賭上一切的硅谷夢 準媽媽也能成功

Before Nathalie Miller decided to walk away from Instacart, the grocery delivery start-up now worth more than $2 billion, she made a spreadsheet to analyze how much money she was leaving on the table.

在決定離開現估值超過20億美元的食品雜貨遞送創業公司Instacart之前，納塔莉·米勒(Nathalie Miller)做了一個電子表格來分析她放棄了多少錢。

She had been Instacart’s 20th employee, managing operations during a period of extremely rapid growth, and the sum could have been huge. She quit anyway. Like many strivers in Silicon Valley, she had a bigger plan: to start her own company that could not only make millions, but also fulfill a mission she believed in.

她是Instacart的第20名員工，在一段極爲快速增長的時期管理公司運作，這應該會是一筆鉅款。但她還是辭了。就像硅谷的衆多奮鬥者那樣，她有一個更大的計劃：創辦一家自己的公司，不僅可以賺許多錢，還可以追求她自己的信仰。

Her idea was to build a recruiting and hiring website that would make corporate America friendlier to women. She called the site Doxa and persuaded an engineer friend to start it with her. They strategized in borrowed office space and recruited people from other tech companies to work on the project at night, promising full-time salaries as soon as they raised venture capital.

她的想法是建立一個招聘網站，讓美國企業對女性更友好。她將網站命名爲Doxa，並說服一名工程師朋友與她一同創業。他們的策略是在借來的辦公空間辦公，並從其他科技公司招募員工在晚上開發這個項目，承諾在募集到風險投資後給他們發放全職工資。

Then, six months later, Ms. Miller discovered that she was pregnant with her first child. A baby wasn’t something she and her husband, Isaak Le, had been planning quite yet, but they were excited. Still, a sliver of doubt began to undercut her confidence about starting her own company. “How high can I stack the cards against myself — a pregnant brown woman?” said Ms. Miller, who is of Vietnamese and European descent.

然而半年後，米勒發現自己懷上了第一個孩子。她和丈夫伊薩克·黎(Isaak Le)尚未打算要孩子，但他們都很興奮。儘管如此，一絲懷疑已經開始削弱她對創辦公司的信心。“對一個棕色皮膚的孕婦來說，在不利的情況下我還能堅持多久？”有着越南和歐洲血統的米勒說。

Silicon Valley can seem like the land of overnight success. College dropouts show up and become billionaires a few years later. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire by the time he was 23, and Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp when it was just five years old.

有人會覺得硅谷是一個一夜成名的地方。大學輟學生們來到這裏，幾年後就成爲了億萬富翁。馬克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)在23歲時成爲了億萬富翁，而Facebook花費了190億美元來收購剛剛創辦五年的WhatsApp。

But despite their hold on the imagination, these examples aren’t typical. Much more representative are the companies you never hear about because they never get off the ground.

但是，儘管他們堅持自己的夢想，這些例子並不典型。更具代表性的是那些你從來沒有聽說過的公司，因爲它們始終沒有發展起來。

Venture capital firms invest in 1 percent of the companies that pitch them. The overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs who are funded are white men. Just 1 percent are black, 8 percent are female and 12 percent are Asian, according to data from CB Insights, which tracks private companies and investors. Even for start-ups that raise money, the mortality rate is high, with most dying after an average of 20 months and $1.3 million in financing.

在所有向風投介紹了自己的公司中，只有1%能拿到投資。絕大多數獲得投資的創業家是男性白人。據追蹤私營企業和投資者數據的CB Insights，僅有1%是黑人，8%是女性，12%是亞裔。即使對於已籌集到資金的初創企業，倒閉率也很高。大多數會在平均堅持20個月並融資130萬美元后倒閉。

In recent months, the fund-raising atmosphere has cooled as venture capitalists react to the poor stock market performance of some public tech companies and question whether the recent fast pace of investment is sustainable. Venture capitalists are making fewer investments at lower valuations.

近幾個月來，募資氣氛有所降溫，因爲風險投資人對一些上市科技公司在股市上的糟糕表現做出了反應，並質疑近期投資的快節奏是否是可持續的。風險投資人在估值較低時會減少投資。

“There is this delusion that it’s easy to raise money in Silicon Valley,” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a mentorship and investment program for start-ups. “Raising money is incredibly hard.”

