Also today in the Times, Sallie Krawcheck, a celebrated and unusually successful Wall Street investment person, writes about what it was like for her starting out in a field notorious for crude male behavior, in a solid essay about the cost of devaluing women.
Since I’ve known a few people in the world of high finance, I was not surprised at Krawcheck’s personal Wall Street trial by assaultive fire. Nor will you be, I’m sure.
But here’s where I started smiling. She wrote (my bolding and my blown up type):
One might argue that start-ups run by men just happen to deliver the highest possible returns. The mythology around the industry bolsters this, with venture capitalists boasting of investing in Facebook practically out of the dorm room.
But that argument doesn’t hold up. Investors in venture capital funds would have been as well off simply investing in the stock market over the past five to 15 years. That’s what I see in reviewing the data from the research firm Cambridge Associates: Investors in the high-risk, high-reward world of start-ups essentially did no better than they could have opening an account at their neighborhood brokerage. What might help those venture capitalists?
Well, what, Sallie? This: