Before Nathalie Miller decided to walk away from Instacart, the grocery delivery start-up now worth more than $2 billion, she made a spreadsheet to analyze how much money she was leaving on the table.

在决定离开现估值超过20亿美元的食品杂货递送创业公司Instacart之前，纳塔莉·米勒(Nathalie Miller)做了一个电子表格来分析她放弃了多少钱。

She had been Instacart’s 20th employee, managing operations during a period of extremely rapid growth, and the sum could have been huge. She quit anyway. Like many strivers in Silicon Valley, she had a bigger plan: to start her own company that could not only make millions, but also fulfill a mission she believed in.

她是Instacart的第20名员工，在一段极为快速增长的时期管理公司运作，这应该会是一笔巨款。但她还是辞了。就像硅谷的众多奋斗者那样，她有一个更大的计划：创办一家自己的公司，不仅可以赚许多钱，还可以追求她自己的信仰。

Her idea was to build a recruiting and hiring website that would make corporate America friendlier to women. She called the site Doxa and persuaded an engineer friend to start it with her. They strategized in borrowed office space and recruited people from other tech companies to work on the project at night, promising full-time salaries as soon as they raised venture capital.

她的想法是建立一个招聘网站，让美国企业对女性更友好。她将网站命名为Doxa，并说服一名工程师朋友与她一同创业。他们的策略是在借来的办公空间办公，并从其他科技公司招募员工在晚上开发这个项目，承诺在募集到风险投资后给他们发放全职工资。

Then, six months later, Ms. Miller discovered that she was pregnant with her first child. A baby wasn’t something she and her husband, Isaak Le, had been planning quite yet, but they were excited. Still, a sliver of doubt began to undercut her confidence about starting her own company. “How high can I stack the cards against myself — a pregnant brown woman?” said Ms. Miller, who is of Vietnamese and European descent.

然而半年后，米勒发现自己怀上了第一个孩子。她和丈夫伊萨克·黎(Isaak Le)尚未打算要孩子，但他们都很兴奋。尽管如此，一丝怀疑已经开始削弱她对创办公司的信心。“对一个棕色皮肤的孕妇来说，在不利的情况下我还能坚持多久？”有着越南和欧洲血统的米勒说。

Silicon Valley can seem like the land of overnight success. College dropouts show up and become billionaires a few years later. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire by the time he was 23, and Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp when it was just five years old.

有人会觉得硅谷是一个一夜成名的地方。大学辍学生们来到这里，几年后就成为了亿万富翁。马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)在23岁时成为了亿万富翁，而Facebook花费了190亿美元来收购刚刚创办五年的WhatsApp。

But despite their hold on the imagination, these examples aren’t typical. Much more representative are the companies you never hear about because they never get off the ground.

但是，尽管他们坚持自己的梦想，这些例子并不典型。更具代表性的是那些你从来没有听说过的公司，因为它们始终没有发展起来。

Venture capital firms invest in 1 percent of the companies that pitch them. The overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs who are funded are white men. Just 1 percent are black, 8 percent are female and 12 percent are Asian, according to data from CB Insights, which tracks private companies and investors. Even for start-ups that raise money, the mortality rate is high, with most dying after an average of 20 months and $1.3 million in financing.

在所有向风投介绍了自己的公司中，只有1%能拿到投资。绝大多数获得投资的创业家是男性白人。据追踪私营企业和投资者数据的CB Insights，仅有1%是黑人，8%是女性，12%是亚裔。即使对于已筹集到资金的初创企业，倒闭率也很高。大多数会在平均坚持20个月并融资130万美元后倒闭。

In recent months, the fund-raising atmosphere has cooled as venture capitalists react to the poor stock market performance of some public tech companies and question whether the recent fast pace of investment is sustainable. Venture capitalists are making fewer investments at lower valuations.

近几个月来，募资气氛有所降温，因为风险投资人对一些上市科技公司在股市上的糟糕表现做出了反应，并质疑近期投资的快节奏是否是可持续的。风险投资人在估值较低时会减少投资。

“There is this delusion that it’s easy to raise money in Silicon Valley,” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a mentorship and investment program for start-ups. “Raising money is incredibly hard.”

“有这样的一种错觉，就是在硅谷募集资金很容易，”为初创企业提供指导和投资计划的Y Combinator公司总裁萨姆·奥尔特曼(Sam Altman)说。“筹集资金是极其困难的。”

Nonetheless, Silicon Valley keeps seducing people. For those who come, the risk is worth the potential reward — not just riches, but also the more dreamy belief that tech entrepreneurialism is a force for good. Ms. Miller was not immune.

