Female VCs from Sequoia, Cowboy, Benchmark, and others launch Female Founder Office Hours, a series of events at which investors will advise women entrepreneurs
The female investors of venture capital are expanding their dinner party, so to speak. — Jess Lee, the former CEO …
Context & Ripple Effects
Female Founder Office Hours is the informal precursor to something bigger: the same cohort of female VCs went on to launch All Raise five months later with explicit targets — lifting women's share of funding from 15% to 25% in five years and doubling the share of women in partner roles within ten. The dinner-party framing in Fortune's write-up captures the mechanism: deal access flowing through peer networks rather than firm pipelines.
The effort lands against a measurable backdrop. PitchBook counted all-female founding teams at roughly 2.2% of the $85B VCs deployed in 2017, up only marginally from 1.9% the year before, while the rise of female-run funds since 2015 had already been reshaping which firms exist — if not yet who gets funded.
First-order effects
- Women entrepreneurs gain direct office-hours access to partners at Sequoia, Benchmark, and Cowboy — firms whose partner meetings are otherwise the hardest gate in venture.
- Jess Lee leaves her CEO post at Polyvore, converting an operator into a full-time organizer of investor-side mentoring.
Second-order effects
- The ad-hoc event series scales into All Raise's standing infrastructure: roughly 120 successful female entrepreneurs recruited as mentors across the US, turning one-off advice into a repeatable pipeline.
- Firms without female partners face a recruiting and reputational benchmark set by peers — especially as All Raise publicizes its partner-diversity target.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, capital allocation shifts through network structure rather than mandate: Q2 2018 saw 14 women added to US VC firms in senior roles, the most of any recent quarter, yet about 75% of firms still have no female partners — meaning the bottleneck moves from founding new funds to changing incumbent partnerships.
- A durable mentorship-and-sponsorship layer between founders and VCs becomes part of how deal flow is formed, reducing dependence on the warm-intro networks that historically excluded women.
The trend: Informal peer networks among female VCs are institutionalizing into standing organizations that aim to move both who gets funded and who sits in partner seats.