Welcome to Transparent VC by Tribe Global Ventures.

Normally Tribe Talking discusses a range of news items sharing our view on them.

But this episode will be focused on just one issue

and separated from other news items of the day. We'll be talking about what happened on Saturday

4th of November, 2003 by Sam Joel, founder and CEO of GivTree in comments made on LinkedIn

against Elainestead, Hannah Marino, Trenner Probert and others. Whilst Elaine, Hannah and Trenner are friends of tribe, this type of behaviour is unfortunately

not unique and sadly experienced daily by women in many geographies in many industries.

As such, we will use this time to do a short recap on what happened,

point you in the direction if you want to find out more,

and how we are thinking about the steps we will take to create what we consider a basic right,

the ability to turn up without being harassed or assaulted.

You'll see that we don't have all the answers and there may be parts that we've not expressed as well as we could,

but it's a start and we see this as an ongoing process of iteration and hope others will put forward what they're

going to do to improve these basic standards.

So for today, we're going to do something a little bit different.

We're going to take a specific topic that we think is very important, and rather than just treating it as a news item, we're going to take a specific topic that we think is very

important and rather than just treating it as a news item, we're going to put a specific

episode around it and hopefully use it to be a positive part of the overall conversation.

But it's to do with the Sam Joel of GivTree.

I don't even know what to describe it, whether it's an incident or a debacle or a situation.

I think it's all of those words you just described.

My first read of it was, is this actually for real?

...