emily: while the me too movement has rocked the world of entertainment, media and politics, it got a head start in the tech industry. in early 2017, a young engineer named susan fowler published a scathing memo about sexual harassment at uber that kicked off reports about men behaving badly across silicon valley. the revelations lit a fire in the hearts of women in tech who had had enough. in 2018, a group of female venture capitalist banded together with the goal of changing the face of those investing in tech startups and

the people who build them. it is the industry that's changing the world faster than any other, yet it is also one of the most dominated by men. joining me today on "studio 1.0," aileen lee, founder of cowboy ventures, kirsten green of forerunner ventures, and maha ibrahim, general pointer -- partner and can ventures. ♪ emily: in april of 2018, you all were the cover of forbes magazine. this is space normally reserved for men, male billionaires, and this is the first time a group of women was on the cover. when you saw this, how did it make you feel? >> we were all in awe, months of work and frankly this point decades in the background conversations, and wondering whether our industry was finally

going to be as diverse as we all wanted it to be. i would say that the first reaction we all felt was this level of awe that it was coming to the forefront. emily: aileen, it was about a year before that you wrote an email to 20-some female vc's and you had had enough. what was the spark that was the fire that got you to do that? aileen: when you enter venture enter tech, after being fortunate enough to go to good high schools and selective colleges, there are as many women as men in your undergraduate class and you wind up in tech. you look around the table and there are really no women, no people of color. it is this bizarre other universe. i have been thinking about it. i know enough of these women. we are friendly with each other. we all behind closed doors or

over cocktails and after board meetings are comparing notes about these kinds of issues. there is enough of us now. we all feel the same way. we are starting to collaborate with each other more. we should get together. i wrote this draft and kept it in my draft folder for a couple weeks or couple months. what if everyone is like, i don't want to do it. i don't know. one day i decided to hit send. emily: you get this email. what did you think? >> i think it was the right time with the right message. it felt like here is an opportunity to do something productive, right? i think everybody has a combination of outrage over what was happening feeling exhausted , and frustrated with the situation, and the original impetus was let's do something productive with it. emily: you are all competitors. you compete for deals. why collaborate with the competition? >> that is what makes it so special. by the way, the competition is nothing new in the venture industry. our male colleagues have been doing to as long as i have been

in venture. >> we are competitive, but we also have to be collaborative. that is something about the industry. very seldom do you see a company that goes from there first to their round of funding to their exit opportunity with one firm. emily: how did you decide to make all raise a thing? there is the careers program, female founders office hours. you know have a conference. >> this did not happen overnight. we all knew each other fairly well. that is what made it so special. it was so authentic, so natural, and we all had this call to action by the virtue of what had been happening in our industry over the 2017 period that it was a point in time thing that when aileen pressed send, there was no saying no. emily: do you know of any woman who has gotten an opportunity or hired or a company that funding

because all raise exist? >> many. we get regular emails from women who have been doing office hours, never raised money before, or outside the technical echo system and they are not in the bay area didn't go to , stanford or harvard, don't know anyone growing up in tech. they feel like an outsider. they say i feel like for the first time like people are looking out for me. we have gotten emails from women he said this changed my life. i feel like i can do this now. emily: there is activism. there is conversation and organizations like all raise. when you look at the numbers, 30 new women partners were added since march 2018, but only 10% of vc's in the united states are women. 73% of firms still don't have a female partner. >> i know. emily: is that progress? it's opportunity. that is what we are doing. it has been one year we have mobilized forces against that.

i think 30 new female partners that have a community behind them to help them be better and more successful in their new role. >> in our industry, things move slowly. my firm is, and you know this, because you have interviewed all of us, we are a case study in what having female investors can mean for the number of females that actually receive capital. emily: you have been there for years. >> i have been there 19 years. we have 40% of our investment professionals are female. forerunner is larger than the percentage. i would make a bet that my firm and forerunners and cowboy have a higher percentage of females being invested in than anybody in the industry, because we have females at the investing table. what i would like to see is how that number changes over the next five to 10 years unfortunately. not over the next one to two. emily: there are those who do not think it will be as successful as you think.

another investor is skeptical of the work you're doing, saying, "it will predictably fail." adding a single white woman partner will not change a vc firm." >> she is absolutely right. that is why all raise exists, a coalition of women supporting women. it is incredibly important that we have not one woman at the investing table but two, , three, four, and they stay in the door and stay successful. >> it is also fair to be skeptical because there are firms that are marketing they have women or hiring investment professionals and not supporting them, or saying i hired a woman, check, done. high five, let's do what we were doing before. that is not good. it does not work. we are on to that. emily: you hear a lot of things and a lot of things that happened behind the scenes. do you think bad behavior is

rooted out in silicon valley? is it still happening? >> bad behavior happens in life. it is like people. there are good people, better people. i don't know it will get routed out in all kinds of places but i , think there is a light shone on it and it is a conversation acceptable to have a about it, and questions there to ask or even expected to ask. emily: i get asked a lot, some are writing books, raising money. they are the ceo of a startup. is that ok? is there room for redemption? >> i think we have to stay hopeful that people can change and that people can evolve. emily: that is a yes. >> i want people to be the best versions of themselves. just because they found themselves at a time in their life with a have not lived up to that in a time in their life, i hope that does not mean they have to walk around not being the best version of themselves. >> i am focused on people getting first chances.

