Venture capitalist Shelly Kapoor Collins out to shatter gender stereotypes.
Venture capitalist Shelly Kapoor Collins has made it her mission to shatter gender stereotypes.
It’s a line from the famous musical “My Fair Lady”: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” In Silicon Valley these days, the question is often the opposite: Why can’t a man be more like a woman?
Women are not only underrepresented in the Silicon Valley workforce, but when they pitch ideas for startups, they can have a hard time getting male investors to pay attention.
Shelly Kapoor Collins is listening.
As a managing partner at Propeller Venture Capital in San Francisco, Collins has seen the way women’s startup ideas often get short shrift from her male colleagues. Take Glam Squad, an app that brings hair and makeup services to a client’s door. The app was preparing to launch services in a new market, Washington, D.C.
“I just don’t see the link between beauty on-demand and politics,” Collins recalls a male colleague saying. To many women, it was obvious. Collins, who attended the Glam Squad pop-up in a Hilton hotel suite hours before a White House correspondents’ dinner, saw firsthand that dozens of women were standing in line for hair and makeup touch-ups after a long day at the office so they could be camera-ready for photos and TV interviews.
“Politicians in D.C. make appearances on TV,” Collins said. “People are on the road. They need privacy. If someone can come to you while you’re working, rather than you going to a spa or salon, isn’t that better? It’s about efficiency.”
Similarly, Collins’ male partner passed on a startup called Barnraiser, a Pinterest-like online community that helps makers in the world of sustainable food showcase their wares, ask for crowdfunding and sell their products. Collins went back later and said yes.
Statistics are stacked against women — just 7 percent of all venture capitalists are women according to a TechCrunch analysis, and women received less than 3 percent of all venture funding in 2016, according to a report in Fortune in March. It’s no wonder that Collins wants women to have better access to money, networks and markets.
“We have a good old boys’ network,” she says. “We need a good old girls’ network.”
To help that along, Collins, 45, created the Shatter Fund, which invests solely in women-led businesses. She is also hosting a Shatter Summit at the Battery social club on Tuesday, May 9, where invited guests will hear from speakers including investment banker Linnea Roberts of Goldman Sachs, Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon, angel investor Dave Morin of Path and Facebook, and Craig Newmark of Craigslist, among others. (A #WomenWhoShatter T-shirt for $29.99 launches on www.shatterfund.com on May 11.)
Collins, a married mother of two, is a Danville resident and a native of India. Her first name, Shelly, is a nickname for Shalani. She grew up in Maryland, where her father was an engineer and real estate investor. Her mother, a homemaker, taught her multiplication tables when she was 5. In college at the University of Maryland, where Collins studied management-information systems, business and coding, she took four types of calculus because “math was like a puzzle; it came to me very easily,” she said. “If you’re good at math, you can do anything.”
Her first job was at Sprint. Her second was at Oracle, where she oversaw installation of its human resources, financial and payroll systems at large corporations and government entities. In 2005, she married (Patrick Collins, now a Netgear senior exec), and had a daughter. While pregnant with her second child in 2008, she started her own company, Enscient Solutions, providing tech services for government clients.
It was lucrative, but she wasn’t thrilled with it. Politics became her new passion.
She was a tech advisor for the campaign of state Attorney General Kamala Harris and helped her hire the first chief information officer at the state Department of Justice. Collins was a national co-chair for technology during President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign (with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and others); was among eight women appointed to the National Women’s Business Council during Obama’s tenure; and was vice chair of Women in Public Service, a group created by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among other things.
“Shelly’s contribution to the advancement of women in business is what motivated our team to work with her,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who has known and worked with Collins for more than five years. “America benefits from having more women leaders in business and technology.”
It was because so many tech companies came calling to ask her for advice — “Hey, who do you know in D.C.? They’re trying to shut me down,” Collins recalls — that she folded Enscient and created Tech Hill Advisors, a government-relations consultancy. At the same time, women from across the country began asking her for advice on starting their own companies and juggling work-life balance. When her term on the Women’s Business Council ended in 2016, she decided the best way to help women in business was to become a venture capitalist and find female tech entrepreneurs to fund.
Eileen Gordon, a food and wine entrepreneur with her husband, restaurateur Michael Chiarello, is glad she did. As the founder of Barnraiser, she sees the potential in linking millions of Millennials and others interested in healthy food products to the people who make them. Barnraiser, she believes, could drive billions of dollars into the hands of those artisans. So did Collins. “If you’re talking about a business catering to a female sensibility like Barnraiser is, it is helpful to have a woman in the room,” Gordon said. “They often have an instinct about it.”
Collins’ focus is on the here and now, with an eye to the future. She’s spoken to Bay Area high school girls to encourage them to study science, technology, the environment and math, and to think big, like the boys do. Really big.
“I don’t think we’re going to see our Steve Jobs or our Mark Zuckerberg for another generation,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do.”