“有這樣的一種錯覺，就是在硅谷募集資金很容易，”爲初創企業提供指導和投資計劃的Y Combinator公司總裁薩姆·奧爾特曼(Sam Altman)說。“籌集資金是極其困難的。”

Nonetheless, Silicon Valley keeps seducing people. For those who come, the risk is worth the potential reward — not just riches, but also the more dreamy belief that tech entrepreneurialism is a force for good. Ms. Miller was not immune.

然而硅谷依然充滿誘惑力。對於那些慕名而來的人來說，這種潛在的回報是值得去冒險的——不僅僅是財富，還有更夢幻的信念：科技創業精神是一股善的力量。米勒也是如此。

“I want Doxa to exist in the world,” she told me in July, “because it will make the world a better place.”

“我想讓Doxa在世界上有一席之地，”7月份她對我說，“因爲它將讓世界變得更美好。”

A White Male Culture

白人男性文化

Ms. Miller, who turns 34 on Sunday, grew up in Berkeley, and after graduating from Harvard, moved to Vietnam. There, she started a microfinance nonprofit, expanding it to 92 employees. When she returned to the United States, she began a doctorate program in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, but was soon drawn into the tech industry.

在週日即將年滿34歲的米勒是在伯克利長大的。在哈佛(Harvard)畢業後，她搬到了越南。在那裏，她創辦了一家非營利性小額信貸公司，最終擴張到了92名員工。回到美國後，她開始在加州大學伯克利分校攻讀社會學博士學位，但很快就被拉進了科技產業中。

She joined Instacart in 2013, and saw some of tech’s biggest challenges firsthand. In a year, the company grew to 120 employees from 20, and had 4,000 independent contractors. Hiring well at that kind of speed, she found, is hard to get right.

她在2013年加入Instacart，親歷了科技業的一些最嚴峻的挑戰。一年內，公司從20名員工發展到了120名員工，並有4000家獨立承包商。她發現以這樣的速度招聘，很難不出錯。

Ms. Miller also experienced the challenges of being a woman in tech. One day, a new employee told her that he had ranked the hottest women at the company, and she was No. 1. She reported the comment to managers, and the employee was fired the next day.

米勒也經歷了女性在科技企業所面臨的挑戰。有一天，一個新員工告訴她，他對公司最漂亮的女性進行了排名，而她排第1位。她將這番話報告給了經理，那名員工第二天就被解僱了。

Though she was satisfied with Instacart’s response, she knew women in many industries faced much worse, and started ruminating about how she could change workplace culture more broadly.

雖然她很滿意Instacart的迴應，但她知道女性在許多行業面臨着更糟糕的情況，並開始琢磨如何可以更廣泛地改變職場文化。

That is when she came up with Doxa. The name comes from a Greek term that sociologists use to describe the things that people take for granted but that don’t necessarily have to be that way.

這時候，她想出了Doxa。這個名稱來自於一個希臘語詞彙，社會學家用來描述人們想當然但不一定會這樣的事情。

The idea was for a site that would collect data about the sorts of things applicants really want to know but don’t ask in job interviews: Do you feel as if co-workers value your opinions? Do people actually take their vacation days? How often do you work nights and weekends? It would offer online personality tests, then use psychometric data to match candidates with employers more effectively. It would make money from companies paying for information about candidates and to post job ads, as they do on LinkedIn. Sam Meder, who had run engineering at a start-up acquired by Pinterest, agreed to start it with her.

這個網站的想法是收集求職者迫切想知道但在面試時卻不問的信息：你是否覺得同事會重視你的意見？員工真的會去休假嗎？你們是否經常晚上和週末工作？網站將提供在線性格測試，然後使用心理數據來更有效地匹配僱主和求職者。它的盈利模式是向購買求職者信息和發佈招聘廣告的公司收取費用，和在LinkedIn一樣。曾在一家被Pinterest收購的創業公司裏負責工程工作的山姆·梅德(Sam Meder)同意與她一起創業。

Ms. Miller also saw Doxa as a way to address diversity issues. The statistics in technology are particularly bad. On average, 30 percent of employees at big tech companies including Google, Facebook and Apple are women, 5 percent are Latino and 4 percent are black. A diversity industry has sprung up to teach companies how to become more inclusive. Engineers attend training sessions on unconscious bias. Companies are hiring corporate diversity chiefs.

米勒還認爲Doxa是一種解決多元化問題的方式。技術領域的數據尤其糟糕。谷歌(Google)、Facebook和蘋果(Apple)等大型科技公司平均30%的員工是女性，5%是拉丁裔，4％是黑人。一個多元化的產業涌現出來，教導科技公司如何變得更具包容性。工程師參加有關無意識偏見的培訓會議。公司僱傭多元化的公司高管。

Ms. Miller thought Doxa could help by offering data that research shows is important to women — the gender pay gap and the percentage of women on the executive team — as well as factors like whether women felt they were given credit for their ideas. But first, she needed to raise money.

