Her Voice at the Table: Phillips Exeter Alumni Event with Veronica Juarez

I’ve been working on the committee planning the celebration of 50 years of coeducation at Phillips Exeter Academy since early in 2019. Many of our original plans and events have been changed since then, but I did have the pleasure of hosting a “Her Voice In” fireside chat with Veronica Juarez, Class of 2000. Our discussion was titled “Her Voice in Leadership” and we covered topics including creating access, DEI, non sibi (meaning “not for oneself,” one of the school’s core values), and meaningful relationships formed at Exeter.

It was a pleasure to interview Veronica who is AVP of Social Enterprise at Lyft and a venture scout for Lightspeed Ventures.

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Lauren Rawlings
VC Investment in Female Founded Companies is Still Lagging

Despite all of the major systemic changes that have taken place in the past few years and months, venture capital investment in female and Black/Latinx-founded companies is still incredibly low. We were pleased to see Ilene Lang, Former CEO of Catalyst and a mentor/friend of the firm, along with Reggie Van Lee, Former EVP at Booz Allen, discussing this important issue in an HBR article this week.

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Lauren Rawlings
Female Founders Panel with Material

We hosted a female founders panel with Material (a new venture studio based in New York focused on co-founding and building companies alongside outstanding entrepreneurial talent) last week, and our goal was to inspire entrepreneurial risk-taking, especially during times of uncertainty.

Our all-star panel included:

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Lauren Rawlings
False Positives in the Fight for Gender Diversity

I'm having a hard time celebrating some of the newly released statistics on women in leadership. Two examples of what I see as false positives here are:

1) The promotion of women into executive roles without true P&L responsibility

2) The promotion/recruitment of women into partner roles at VC firms without the ability to sit on portfolio company boards or make investment decisions

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Lauren Rawlings
Gender Diversity on Private Boards in 2019

According to their 2019 study of private company boardrooms, only 7% of board seats were held by women and 60% of the companies did not have a single female board member. The gender gap stems from a lack of female representation in both founders and funders.

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Lauren Rawlings
VC in NYC

NYC has double the amount of VC investments in female-founded companies than Silicon Valley. The diversity of the city's industries, along with the diversity of the population, are both contributing factors.

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Lauren Rawlings
The Importance of Diversity in Venture Capital

Imagine a world in which there was diversity of opinion in meetings where investment decisions took place. Perhaps someone would ask the question, “When will this company be profitable?” or even “Can we trust their leadership team as they continue to build and grow?”

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Lauren Rawlings