How an immigrant became America’s richest female investor
'22.08.2018'
Source: Forbes Russia
Theresia Gow was not afraid to leave a successful career in venture capital firm Accel Partners, which invested in Facebook to open its venture capital fund and become the richest female investor in America. How did she do it?
Theresia Gow began climbing to the heights of the American venture investment Olympus a few decades ago, says Forbes Russia. In high school in a small town near Buffalo in New York State, she became the first student to enter Brown University, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States. In 1990, she became the first female investor in the Accel Partners venture capital fund in Palo Alto, California. Then the first female partner of the company and the first female managing partner. Four years ago, she left the company and founded Aspect Ventures, her own investment fund, which later became one of the first such organizations in the Silicon Valley, headed by a member of the weaker sex.
This year for the first time, Theresia entered the list of women who had been successful on their own, compiled by Forbes. Her fortune is estimated at $ 500 million, most of which comes from profits from Accel Partners' early investments in the social network Facebook. Recently, at Aspect Ventures, she prepared ForeScout, which develops digital security solutions, to market, and during the initial public offering of the company managed to attract more than $ 1 billion. Gou was born into a family of overseas Chinese in Indonesia. At the beginning of 1970, when she was only three years old, her family moved to the USA.
“We left the country at the very end of Suharto’s political revolution, when the authorities started persecuting ethnic Chinese,” the entrepreneur recalls. In Indonesia, her father was a dentist and her mother was a nurse. However, upon arrival in the United States, both were forced to start a career from scratch.
Goe says: "My father started working as a dishwasher to get an American dental license, he entered New York State University at Buffalo." It so happened that in the school where she studied, most students did not think about higher education. Contrary to this trend, in 1986, she entered Brown University and received an engineering degree. During her summer internship at General Motors and British Petroleum, she found her vocation in expanding her client network.
Gow shares: “I was working in the same building with a thousand engineers and suddenly realized that my main attraction was sales management. But all those who moved from front-line design to marketing were MBAs. ” So after graduating from Brown University, Gough passed a standardized management test and became a management consultant for the Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Company. She then also received her MBA from Stanford University.
Shortly after graduating from Stanford in 1996, Go cooperated with several classmates and attracted $ 1 million venture capital investments to finance Release Software, a software development company for payments in the software industry. The entrepreneur notes: “We have grown to a decent scale in 1998-1999 and were already ready to go public. But at the same time, our third CEO changed in a year, and I thought that this would not be good for our capitalization. ” When the woman began to look for a new field of activity, the member of the Board of Release Software pushed her to the field of venture investments:
“He told me about three other young projects in his portfolio, as well as three venture funds. He told me: “You managed to work as a startup engineer, you have an engineering degree. Why not immerse yourself in something new? ”
And Gow accepted the offer. In 1999, she joined Accel Partners as an investment partner. Over the years, 15 has spent a number of successful investment rounds at this company, including those for Trulia’s rental rental search site and digital security solutions firm Imperva. Both organizations today are traded on the stock market.
Nevertheless, the main part of the current state of the entrepreneur brought work in the investment project of one of her Accel Partners colleagues Jim Breuer, who was engaged only in the increasingly popular social network Facebook. Gow admits: “Before that, we considered other online platforms that even had more users. However, nowhere have we seen such high daily user activity as on Facebook. Two thirds of its users visited the site every day, and half of them spent two hours there every day. Facebook is a truly significant service - it won us over then. ”
Facebook’s entry into the stock market in 2012 was a resounding success, and to this day it remains one of the most successful examples of initial public offerings in history. Less than two years after this sensational transaction, Gou left Accel Partners and created her own investment fund, Aspect Ventures. It was founded along with Jennifer Fonstad, another experienced investor, at their own expense.
Aspect Ventures is a young venture fund that invests in digital security, develops new production processes, and software for health monitoring.
Go reveals his business strategy: “I founded Aspect Ventures to invest in the same way that it was done at the end of 1990, that is, through specialized funds, which were specifically designed for the early stages of investing. On the one hand, in order to conduct such rounds, we wanted to be quite noticeable players, but, on the other hand, we strive not to attract all the attention to ourselves in order to allow other participants to make investments. ”
Since February, 2014 has been able to attract around $ 350 million for various projects. The new fund, which was announced this year and already has a sum of $ 181 million, is financed by investors such as the wife of Microsoft’s founder Melinda Gates and the general director of telecommunications Cisco Chuck Robbins. Last October, Aspect Ventures secured an initial public offering of ForeScout, a digital security company.
For Gou, this was the fourth exit to the stock exchange: "Entering the stock market is always an extremely exciting event."
Among other promising startups, the entrepreneur names such companies as Exabeam, which develops solutions for special services, and Cato Networks, which provides enterprise networking services and corporate security solutions.
Gou is also a founding member of All Raise, an organization that helps women establish and invest in startups in Silicon Valley. Therefore, it is not surprising that in projects Aspect Ventures 40% of all assets belong to women. Among the numerous initiatives of All Raise, Founders for Change is worth mentioning, under which 600 founders of a wide variety of start-ups subscribed to encourage diversity in staff and shareholders.
The initiative was supported by such business heavyweights as Instagram founder Kevin Sistrom and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. Gou is extremely happy that the idea has found a lively response in the hearts of so many entrepreneurs: “Diversity in business welcomes and encourages the overwhelming majority. It is a great honor for me to be involved in everything that happens. ”
