Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures) - Unicorn Lessons

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2019

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns they studied had female co-founders, a finding that catalyzed her advocacy for increased diversity in technology startups. She more recently became a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem. She describes her circuitous path to a job in venture capital, surfaces some of the central strategies of seed-stage investing, and encourages people from diverse backgrounds to help transform the venture capital business.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneural Thought Leaders series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner.
0:13.0	On this episode, we're joined by Aileen Lee, founder and managing partner at Cowboy Ventures.
0:19.0	She also is a founding member of All Raise,
0:23.3	a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the representation of women and the venture-backed
0:28.9	ecosystem. Here's Aileen.
0:33.3	Thank you so much. I'm going to just tell you a little bit about me, and then I'm going to
0:37.0	actually open it up to questions in the beginning. I'd love to make sure this is your time, your hour, that we spend the time talking about stuff that you want to hear about. So I'll just give you a little background. So maybe you have a better idea of where I come from and stuff that we might be able to talk about. So I'm a first generation immigrant from,
0:55.0	my parents were both born in China, and they came here separately and through different journeys
1:00.8	and went through Ellis Island, and one settled in Iowa, and one settled in New York, and then
1:06.8	they met here in the United States. And so the immigrant story is a big part of my upbringing.
1:13.0	My grandparents at a Chinese restaurant in Yonkers, New York,
1:15.6	and everyone in the family used to help out and work there.
1:18.0	So kind of that work ethic and also understanding
1:20.6	everything that my grandparents and my parents went through
1:22.7	to make it so that I could be standing here in front of you
1:25.5	is just really important part of my, I think my work ethic and my values.
1:30.3	That lady, I couldn't find a picture of myself with what I was brought, I was born in Staten Island, New York,
1:38.3	and then I moved to New Jersey, and I could not find a picture of what my hair looked like back then,
1:43.3	but that's like a close approximation to what my hair look like back then.
1:49.4	And I was fortunate to go to MIT, as Tom mentioned.
	...

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