there are a lot of people who have not been given first chances and that is what we are trying to work on. >> yes. ♪ >> growing up in tech and in venture capital, when you are the only woman around the table and is not easy and you see a -- and experience a lot of things that by legal definitions are not legal. ♪

emily: let's talk about how you got your first chances. aileen, i want to start with you. aileen: i am a first-generation daughter of immigrants from china. i was fortunate that my grandparents and parents sacrificed a lot and emphasized education for my sister and myself, so we got into selective colleges. i did banking and worked at gap. claire perkins they took a chance on me. they had hired all men in the past, generally people who went to stanford and worked in tech. i was working at gap.

i have loved my job ever since. emily: view joined kleiner perkins as an associate partner. it is interesting because kleiner is one of the more storied venture capital firms, but was also sued for gender discrimination by ellen pao. what was your experience at kleiner like? aileen: growing up in tech and venture capital when you are the only woman around the table is not easy. you see and experience a lot of things that by legal definition are not legal. and people choose to handle it in different ways. emily: ellen lost her case in court, but do you think she should have won? aileen: i was surprised she did not win on one of them. that is all i will say. emily: what made you decide to leave kleiner? you suggested investing in uber. they were not interested at the time. there were moments where you had ideas but they did not listen. aileen: good friends of mine are entrepreneurs.

they are always thinking about startups. they knew my firm and me and said, when we you leave to start your own firm? it had not crossed my mind i could do that. it had not crossed my mind that people would think they would still be my friends if i left kleiner perkins. >> wow. >> wow. >> good thing you debunked that. aileen: i realized i had gotten a little too attached to it. i had been there for 12 years. and then this whole new ecosystem was developing, more collaborative, a different pace and velocity of investing, and i also i would have a chance to find my conviction and my gut. when you are at a big firm, even though you are a senior partner, there are a lot of the egos in the room at all venture firms and you are gaming the system when you bring companies forward based on how you think they will be received. it felt like coming back to the

basics, really small, low overhead, meeting with companies, working with founders and not having a lot of infrastructure what i wanted to do next. emily: you left and started your own seed fund. that is a big deal. aileen: i guess at the time i did not realize it was. >> we had a lot of conversations about starting a firm around that time. emily: you, kirsten, came from outside silicon valley. kirsten: when i got an email from aileen lee saying we should get together, it was like i got an email from a celebrity. i was so excited. [laughter] kirsten: it was validation about how important it was to have community in this business. emily: you started as an analyst. you are going to malls, trying to figure out foot traffic. what was happening in e-commerce. >> i was drawn to investing because i was interested in learning and i was comfortable

with math and analytics. that seems like a good combination, finding unique investment ideas other people were not onto already is what hooked me in the business. emily: you both invested in dollar shave club. a razor company that sold for $1 billion. >> 55. emily: maha, you have had check writing privileges from day one, correct? maha: that is correct. emily: you did not face a lot of these things in your own firm. maha: i didn't. i didn't know at the time, or years, that it was unusual. i had always been, through high school, college, my phd program, through working at a telecommunications startup, always been in the minority. so it was not anything about the strange going into a venture firm and being the only female,

right? i was at a 1000-person startup with four female vps, of which i was one. that is what i knew. i was acclimatized. emily: you have always looked at consumer and enterprise. maha: that is correct. i started my career, and for the first eight or nine years only infrastructure, data center and -- only invested in infrastructure, data center and storage type deals. it was not until 10 years ago i did my first consumer investment, and that was not planned. it was a company that ended up being a consumer company over time. i would say i kind of waded into it inorganically. emily: you are all sort of unicorns in venture capital because of what you accomplished. aileen coined that term. i want to take a moment to recognize that because that term came from you.

aileen: the analysis that underpinned it i equally if not more proud of. our industry historically has been -- even though we manage so much money and create so much economic opportunity, there has been so little data and analysis historically of private companies, i was interested in trying to do a truly accurate quantitative analysis of what these companies have in common and the trends. some of the trends were helpful for the entrepreneurial ecosystem. ♪ maha: the tariffs are government has put in place are ruinous for our economy. ♪

emily: hundreds of billions of dollars have been wiped off the market caps of big tech companies in the last several months. and there is fear about a broader economic downturn and whether that will impact tech. is that impacting your strategies? aileen: it absolutely will.

there are positives and negatives to what is happening. one, on the negative side, the tariffs our government has put in place are in the long-term, and maybe this is my economist background speaking a little bit more, they are ruinous for our economy. they are ruinous for the global economy. even when i look at our micro little world in silicon valley, when we think about prices going up, both for direct goods and the supply goods, the components effectively, these are unnecessary price changes that the only beneficiary of that is, frankly, nobody who needs to have that money. i do believe the tariffs put in place are anti-capitalism, and will in the long-term negatively affect gdp around the world. emily: i wonder if some of these companies have shot themselves in the foot.

