Name: Here’s what John Doerr says about the Ellen Pao discrimination case
Uploaded: 2015-07-14
Duration: 5 min 13 s
Description: The venture capitalist explains the impact of the case on the company.

Here’s what John Doerr says about the Ellen Pao discrimination case

The venture capitalist explains the impact of the case on the company.

Yeah, you guys, about a couple months ago, you won this this massive, massive, at least in terms of media coverage. Gender discrimination case with Ellen Pao. And I'm curious. In the end of this, when you look back from the filing to the trial and all the coverage, what's the long term impact on Kleiner Perkins? Been both internally. And also, do you think externally in terms of perception? Wow, what a great question. Well, look, nobody wins in this kind of an experience, and I'm human. My partners and I are human. This was very painful. But, you know, at the end of the day, a jury of six women and six men, after 5.5 weeks of testimony, decided we didn't discriminate. I want to get this out there. We didn't retaliate and that the claims didn't have merit. It was like a vote attended to. It was decisive on the facts. Now you asked what's been the impact on the firm and one of things Ted Schlein did really well is he concentrated the partnership on serving entrepreneurs and winning new investments, and had just a few people, mostly outside legal talent. Uh, working on this This issue, I will say internally and emotionally it brought people together because we've got a good sense of who we are and what we stand for and the people who know us, you know, those things. But it also raised our our desire to do more. We know we can do more and we can do better. So we figured out four new initiatives that we ought to pursue and which are, Uh, well, the first of them is to, uh, called unconscious or hidden bias training. How many people have heard of that? Well, so most everybody does. So our firm went through it, and we're bringing it to all of our portfolio companies because we all possess biases, and being aware of them is one way to mitigate them. The second thing we decided to do is to regularly hold ourselves accountable, issue a diversity report so you can judge us not on our rhetoric but on the results. A number of general partners that are diverse, the numbers of, uh, fellows that come through our program. And that's the third thing we decided to do. For years now, we've had a program to develop the pipeline, right? Bring talent into the firm. Thousands of applications from all across the country. College age talent, who then get internships, Mentoring. They're part of a network. And we doubled the diversity number there from 2014 to 2015 28% in our target, we've declared Is it to get to 50% of 50 50 World by the time it's that's the pipeline. And then the fourth program that, uh, we've we've signed up for and we're doing has to do with retention and advanced. It is really hard being the only the only female on an engineering team, the only African American in a boardroom and so being conscious and committed to build networks of relationships to find mentor ships. Ah, and and so we convene women leaders regularly tech leaders. We asked them to bring proteges. We call them plus ones. We work to get them on boards, and that's what the partnerships doing. Look, I know we can do better. We can do more. I think it was a case of, uh, the right issue in the wrong place. Let me ask you about the Let me ask you about right. Issue in the aftermath and a lot of the coverage. It's near the end of it. A lot of the issue of gender and venture capital tech more broadly, but venture capital particularly got talked about a lot, not just in contact of Kleiner. Since the trial ended, we've seen a number of kind of veterans sandhill road firms either bring in female full time partners or other senior investment staff. Now, some of it might be unrelated. But I'm curious. The trial obviously was not good for Kleiner Perkins. Was it good for venture capital? Well, it's good to be talking about this issue. 30% of the Kleiner General partners are female. I don't know. 45. I've seen that number one. So you know, I'm a Yeah, I'm not. The glass is half full for me, the glasses overflowing. So I'm an optimistic person, and I believe this is an overdue conversation. It's a really important issue, and I don't want to try to speak for the rest of the venture industry except to say that we collectively are pathetic on the issue. 6% of the venture capitalists are female, you know, Uh, as a matter of social justice because it's better for business because it's our values. That's just dumb. I'm gonna ask one final question. It's a very quick one, but I wrote about it a lot. Uh, you guys have said repeatedly You said in your finals, you couldn't settle et cetera. The figure you offered, according to the settlement, was a little under a million dollars. That's a lot of money to me, but it seems low for settlement. How do you know if it was impossible to settle if you never offered seven figures? Um, I will tell you in our audience, that one. I believe this should have been resolved outside the judicial system to We tried very, very hard, and it was not possible. It simply was not possible. Yeah.