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Writer's pictureGina Stelly

Theresia Gouw

Cofounding Partner, Acrew Capital


“I, like thousands of others who are called to the Valley everyday, have my parents to thank for showing me how to be an American dreamer.” Theresia Gouw



Theresia Gouw, 46, began forging a path that led her to become a top American venture capitalist decades ago. She was the first person in her high school in a small town outside of Buffalo, New York, to go to Brown University. In the 1990s, she was the first female investor at Palo Alto-based venture capital firm Accel Partners. She then became the firm’s first female partner and first female managing partner before leaving Accel four years ago to cofound Aspect Ventures, one of the first female-led venture investing firms in Silicon Valley.


A woman of many firsts, she makes her debut this year on Forbes’ Self-Made Women list with an estimated net worth of $500 million. Much of her wealth is linked to Accel's early investment in Facebook. At Aspect, she recently oversaw the firm’s first billion-dollar IPO with cybersecurity firm ForeScout.


Born in Indonesia to parents of Chinese descent, Gouw immigrated to America in the early 1970s with her family when she was 3 years old. “We left in the end of the [Suharto] political revolution when ethnic Chinese people were being targeted,” she says. Her dad was a dentist and her mother was a nurse in Indonesia, but they were both forced to start their careers over again when they came to the United States. “My dad got a job as a dishwasher and went back to school at SUNY Buffalo in order to get his dental certification to work in America,” she says.


Bucking the trend in her high school, where only 40% of her class went on to higher education after graduation, Gouw enrolled at Brown University in 1986 and majored in engineering. During summer internships at General Motors and British Petroleum, she found her passion for business development.


“I was working in a building with a thousand engineers, and I realized what I liked most was product management,” she says. “But the people who moved out of frontline engineering and into [product management] roles all had M.B.A.s.” So after graduating from Brown in 1990, Gouw studied for the GMAT and took a management consulting position at Bain & Company in Boston. Then she got an M.B.A. at Stanford University.


Shortly after graduating from Stanford in 1996, she teamed up with several other classmates and raised $1 million in venture funding to cofound Release Software, a software-as-a-service company that enabled payment technologies in the software industry. “We grew into a reasonable size around 1998 to 1999 and we were getting ready to file an S-1 and go public,” she says. “But at the same time, we were at our third CEO change in 12 months, so I thought that was probably not a good sign for my stock.”


While searching for her next role, a Release board member pushed her towards the venture capital world. “He introduced me to three other startups in his portfolio but he also introduced me to three venture funds,” Gouw says. “He said to me, ‘You’ve been part of an engineering startup, you have an engineering degree. Jump over to the dark side.’”


Jump she did. Gouw joined Accel as an investment associate in 1999. During her 15 years at Accel she led a series of highly successful investments, including real estate listing site Trulia and cybersecurity firm Imperva, both of which are now public. But the bulk of her fortune comes from her involvement in an investment that one of her Accel partners, Jim Breyer, took the lead on in 2005: a then fledgling social network called Facebook.


“We had looked at a lot of other social media platforms before and some of them actually had a larger number of users,” Gouw says. “But we’d never seen anything like Facebook’s daily active usage at the time. Two thirds of users were using it every day, and half of them were using it two hours a day. That’s a really meaningful service and platform, and that was the thing that really stood out at the time.”


Less than two years after Facebook’s monster IPO in May 2012, still one of the most successful tech public listings in history, Gouw left Accel to start her own venture capital firm, Aspect Ventures. Cofounded with fellow veteran investor Jennifer Fonstad with their own money, Aspect is an earlystage venture firm that focuses on cybersecurity, the future of work processes, digital health and wellness software.



“I cofounded Aspect with the idea to create venture the way it was in the late 1990s, by creating a fund that was just laserfocused on the early stage,” Gouw says. “On the one hand, we wanted to be large enough to lead those rounds, but on the other hand, we also want to be small and nimble enough so that we could syndicate with other firms on investments.”


Aspect has raised around $350 million since its founding in February 2014. The second fund, announced earlier this year at $181 million, includes Melinda Gates and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins as investors. The firm scored its first billion-dollar exit when cybersecurity firm ForeScout listed in October last year. For Gouw, it was the fourth IPO investment of her career. “Going public is kind of like when kids graduate from college and enter the real world,” she explains. “It’s always really exciting.” Other early bets that Gouw counts as Aspect’s most notable investments include security intelligence solutions startup Exabeam and enterprise networking and security company Cato Networks.


Gouw is also a founding member of All Raise, an organization that supports the success of female founders and investors in Silicon Valley, so it should come as no surprise that in Aspect’s portfolio, 40% include a female cofounder. (Read the Forbes magazine cover story about the creation of All Raise here.)


Among the many initiatives of All Raise, it stealthily created Founders for Change, a pledge by 600 startup founders to increase diversity in both their teams and cap tables that has gotten signatures from heavyweights like billionaires Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “There is really a lot of excitement and enthusiasm for diversity,” Gouw says. “I am just super excited to be a part of it.”


A former figure skater who once perfected the double flip jump, Theresia’s passion for sports has evolved to cheering on her favorite teams alongside her children & watching their events. Coming into venture when she had very few female peers, she has dedicated her 20-year career to changing the ratio.


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