Diversity to avoid groupthink

It is fairly unusual for a venture capital (VC) firm to issue a press release on the departure of one of its partners – normally VCs’ websites remain unchanged for months. Especially when the recruiting firm, in this case industrial conglomerate General Electric (GE), has yet to send out its own release.

But a little proactivity is perhaps understandable given the VC in this case is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), which is the most active syndicate partner with corporate venturing units globally, according to Global Corporate Venturing.

KPCB said in its release that Risa Stack had served for two years on the advisory board for Healthymagination – GE’s $6bn global commitment to provide better healthcare for more people by making healthcare more affordable and accessible – “and joining Healthymagination was a natural next step into an operating chapter of her career”.

Brook Byers, partner at KPCB, added in the release: “While she will be missed at KPCB, we are excited that we can continue to work with Risa in her operating role at GE, a company with which we have a long history of collaboration and partnership. We look forward to working even more closely with GE and healthymagination to transform healthcare businesses together.”

Although unintended, Risa Stack’s departure from KPCB to GE’s Healthymagination programme to begin an emerging health innovations group there also comes at a time of increased scrutiny of gender equality at venture investment firms.

KPCB, which has females making up about a quarter of its team on its website, has strongly denied and refuted allegations of gender discrimination by Ellen Pao, a former partner. Last summer, KPCB hired Megan Quinn from financial portfolio company Square as an investment partner and Stephanie Tilenius as an executive-in-residence.

But executives who work trying to boost the number of female entrepreneurs that are backed and the overall numbers of women investors in the industry.

A study of 71 VC firms last June by news provider Betabeat found nearly 50% had no female partners and the overall proportion was 8.3%.

Corporate venturing is seen as more balanced in numbers and percentages between men and women, partly because their parents already have strict human resources practices to control for age, racial or gender discrimination.

Stack’s boss at Healthymagination is Sue Siegel, who has also hired Rowan Chapman and Alex de Winter from VC firm after it last year decided to move away from life sciences to concentrate on information technology deals. Overall, GE is undergoing an overhaul of its corporate venturing unit with what appears to be a rebranding of the unit as GE Ventures and the hires in Healthymagination as well as the launch of a software fund under Mike Dolbec.

But depending on your viewpoint, more can be done to promote diversity at corporate venturing units, too, as 10% of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100 were female. More work will be done by us this year on the relative equality below this top rank, so please let us know your thoughts and what would be interesting.

Diversity helps avoid groupthink and opens up a different range of opportunities that could be considered and, given the fairly poor performance of most venture teams, this can probably be of benefit.

In our own news, my colleague, Toby Lewis, will be taking over primary responsibility for this column and the wider output editor of Global Corporate Venturing as I step up to become editor-in-chief. Expect to see these emails from tlewis@globalcorporateventuring.com in future and also drop him as well as me a line as your feedback and news has been very helpful these past two years.