With the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sex discrimination trial entering its fourth week, Mary Meeker, one of the most powerful women in venture capital and a well-respected tech investor, took the witness on Monday stand to testify that she never saw or experienced gender bias at the firm being sued.
In fact, her testimony offered a picture of Kleiner Perkins that is far different from the boys-club, sexist, male-dominated and exclusionary firm that testimony from Pao and others has portrayed.
I think Kleiner Perkins is the best place to be a woman in the business, Meeker said on the witness stand. I have a view, and I ve developed this over many, many years, (that) two women are more powerful than one, three are more powerful than two, four are more powerful than three, if you have the right people in the room.
She then said how much she appreciated working with Kleiner women Susan Biglieri, Juliet de Baubigny, Beth Seidenberg and Christina Lee. Implicit in her testimony was that perhaps Pao just wasn t one of those right people.
When Kleiner Perkins attorney Lynne Hermle asked Meeker if she ever witnessed any gender discrimination, Meeker replied, I have not … Having learned about Ajit (Nazre) and Trae (Vassallo) and that situation, that was not a great situation. (But) I have not.
Meeker was referring to an incident in which male partner Ajit Nazre went to female partner Trae Vassallo s hotel room during a business trip wearing only his bathrobe and slippers. He tried to push his way in, but Vassallo forced him out. Nazre had also hit on Vassallo during a business meeting at a bar; he was later fired from the firm. Nazre is also a central figure in Pao s complaint, because the two had a consensual relationship, and when Pao broke it off, she alleges he retaliated against her and stymied her career at Kleiner.
Pao worked at Kleiner Perkins as a junior partner from 2005 to 2012, when she was fired. She has sued the firm for gender discrimination, retaliation and failure to take the necessary steps — such as having clear anti-discrimination policies — to protect women at the firm. The trial began Feb. 24 and is expected to conclude at the end of the month.
Meeker s testimony has been hotly anticipated: She is one of the few female senior partners at the firm and a widely respected and influential tech leader who was long ago dubbed Queen of the Internet for her early and savvy tech investments. Meeker worked from 1991 to 2010 at Morgan Stanley as a managing director and research analyst. She helped the firm, at the infancy of the Internet boom, identify key tech players such as Google, Netscape and Alibaba, she said.
I was the most experienced person there in the technology area, Meeker said Monday.
Kleiner Perkins had been recruiting Meeker for about a decade by the time she decided to join the firm to lead its digital growth fund in 2010. She is currently on the boards of Lending Club, Square and DocuSign. Her annual reports on Internet trends are widely anticipated and voraciously read by much of Silicon Valley.
Meeker gave mixed reviews of Pao, once describing her as certainly more passive but very thoughtful. Meeker praised Pao for her work editing a book she wrote, yet said she agreed to an extent with a 2011 performance review of Pao that said she seems very insecure and without self-confidence.
When asked by Pao s attorney Alan Exelrod she was called on to participate in the decision to fire Pao, Meeker replied: I don t recall.
Throughout the trial, Pao has also been called a number of adjectives that contradict this, including: hostile, having sharp elbows, entitled and hypercritical. Pao, in her testimony last week, underscored one challenge of being a woman at Kleiner: no matter what you tried to do to please people, it backfired.
I wasn t talking enough. But if I did talk, I was being hostile and sharp-elbowed, Pao said. What exactly are you supposed to do? I m supposed to be more aggressive, and then I m too aggressive.
Pao had also testified that after she filed a lawsuit in May 2012, colleagues avoided her and refused to come to her meetings. But Meeker said on Monday that she never refused to meet with Pao after her lawsuit, and wasn t aware of anyone at the firm refusing to either.
Meeker also undercut Pao s complaint about an all-male dinner in 2011 at former-Vice President Al Gore s house. Pao testified that male members of the firm joined male CEOs at Gore s house for dinner, and no women were invited because they kill the buzz, one male partner allegedly said. Pao was humiliated, she said, because she lived in the same house as Gore and bumped into some of these men on their way to dinner.
But Meeker said that, just a couple of months later, Gore had another dinner to which both she and female partner Aileen Lee were invited.
Photo: Pao arrives at Superior Court in San Francisco, Calif., Tuesday morning March 10, 2015, Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group.
