What to Expect When You’re Expecting…The VC Edition

Advice for first time VC mummas

I became a mother for the first time 22 months’ ago. I had only become a general partner at Blackbird the year before. I didn’t know any women GPs who I could turn to for advice. There was no blueprint for how a woman GP should approach maternity leave.

I returned to work 16 months ago. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the conversations, decisions, and actions in relation to what is a pretty big transition.

In the last few months, I’ve had around half a dozen women VC investors reach out to me for advice on how to prepare for maternity leave. I’ve had a handful of dot points in draft for at least a year now but I haven’t prioritised publishing a blog until now. Spoiler alert: you will need to learn to ruthlessly prioritise as a new parent!

This isn’t intended to be exhaustive. It won’t be appropriate for every VC. Use your own judgment.

Before Maternity Leave

Leave Policies

As the most senior woman on the investment team and well before I actually fell pregnant, I led the research and drafting of an upgraded our parental leave policy. I was upfront with the partners about my plans and had their full support to do so. The end result was a policy that was, given our firm size and maturity, generous to both primary and secondary carers.

I did an extensive survey of data from the tech ecosystem, both small and large startups, as well as some other financial services firms and corporates that we could find data for. We landed on 16 weeks paid leave for primary carers and 6 weeks for secondary carers, in addition to any statutory entitlements. We also have a ‘Transition Period’ policy where, for up to 6 months after the parent returns to work, if the primary carer returns to work 4 days’ a week, they are entitled to be paid for a 5 day week.

We copied this from Redbubble’s policy. I really appreciated it and was better at work, and at home, for having this clause, and using it.

Communications

Think ahead of time about who and how you want to communicate about your absence.

Your team, your portfolio company founder relationships, LPs and others in the ecosystem will each have different questions.

Before you have these conversations you should have an idea of…

• Key dates - when you will go on leave, when you will come back.

• Will you have a ‘black out’ period (ie a period when people should not contact you, or only contact you under a very limited number of situations)?

• Who will cover your responsibilities during your absence?

• What level of involvement with the running of the firm, existing and new investments, hiring, fundraising, speaking engagements, community engagement etc do you want to have while you are on leave? What do others expect of you? How do you know they expect that of you?

Expect the Unexpected

It’s not very pleasant to think about but if your goal is to reduce anxiety and have as smooth a transition as possible, you need to think about what you will do if you have a difficult pregnancy or an early delivery. I was on bedrest on and off for around 4 months. I was admitted into hospital more times than I can remember. My baby arrived 5 weeks early, 17 hours into my mat leave. Get as prepared as you can, as early as you can.

You should not have to think about what to do if you have a stillbirth. It’s an unthinkable tragedy that no-one expects to happen but the least a workplace can do is not to add to the anxiety of negotiating what leave applies to the parent in those situations.

Our parental leave policy gives the parent the same entitlements as if there were a live birth. If your parental leave policy doesn’t have this, you should recommend it to HR (or if you’re a GP, go ahead and make the change and hope it’s never needed).

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

VC is a long game played on short cycles. You might be nurturing relationships for years and hope that, if and when people you respect and admire start a company and/or raise, you’ll have an opportunity to invest. Deals are competitive. Just knowing the deal is happening is never a guarantee you’ll be part of it, of course, but you have to know to have a chance!

The hard thing about going on maternity leave is that unless you actually don’t stop working (i.e. having coffees, reading company updates, going to events etc and waiting for serendipity to strike), you may not hear about a round coming together and so you won't get a chance to invest. This does happen. Others might take a different view, but I don’t think it’s fair, or at least realistic, to expect founders to hold a seat for you.

My best suggestion is that well before you plan to go on maternity leave, have a coffee/zoom/send an email with every interesting founder/potential founder/angel investor/source of leads that you have met in the last 12 - 18 months. Let them know that you are pregnant, when you are going on leave, when you will be back, and if possible introduce them to 1 to 2 members from your team and ask them to keep those people in the loop of any opportunities that come up while you’re away. Yes, this list could go into the hundreds of people.

Why 12 to 18 months? Venture is a long game. Typically, it’s the work done over a long period of time, developing relationships or developing a community or investment thesis etc that turns into an investment opportunity.

There is no guarantee that just introducing others to your team will be effective at ensuring that the firm doesn’t miss out. Also, some firms have a culture where deal-sourcing is so competitive internally that it may be career (or promotion) suicide to refer your deals to others. I am very grateful this is not the case for Blackbird.

During Maternity Leave

This is actually relatively straightforward, having set expectations with your colleagues and portfolio companies on what to expect from you.

I was very anxious about falling out of the loop. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing feeds and cruising email and Slack during what was meant to be my “black out period”, the first 8 weeks’ after my daughter was born. I started attending board meetings, LP due diligence meetings, LP pitch meetings for our New Zealand fund and key Blackbird events like The Sunrise conference 12 weeks after my daughter was born. This was all self-imposed - I wanted to do these things.

With the benefit of hindsight and in all honesty, this was not ideal, and if future me could have given past me advice, I’d recommend just lapping up the time you have with your first baby. You can never have that time again and it will make it easier to come back to work if you’ve somewhat rested and hopefully have some good routines in place with your new baby.

After Maternity Leave

You should put as much thought into how you come back from maternity leave as you do into your maternity leave itself.

Becoming a mum is a huge transition. When you return to work, it should be seen as akin to a new person joining the firm. Best practice should be to re-onboard into the firm over 3-4 weeks. This would reduce the anxiety about taking leave and feeling the need to ‘stay connected’ while on leave.

This should include coffees being set up with all team members, including new hires. Meetings should be set up with all the new portfolio company founders. Allow time to read up on all investment memos, reporting and so on so you have the context on investment decisions.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and have other partners understand that your participation in partner meetings will ramp up.

Remember all those people you told you were going on mat leave? Tell them you’re back. Have a lot of coffee/zoom. Have zero expectation that you will do a deal for six months. Be realistic that your leads have gone, well, lukewarm if not cold, and it takes time to rebuild that.

You will be feeling very mixed emotions, as you are not the person you were when you went on leave. You’re almost certainly not as well-rested. And mum guilt is a real thing.

A Level Playing Field?

It’s clear that at a high level the ecosystem wants to encourage more women into VC particularly at senior levels. I’ve seen more LPs be more proactive about this in recent years, too. Specific questions are asked in DD questionnaires about the split between men and women and non-binary, cut by investment and non-investment team and seniority. This is a positive move.

There are other areas where LPs could be more nuanced in their assessment of firms and how truly inclusive and supportive of women they are.

Questions around deal sourcing are an example. Typically questions are asked which essentially try to attribute deals to particular partner/s. Without taking into consideration any periods of parental leave, this analysis is going to disadvantage those who are at the age of taking parental leave, and it will disadvantage women who typically take more leave than men most of all. Remembering my comment above about how deal flow is affected both prior to, during and after maternity leave, the ‘discounting affect’ on the deals you can close potentially lasts much longer than the weeks or months of leave taken.

Personally, I think attributing one deal to one person in a firm very likely suffers from all the weaknesses of last-click attribution in marketing and basically isn’t useful at all. While there is typically a lead and a stronger relationship with one person at the firm, VC is far more of a team sport than that. The impact of the firm’s brand, positive interactions with others in the team and community over a period of many years have such a big part to play in winning the deal overall.

Proportion of Fund vs Proportion of Liquid Assets

Lastly, we need to be more nuanced about how to measure alignment of LP/GP interests. Right now, GP commit (that is, how much the GP has personally invested in the fund as committed capital alongside LPs) is the yardstick by which alignment is measured. This is problematic for diversity reasons.

The most common yardstick by which alignment is measured is the percentage of the fund that the GPs have personally committed, with 2% of the Fund being a good average in my anecdotal experience.

How much does this really show alignment with LP interests if the GP commit in dollar terms is a small or non-meaningful proportion of the GP’s net or liquid assets?

LP questions around GP commit never seem to be directed to answering this question. Without knowing whether the amount is a significant proportion of the GPs wealth, I would suggest that it is not indicative of much.

The more problematic aspect is that expecting large GP commits obviously disadvantages people who come from groups who are less likely to have wealth in the first place. Women (particularly those who have taken time out of their careers to have children, or who are the primary or sole income-earners), migrants, indigenous minorities, veterans and Black and Latin-X people, are all disproportionately going to be disadvantaged under this test.

We have some work ahead of us to level the playing field in VC. These are a couple of considerations that should help.

Concluding Thoughts

For avoidance of doubt, becoming a parent was the single best thing that has ever happened to me.

I have no idea if it has made me a better investor (give me another 5 to 7 years) but I definitely don’t think it has made me any worse!

If you are a new or expectant or hopefully-soon-to-be-expectant mum in VC, I am sending you all my best wishes. AMA. I am here for you.