She figured that with a Stanford MBA, she could one day earn good money in Silicon Valley—maybe even a six-figure salary.

  SONJA HOEL

  In 1989 twenty-two-year-old Sonja Hoel had been working as an analyst at the venture capital firm TA Associates in Boston for several weeks—yet she still didn’t have a chair for her desk. The secretary wouldn’t order her one.

  Sonja didn’t dwell on it—she was just glad to be there. Before starting at TA, she had heeded her mother’s advice to cut her hair and wear glasses. “You will be treated with more respect,” her mother advised. In the same way, when she heard that her fellow analysts were getting together for scotch after work, she quickly joined, feigning delight at what she found to be an awful-tasting drink. Nothing was going to dim her love affair with the venture capital industry. It was the perfect place for the cheerful blue-eyed southerner who liked to say “My obstacles are my allies.”

  But before long, Sonja’s naturally sunny disposition took a hit. Standing upstairs in TA’s gorgeous wood-paneled offices, she looked down the spiral staircase and realized she was the only female investor in the Boston office. Am I here just because I’m a woman? she wondered. After a few days of sulking and second-guessing herself, she looked in the mirror and said, Snap out of it.

  There was no point in looking for discrimination, she realized; life was too full of opportunity. Her firm’s downtown Boston office was less than a mile’s walk from her fashionable Beacon Hill apartment. She relished nights when it snowed, erasing her steps almost as fast as she made them. As boughs of trees became heavy with snow, the sounds of the city softened, and even the streetlight grew paler, turning the color of butter. She wore long underwear under her suits, purchased in the bargain basement of Filene’s department store. When she started at TA Associates, she’d had only one black suit and one navy suit, with a few extra jackets, and she would mix the pieces to get through the week. She laughed when a fellow analyst told her, “Sonja, your long johns are showing.” She encountered the same homeless man, Michael, on her commute to work every day and eventually struck a deal with him: She would give him a dollar a week, but he was not allowed to ask her for money on any other days. Michael was friendly and made her laugh, and he was grateful when Sonja gave him warm winter clothes.

  * * *

  Sonja shared a two-bedroom apartment with Anne Heese, a woman she’d met while shopping at Filene’s Basement. The two had been trying on clothes over their clothes, as the store didn’t have dressing rooms. They now shared an apartment on the top floor of a three-unit building, furnishing their flat with chairs and tables that their wealthy neighbors had left at the curb. The top floor was old, and the floor was slanted—a marble would roll from one end of the kitchen to the other—but it had a treasured view of the landmark CITGO sign near Fenway Park. They each paid $500 a month, and often did the dishes while singing along to their favorite song, “Push It,” by Salt-N-Pepa. Sonja had taped a picture of Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs up on the fridge. She thought he was “the cat’s meow.”

  Her father had been right—there was life after high school. During her teenage years in Charlottesville, Virginia, some of the girls had her disinvited to prom because she was “too straight.” She didn’t drink or do drugs and didn’t believe in casual sex. She didn’t make the cheerleading squad because the dance moves were too fast for her. She was cut from the basketball team as well but volunteered to be the team statistician. She tried out for field hockey and volleyball but didn’t make the squads—her high school was big and boasted a strong sports program. She joined the lacrosse team and the school choir because she loved both, and tryouts were not required. She grew up with two sisters, including a twin, and had a Marie Antoinette–style canopy bed.

  A graduate of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, Sonja had been hired at TA Associates after a stint at the London Stock Exchange. She had impressed TA management with her self-taught computer skills and the computer jobs she held at UVA. Now an analyst, her job was to find auspicious companies for investments, interview the founders and executives about their business models, and then—when she had enough compelling information—pull in the TA partner best suited to land the deal.

  Sonja was a quick study. She knew how to seek out companies that solved problems for businesses with products that were ten times more efficient at one-tenth the cost. She understood intuitively that learning about the problem a company intended to solve, its market size, and its business model was just as important as learning about its core technology. Within two years of her arrival at TA Associates, Sonja landed two hugely lucrative deals by cold-calling companies she’d found in comp
uter magazines—OnTrack, a data recovery software company, and Artisoft, which connected PCs to a network. Both went public.

  But to rise through the ranks of the financial world to become a partner, she realized, she would need an MBA. It was the partners who made investments and received the all-important and closely held “carry”—a share of the profits. Venture partners took board seats and worked in lockstep with entrepreneurs, So she applied to the business schools at Stanford, Dartmouth, and Harvard and was accepted at Harvard. Dimming her excitement, her longtime boyfriend was accepted to the business school at the University of Michigan. The two talked about getting married. Sonja was heartbroken that they would be apart. But she was thrilled about attending Harvard. “I want to become a venture capital partner!” she told her roommate Anne.

  * * *

  When Sonja informed TA Associates that she would be leaving at the beginning of the summer, the firm’s managing partner, Kevin Landry, offered to double her salary if she stayed. But she was set on becoming a venture capitalist, knowing they played a key role in launching and shaping revolutionary companies. They were the futurists, hand holders, and risk takers in the financial world. Moreover, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs were her favorite type of people: optimists.

  Sonja had proved that she had a nose for deals. Now she wanted to help build companies that would make the world a better place.

  A few months before leaving for Harvard, Sonja, sitting at her desk at TA, studied an ad in PC magazine. A company piqued her interest. She had by now cold-called more than one thousand companies. She dialed the number in the ad but got a busy signal. She tried again a few minutes later. Busy still. So she read the Dun & Bradstreet research report on the software company, which was based in Silicon Valley. The company sold antivirus software and was growing quickly. It had a good product and apocalyptic viruses were predicted to take down computers across the globe.