“ What matters to Azure are interesting areas that they have identified themselves as promising, and from there they try to find the startups that fit within the model of what the partnership has decided it is going to invest. Of course, the strength of the CEO does matter, but if that CEO isn’t a male from Stanford, that’s OK. “Biases are detrimental to making good investment decisions. “When we looked at VMWare, we looked at a company with a very unique solution to a fundamental problem and we ended up funding Diane Greene.” VMWare was one of the first companies Azure backed, and they have no reason to regret it! Incidentally also, Azure threw away another bias at the time. It invested in a husband-wife company, as one of the other founders was Diane’s husband, Mendel Rosenblum. “And we continued along…” A great precedent can’t be discouraging, of course. “The women CEOs that we backed have been very strong performers. Azure currently supports Deidre Paknad (of whom I spoke in an earlier post and attracted my attention to Azure Capital!), CEO of PSS Systems, Karen Vergura at ezRez, Tracy Randall at Cooking.com, Lisa Stone one of the three women founders of BlogHer, and very recently, Wendy Lea, the CEO of Get Satisfaction.