if you look at a company like facebook, is the damage self-inflicted? >> i think the consumer response or sentiment around facebook -- it creates windows for new startups. because if there is a startup that will promise certain things around privacy or your data and you can share, and we have learned a lot about social media in the past five or 10 years -- this is part of the cycle of creation, destruction and evolution in technology. you learn from the predecessors and then people come up with new products. emily: mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg have been scrutinized for their leadership. where do you think they went wrong? >> it is pursuing dollars at any cost at the end of the day. they are willing to -- whether it is them or people under them, i have no idea. that is for you to figure out as journalists, but i think they were willing to sacrifice a lot

of their principles for the almighty dollar. emily: sheryl sandberg, specifically, has been heavily criticized for whatever shortcomings. do you think that criticism has been fair, or it has been disproportionate? >> i think in many sectors of society we are witnessing how women are treated and viewed in the public media than men are treated. emily: do you think she is getting criticized more because she is a woman? >> obviously, it is not binary. she is the chief business officer of the company, and there are a lot of business issues or business decisions and policy decisions that fall under her purview. but if you look at politics in particular right now and how females in office are being viewed by the media or by the public versus men, there is

clearly a double standard. i think the same is true in business. emily: where are the double standards? if elon musk can talk to the new york times and cry >> -- >>and spoke during an interview -- emily can women do that? : >> no. >> no. >> what you think? >> #fundingsecured. kirsten: it is not ok but we are on a continuum of integrating women, and while we are on that path to carbon that opportunity out we are held to a higher standard. emily: i wonder if we are doing this to our detriment of society, these companies. like marissa mayer, who was so picked apart. where is she now? aileen: there has to be an acknowledgment that we are not all uniform. that one woman does not equal the next does not equal the next. we are all very different. our investment styles and personalities are different.

that doesn't mean we can't come together and produce something that is excellent and where we can succeed. in fact, that means we can come together and do great things. aileen: the other thing that has changed in the past year that i am excited about, we are seeing more men stand up and call these things out. i think it is exciting to see more men willing to stand up and say what they think about the issues. emily: there is talk about amazon meeting regulation. are you concerned about regulation for tech? could that hurt? kirsten: i think about it from different perspectives, i don't want to live in a world where there are five choices for everything. it is not enough. it will not be as interesting. i don't think it will ultimately be good for us. if you go back to why the regulations exist, why do the antitrust laws exist, it is to protect the consumer, right? i think it is your definition of what has been protecting the consumer has been about price and access, and that is where we are running into interference

around how those companies, if they interfere with that, but i think maybe that needs to be re-explored, the standards that govern the way we think about when a company is too big. emily: are you concerned because the macroeconomic slowdown that funding could dry up? >> i am concerned about that. i believe that is why a lot of companies raised the capital they did in 2018. i think fear as opposed to greed was driving a lot of the large capital raises. people were feeling like this party has to end at some point in time. the problem is or the benefit is i don't really see the party ended. there is still a huge amount of cash in the system looking for returns. you are not getting it on the stock market. they are not getting it in emerging markets. it is a macro fund flows issue. it will go for high beta, high

innovation, high potential return, and that is venture. emily: you are on a lot of this these days, the midas list, how do you use that power? >> that is a great question. one thing is we made all raise happen. we decided to take some of that notoriety and influence and really direct it towards goals we feel like our worthwhile. >> 2018 was the year where i realized that we collectively have reached o.g. status in this industry. [laughter] it is scary. it is sad. >> let's own it. >> to that extent, i am trying to own it, and with that owning or power comes the responsibility to make sure that we are bettering this industry, that we are making sure we have a class of junior people in this industry that are doing the right things with our founders

and companies, etc. >> there is still so much opportunity regardless the funding or economic environment. both -- cowboy ventures is a start up. we are very small and early, so we have a lot to prove. i still have a lot to prove as a venture investor and a founder of a firm i hope will last beyond me. the opportunity we have, all of us, and many who are not here right now who are involved with all raise, that family and community will grow larger in 2019. it comes from such a good place. i am sure we will make mistakes. we have not done everything perfectly but it comes from a place of checking any personal agenda or self-help at the door and truly trying to create a better, more-inclusive tech environment where all people from different backgrounds have an opportunity to thrive, and that is super important to all of us.

emily: aileen lee, kirsten green, maha ibrahim, thank you. >> thank you. ♪

joel: grant reid leads a company with global success and some of the most well-known brands in the world. but the ceo of mars keeps his focus firmly on the future. mr. reid: my job is to make sure i'm setting us up for the next 100 years. joel: his vision for growth is linked with an insistence for principle. mr. reid: or performance for that principle is impossible. joel an emphasis on : transparency. mr. reid: we are trying to move with the consumer, give choice, and i think that is working well. joel: and a commitment to sustainability. mr. reid: we are cutting our greenhouse gas emissions ourselves. zero waste to landfills. joel: we talked about much more than candy and it was a treat. a conversation with grant reid