然而硅谷依然充满诱惑力。对于那些慕名而来的人来说，这种潜在的回报是值得去冒险的——不仅仅是财富，还有更梦幻的信念：科技创业精神是一股善的力量。米勒也是如此。

“I want Doxa to exist in the world,” she told me in July, “because it will make the world a better place.”

“我想让Doxa在世界上有一席之地，”7月份她对我说，“因为它将让世界变得更美好。”

A White Male Culture

白人男性文化

Ms. Miller, who turns 34 on Sunday, grew up in Berkeley, and after graduating from Harvard, moved to Vietnam. There, she started a microfinance nonprofit, expanding it to 92 employees. When she returned to the United States, she began a doctorate program in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, but was soon drawn into the tech industry.

在周日即将年满34岁的米勒是在伯克利长大的。在哈佛(Harvard)毕业后，她搬到了越南。在那里，她创办了一家非营利性小额信贷公司，最终扩张到了92名员工。回到美国后，她开始在加州大学伯克利分校攻读社会学博士学位，但很快就被拉进了科技产业中。

She joined Instacart in 2013, and saw some of tech’s biggest challenges firsthand. In a year, the company grew to 120 employees from 20, and had 4,000 independent contractors. Hiring well at that kind of speed, she found, is hard to get right.

她在2013年加入Instacart，亲历了科技业的一些最严峻的挑战。一年内，公司从20名员工发展到了120名员工，并有4000家独立承包商。她发现以这样的速度招聘，很难不出错。

Ms. Miller also experienced the challenges of being a woman in tech. One day, a new employee told her that he had ranked the hottest women at the company, and she was No. 1. She reported the comment to managers, and the employee was fired the next day.

米勒也经历了女性在科技企业所面临的挑战。有一天，一个新员工告诉她，他对公司最漂亮的女性进行了排名，而她排第1位。她将这番话报告给了经理，那名员工第二天就被解雇了。

Though she was satisfied with Instacart’s response, she knew women in many industries faced much worse, and started ruminating about how she could change workplace culture more broadly.

虽然她很满意Instacart的回应，但她知道女性在许多行业面临着更糟糕的情况，并开始琢磨如何可以更广泛地改变职场文化。

That is when she came up with Doxa. The name comes from a Greek term that sociologists use to describe the things that people take for granted but that don’t necessarily have to be that way.

这时候，她想出了Doxa。这个名称来自于一个希腊语词汇，社会学家用来描述人们想当然但不一定会这样的事情。

The idea was for a site that would collect data about the sorts of things applicants really want to know but don’t ask in job interviews: Do you feel as if co-workers value your opinions? Do people actually take their vacation days? How often do you work nights and weekends? It would offer online personality tests, then use psychometric data to match candidates with employers more effectively. It would make money from companies paying for information about candidates and to post job ads, as they do on LinkedIn. Sam Meder, who had run engineering at a start-up acquired by Pinterest, agreed to start it with her.

这个网站的想法是收集求职者迫切想知道但在面试时却不问的信息：你是否觉得同事会重视你的意见？员工真的会去休假吗？你们是否经常晚上和周末工作？网站将提供在线性格测试，然后使用心理数据来更有效地匹配雇主和求职者。它的盈利模式是向购买求职者信息和发布招聘广告的公司收取费用，和在LinkedIn一样。曾在一家被Pinterest收购的创业公司里负责工程工作的山姆·梅德(Sam Meder)同意与她一起创业。

Ms. Miller also saw Doxa as a way to address diversity issues. The statistics in technology are particularly bad. On average, 30 percent of employees at big tech companies including Google, Facebook and Apple are women, 5 percent are Latino and 4 percent are black. A diversity industry has sprung up to teach companies how to become more inclusive. Engineers attend training sessions on unconscious bias. Companies are hiring corporate diversity chiefs.

米勒还认为Doxa是一种解决多元化问题的方式。技术领域的数据尤其糟糕。谷歌(Google)、Facebook和苹果(Apple)等大型科技公司平均30%的员工是女性，5%是拉丁裔，4％是黑人。一个多元化的产业涌现出来，教导科技公司如何变得更具包容性。工程师参加有关无意识偏见的培训会议。公司雇佣多元化的公司高管。

Ms. Miller thought Doxa could help by offering data that research shows is important to women — the gender pay gap and the percentage of women on the executive team — as well as factors like whether women felt they were given credit for their ideas. But first, she needed to raise money.

