Q&A with Pam Kostka, CEO of nonprofit All Raise which launched two years ago, on the mixed progress it has made in closing the gender gap in the US VC industry
but others are network-reliant in virtual age. I spoke to @PamKostka on the 2nd anniversary of @AllRaise about the progress they've made — and how to prevent a backslide: https://www.protocol.com/... @protocol : Silicon Valley could easily fall back on its old biases and networks amid a crisis. But @AllRaise CEO @PamKostka, who has been running the nonprofit for the last year, is trying to make sure the industry doesn't backslide. https://www.protocol.com/... @allraise : Check out our @PamKostka in @protocol: “Pattern recognition is what often keeps us stuck in our old mode of behavior. Especially now, when we're looking at what's happening in the current environment, we need to be able to reshape that industry narrative.” Thnx, @bizcarson! https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after 36 female VCs launched All Raise with explicit targets — lifting women's share of funding from 15% to 25% in five years and doubling women in partner roles within ten — CEO Pam Kostka sits down with Protocol to grade the effort at its midpoint moment. The organization has also built a mentoring bench, pairing its members with roughly 120 successful female entrepreneurs to feed the founder pipeline.
The timing matters: just weeks before this interview, All Raise's own data showed a record 52 women became new VC or general partners in 2019, yet 65% of US firms still have no woman partner. Now the COVID crisis hits, and Kostka's core warning is that dealmaking runs on networks and pattern recognition — exactly the mechanisms that revert to old biases when everyone retreats to trusted circles.
First-order effects
- All Raise's mentoring and network-building programs must operate virtually overnight, testing whether relationships formed through the nonprofit survive without in-person dealflow.
- Kostka's immediate fight is against crisis-driven pattern matching: partners retrenching into familiar networks precisely when the 2019 cohort of 52 new women partners needs those networks to fund companies.
Second-order effects
- If crisis-era check-writing reverts to old-boy networks, All Raise's five-year target of moving women's funding share from 15% to 25% slips, putting pressure on the 65% of firms with no woman partner to justify their hiring and deployment decisions.
- The ~120-entrepreneur mentoring roster becomes a counter-network: founders backed through it arrive at partner meetings with warmer introductions, partially offsetting the closed-circle effect.
Third-order effects
- Whether VC partnership composition shifts durably or snaps back depends on which mechanism wins in a downturn — deliberate pipeline programs like All Raise's versus the industry's default reliance on incumbent networks — and this crisis is an early stress test of that contest.
- If the pattern holds that representation gains concentrate in new partner seats while most firms stay all-male, the industry's structure bifurcates: a visible vanguard of diversified firms alongside a stagnant majority, making firm-level composition a competitive signal for founders choosing investors.
The trend: US venture capital is measuring whether institutional interventions like All Raise can outpace the industry's network-driven defaults, with economic crises serving as the decisive test of durability.