It’s been a little over a week since Travis Kalanick resigned as CEO of Uber in the wake of disclosures about a poisonous corporate culture where “Toe-Stepping” was considered a company value and sexual harassment was treated as business-as-usual. At the time a former Uber engineer had come out with a lengthy blog post detailing not only her boss’s sexual advances, but also the company’s staunch refusal to discipline him in any way. Embarrassing as this was for the ride-share unicorn, Uber engineer Amy Lucido argued at the time that the company was being singled out for behavior that was the norm throughout Silicon Valley.
It turns out she was very, very right. Emboldened, perhaps, by the fact that sexual harassment at Uber actually had consequences, 24 female entrepreneurs who sought funding from Silicon Valley venture capitalists have told The New York Times and tech site The Information in some detail about the routine sexual harassment they faced and the sexual favors they were expected to offer in exchange for that funding.
For example, Lindsay Meyer described how, after funding her startup, Justin Caldbeck, co-founder of Binary Capital would text her at all hours of the night, asking if she was attracted to him and why she preferred spending time with her boyfriend to spending it with him. He also groped and kissed her, she told the Times. “I felt like I had to tolerate it because this is the cost of being a nonwhite female founder,” she explained. She and others also recounted experiences similar to those described by female engineers at Uber: Complaints to the VCs’ employers did them no good at all.
Faced with the stories in The Information and the Times, Caldbeck denied the charges, claiming he always treated women with respect. Meanwhile, his company responded dismissively that the accusations were: “a few examples which show that Justin has in the past occasionally dated or flirted with women he met in a professional capacity.” Not only that, Caldbeck apparently reached out to at least one female founder he’d harassed two years earlier with an unexpected offer of funding (that she wasn’t even looking for) in what seems like a clear attempt to buy her silence.
But the post-Uber Silicon…