米勒认为Doxa会有帮助，它可以给出对女性有重要意义的研究数据——性别收入差距和管理团队的女性比例——还有别的一些因素，比如女性是否感觉自己的想法受到肯定。但首先，她需要融资。

Venture capitalists, who hold the keys to success in Silicon Valley by providing start-up money, are even more likely to be white and male than tech company employees are. Theirs is an insular business. Most investors accept pitches only from entrepreneurs who come through an introduction, and they tend to finance people who have succeeded before, or who remind them of those who did.

与科技公司员工相比，在为初创公司提供资金，掌握硅谷成功命脉的风险投资人中，白人男性的比例还要更高。这是个很封闭的行业。大多数投资者只接受引见来的创业项目，他们倾向于投资的都是以前有过成功经历的，或者是能让他们想起某个成功者的人。

According to a 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences, investors prefer pitches by men, particularly attractive men, to those by women, even when the content of the pitch is the same. In addition to studying the results of three entrepreneurial pitch competitions, the researchers conducted two experiments in which a representative sample of working adults heard identical pitches in male and female voices. Sixty-eight percent of people preferred to finance the company when it was pitched by a male voice, while 32 percent chose the female.

美国国家科学院(National Academy of Sciences)2014年公布的一篇论文显示，在介绍创业项目时，投资者更喜欢男性的介绍，尤其是外形好的男性，尽管女性介绍的内容跟男性并无不同。除了研究三大创业项目介绍比赛的结果，研究人员还开展了两项实验，让成年工作者的代表倾听男性和女性讲述同样的计划。68%的人倾向于资助由男性讲述计划的公司，只有32%的人选择女性。

Venture firms with female partners are three times as likely to invest in a company with a female chief executive, according to the Diana Project at Babson College. Yet just 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms are women.

巴布森学院(Babson College)戴安娜项目(Diana Project)指出，在拥有女性合伙人的风投公司中，投资由女性担任首席执行官的公司的几率，是男性组建的风投公司的三倍。但风投公司只有6%的合作人是女性。

Because of investors’ lack of diversity, they do not necessarily understand the value of companies that make products for customers who are not like them, said Tristan Walker, founder and chief executive of Walker & Company, which makes health and beauty products for minorities, including the Bevel razor. On his first pitch, the investor told him she didn’t think shaving irritation was a big enough societal issue.

Walker & Company公司创始人兼首席执行官特里斯坦·沃克(Tristan Walker)表示，由于投资者缺乏多样性，在针对不同于他们的人生产的产品上，他们不见得能理解其价值。该公司为少数族裔人士提供保健及美容产品，比如Bevel剃须刀。第一次介绍项目的时候，投资人对他说，她觉得剃须引起的发炎不是一个足够大的社会问题。

“All she had to do before she said that was get on the phone with 10 black men or women and eight or nine would have said, ‘This is an issue I’ve had to deal with my entire life,’” Mr. Walker said.

“她在说这些话前应该与十个黑人男性或女性通电话，其中有八九个会说，‘我这辈子都得对付这个问题，’”沃克表示。

Some investors are working to change this. Venture firms like Kapor Capital were formed specifically to finance start-ups with a diversity mission and to prioritize underrepresented founders. Others fill their partner ranks with people who are not white men.

一些投资者正在努力改变这种情况。卡普尔资本(Kapor Capital)等公司得以成立，专门致力于资助怀有多样化使命的初创公司，并优先考虑那些属于少数群体的创始人。其他一些公司则选择非白人男性担任合伙人。

“Deal flow comes in through people’s network, and if you’re a young woman or a person of color, a lot of times you just might not know who that senior person is at that top-tier firm,” said Joanne Yuan, an associate partner at Cowboy Ventures, whose investment team of four has three women who are minorities. “Our portfolio looks more diverse because we know a lot of people who aren’t white males.”

“交易流程经由人际网络完成，如果你是年轻女性或者有色人种，你可能很多时候都不认识顶级公司的高层人员是谁，”Cowboy Ventures副合伙人乔安妮·袁(Joanne Yuan)说。她所在公司的投资团队有四个人，其中三人是属于少数群体的女性。“我们的投资组合看起来更加多元，因为我们认识很多不是白人男性的人。”