I am in Austin. My last company was a tech startup founded by a successful entrepreneur who had a reported $100 million exit from his previous venture. He’s in his mid-to-late 50s and could easily have retired, but instead decided to start another company. People attributed it to his boundless energy and inability to sit still.
Not long after I joined, I developed a different theory. He’s a very good-looking man, married to his high-school sweetheart, whose politics and worldview are very different from his own. She looks her age; he doesn’t. But here’s what I came to understand about him: he’s a player. And I began to suspect that one of the attractions of starting another company was the access it gave him to ambitious young women eager to break into the startup world, while his unsuspecting wife thinks nothing of it because he’s “working.”
When you own a bootstrapped company with no meaningful HR function, no independent board oversight and virtually no accountability, you can operate with astonishing impunity.
Throughout my time there, he made repeated, unwanted advances towards me. It was exhausting, demoralizing and ultimately intolerable. I didn’t even make it a year.
My guess is that this story is playing out on repeat in startups everywhere. Successful, middle-aged founders who have accumulated enough wealth and power to believe the rules no longer apply to them, operating in environments where accountability is practically nonexistent. And because we live in a world that still places so little value on women’s dignity and experiences, the consequences are almost always borne by the women, not the men responsible. They get to keep building companies, accumulating wealth and enjoying their reputations as visionary entrepreneurs. The women quietly leave, and the cycle repeats.