The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Theresia Gouw approaches her philanthropy in much the same way that she invests in startup companies. She backs nonprofits that need more than just her money and that are open to working closely with her so she can get to know their work deeply.
“There are a lot of people out there who have more money than I do so I have to add more value beyond just the dollars, and it has to be with a group that wants that,” says Gouw. “I have to believe that I can be helpful and not just write checks.”
She also takes the long view. It can take eight to 10 years for a startup to become successful. Likewise, Gouw, whose net worth stands at about $500 million, knows her charitable investments won’t always solve problems or bear fruit quickly; real results and change take time, she says.
The bulk of her giving so far has gone toward financial aid at her alma mater, Brown University, where she is a trustee. In 2013 she and another Brown alumnus gave a combined $35 million for Brown’s School of Engineering. Her first donation there was in 2004 when she endowed a scholarship for female majors in science, technology, engineering, and math, and later she supported Brown’s effort to eliminate loans from student financial-aid packages. At her 20-year reunion in 2010, she gave what she says is probably her most meaningful gift so far: an endowed scholarship to honor her close college friend, Lisa Neal Healy, who died of cancer in 2006 at age 38.
She also contributes to DonorsChoose.org, the crowdfunding site where teachers ask for money for classroom projects, and she serves as vice chairman of its board. In addition, she gives to All Raise, a new nonprofit aimed at promoting female and diverse leaders of technology companies, and a few other charities. To date, Gouw has given a total of just over $50 million, primarily to education and efforts to get more young women into STEM careers, two causes that have a direct relationship to her professional background and to her roots as an immigrant.
Immigrant Roots
Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Gouw came to the United States in 1971 when she was 3. Her parents fled the country amid a growing tide of resentment of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese. Her father was a dentist and her mother a nurse, but like many immigrants before them, they put their professional status aside and took jobs as a dishwasher and a waitress. They moved around in the early years in the United States, first staying with family in the Detroit area and then in New Jersey before moving to Buffalo, N.Y.
There her father attended the State University of New York at Buffalo’s dental school, which had an accelerated program for people who had earned their credentials outside the United States but needed a U.S. degree to practice here. After her father finished the program, the family settled in Middleport, N.Y., where he set up a dental practice, and her mother ran the office.
Gouw was among a moderately diverse crowd of children during her father’s SUNY years. But in Middleport — a town of about 1,800 people — the Gouws were almost the only Asians. Entering elementary school in the middle of the year was a jarring experience.
“Moving to this small town was in many ways a wonderful, lovely experience,” says Gouw. “But on my first day of first grade, a boy came up to me with this little-kid taunt (about Asians). My teacher was horrified, and he got into a lot of trouble, but it was maybe not the smoothest entry.”
On the other hand, she says, coming to understand over time how her immigrant parents gave up a comfortable life in Indonesia and struggled to rebuild that life in pursuit of the American dream for their family left a deep impression.
“That really shaped me. It drilled into me the power of hard work and determination and perseverance,” says Gouw. “Lots of people work hard and don’t necessarily achieve their dreams, but unlike a lot of places in the world, it was very clear to me from an early age that if you work hard and try your very best, you have the opportunity to try to pursue whatever you want here.”
Education a Priority
In her parents’ view, everything good came through education, and Gouw says that is one of the reasons education is such a big part of her philanthropy. After graduating from the local public high school, she struggled in her first year at Brown to master her engineering class. But she persisted and graduated with an engineering degree in 1990 and went to work as a consultant at Bain & Company in Boston to pay off her school loans. She then moved to California to attend business school at Stanford, where she graduated in 1994 with an MBA.
After Stanford, Gouw returned to Bain for two years to pay for her business degree before joining some Stanford friends as a founding member of the start-up Release Software in 1996.
Her decision to join a startup didn’t come easily. Success was not guaranteed, and she was worried what would happen if the venture didn’t work out. Still, she took the leap, reminding herself of the risk her parents took in leaving home to start over on the other side of the world so she could have a better life.
“It’s not so scary when you frame it that way,” says Gouw. “I thought, ‘You know what? Most startups fail. So what? Let’s try it.’ I had to remember I have this great education. If it’s a complete and total failure, I’ll find something else I can do.”
True Calling
Release Software ultimately didn’t make it and was sold, but Gouw says the experience of working at a startup helped her find her true calling: She loves working with entrepreneurs and helping their companies grow. So in 1999, she joined the venture-capital firm Accel Partners, a big investor in Facebook in 2005, eventually becoming Accel’s first female managing partner. In 2014, she set out with Jennifer Fondstad, a friend and former colleague from her Bain days, to start Aspect Ventures, where she led early-stage investments in Imperva, Trulia, LearnVest, and many other security, data analytics, and consumer-serving companies.
Aspect, an early-stage investor in software companies, is a rare bird in the world of venture capitalism, where only about 5 percent to 7 percent of investors are women. While Gouw says Aspect doesn’t have a specific mandate to invest in women-led or diverse-led companies, its portfolio is made up of about 43 percent female founded or co-founded companies, and Gouw says she would like to see that number grow to 50 percent.
Another side of Gouw’s giving mirrors that effort. She is one of 34 women investors from U.S. venture-capital firms who founded the nonprofit All Raise last year. The group aims through mentoring and other programs to increase the percentage of venture funding going to tech companies with a woman founder over the next five years. It also wants to double the percentage of female partners at tech venture firms with funds of more than $25 million over the next decade.
Vision and Strategy
Whether she is backing efforts to give more girls and women access to STEM-related careers, endowing scholarships, or supporting teachers’ classroom projects, Gouw says she always looks for nonprofits with a mission that she understands and is in line with her two main causes. She also seeks out groups with strong, transparent, committed management teams she can believe in, the same as she does when she is deciding to invest in a tech start-up.
When she mulls making a gift, she asks herself a number of questions, including whether she thinks the charity leader has a compelling vision and strategy for what the organization wants to achieve and conveys it in an exciting way that is going to attract other donors and active board members.
“Then it’s do I feel they are someone who really wants to work with their supporters in a very transparent and honest and collaborative way,” says Gouw. “I would never invest in something that wasn’t going to be fully transparent with all of their financials and plans and operating metrics with me.”
When she is approached by nonprofit leaders who don’t adequately explain how they measure themselves against their goals, Gouw says she simply doesn’t get involved because she won’t be able to know if her support is having any impact.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not doing great things for the world. It just means I’m not going to grok it; I’m not going to get it because they’re not going to be able to explain it to me in the ways that I can understand.” says Gouw.
A self-described “data geek,” Gouw gets so excited when she starts talking about the results Brown and DonorsChoose officials provide her that it’s hard to keep up with her. It is clear she happily pores over the pages of metrics that track how a group is doing in reaching its goals. However, her love of quantifiable results does not overshadow her long-term outlook. For example, a scholarship student may or may not become a scientist or run a technology company. Even if that does happen, it may take that person a decade or so to achieve success, she says.
What is most important, says Gouw, is that people who do take STEM jobs have access to the education needed to get them there just as she did. Her long-term goal in her education philanthropy is to make quality education available to as many people as possible regardless of their background. And on the STEM side of her giving?
“I would like to see women founders and women in technology represent 50 percent — or more, even, because 57 percent of bachelor-degree earners are women,” says Gouw. “I would like to see those numbers be much more reflective of our working population and our college-educated population. I think that’s an achievable goal.”