米勒認爲Doxa會有幫助，它可以給出對女性有重要意義的研究數據——性別收入差距和管理團隊的女性比例——還有別的一些因素，比如女性是否感覺自己的想法受到肯定。但首先，她需要融資。

Venture capitalists, who hold the keys to success in Silicon Valley by providing start-up money, are even more likely to be white and male than tech company employees are. Theirs is an insular business. Most investors accept pitches only from entrepreneurs who come through an introduction, and they tend to finance people who have succeeded before, or who remind them of those who did.

與科技公司員工相比，在爲初創公司提供資金，掌握硅谷成功命脈的風險投資人中，白人男性的比例還要更高。這是個很封閉的行業。大多數投資者只接受引見來的創業項目，他們傾向於投資的都是以前有過成功經歷的，或者是能讓他們想起某個成功者的人。

According to a 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences, investors prefer pitches by men, particularly attractive men, to those by women, even when the content of the pitch is the same. In addition to studying the results of three entrepreneurial pitch competitions, the researchers conducted two experiments in which a representative sample of working adults heard identical pitches in male and female voices. Sixty-eight percent of people preferred to finance the company when it was pitched by a male voice, while 32 percent chose the female.

美國國家科學院(National Academy of Sciences)2014年公佈的一篇論文顯示，在介紹創業項目時，投資者更喜歡男性的介紹，尤其是外形好的男性，儘管女性介紹的內容跟男性並無不同。除了研究三大創業項目介紹比賽的結果，研究人員還開展了兩項實驗，讓成年工作者的代表傾聽男性和女性講述同樣的計劃。68%的人傾向於資助由男性講述計劃的公司，只有32%的人選擇女性。

Venture firms with female partners are three times as likely to invest in a company with a female chief executive, according to the Diana Project at Babson College. Yet just 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms are women.

巴布森學院(Babson College)戴安娜項目(Diana Project)指出，在擁有女性合夥人的風投公司中，投資由女性擔任首席執行官的公司的機率，是男性組建的風投公司的三倍。但風投公司只有6%的合作人是女性。

Because of investors’ lack of diversity, they do not necessarily understand the value of companies that make products for customers who are not like them, said Tristan Walker, founder and chief executive of Walker & Company, which makes health and beauty products for minorities, including the Bevel razor. On his first pitch, the investor told him she didn’t think shaving irritation was a big enough societal issue.

Walker & Company公司創始人兼首席執行官特里斯坦·沃克(Tristan Walker)表示，由於投資者缺乏多樣性，在針對不同於他們的人生產的產品上，他們不見得能理解其價值。該公司爲少數族裔人士提供保健及美容產品，比如Bevel剃鬚刀。第一次介紹項目的時候，投資人對他說，她覺得剃鬚引起的發炎不是一個足夠大的社會問題。

“All she had to do before she said that was get on the phone with 10 black men or women and eight or nine would have said, ‘This is an issue I’ve had to deal with my entire life,’” Mr. Walker said.

“她在說這些話前應該與十個黑人男性或女性通電話，其中有八九個會說，‘我這輩子都得對付這個問題，’”沃克表示。

Some investors are working to change this. Venture firms like Kapor Capital were formed specifically to finance start-ups with a diversity mission and to prioritize underrepresented founders. Others fill their partner ranks with people who are not white men.

一些投資者正在努力改變這種情況。卡普爾資本(Kapor Capital)等公司得以成立，專門致力於資助懷有多樣化使命的初創公司，並優先考慮那些屬於少數羣體的創始人。其他一些公司則選擇非白人男性擔任合夥人。

“Deal flow comes in through people’s network, and if you’re a young woman or a person of color, a lot of times you just might not know who that senior person is at that top-tier firm,” said Joanne Yuan, an associate partner at Cowboy Ventures, whose investment team of four has three women who are minorities. “Our portfolio looks more diverse because we know a lot of people who aren’t white males.”

“交易流程經由人際網絡完成，如果你是年輕女性或者有色人種，你可能很多時候都不認識頂級公司的高層人員是誰，”Cowboy Ventures副合夥人喬安妮·袁(Joanne Yuan)說。她所在公司的投資團隊有四個人，其中三人是屬於少數羣體的女性。“我們的投資組合看起來更加多元，因爲我們認識很多不是白人男性的人。”