![]() ![]() Their brief also hand-waves Pao's concerns about the company culture, implying they're petty and don't amount to a discriminatory workplace: She "lacked the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player, which is crucial to a successful career as a venture capital senior investing partner," KPCB's brief contends. In what the NYT calls a "scorched-earth" civil court filing, KPCB argued last week that Pao's sexual relationship with Nazre was consensual, and that it was her personality, not her gender, that kept her from senior partnership. She's seeking $16 million in damages, an estimate of the earnings she feels she was unfairly denied by the KPCB boys' club. said that a Kleiner partner did not invite her or any other women to an important dinner because "women kill the buzz" that another Kleiner partner inappropriately gave her Leonard Cohen's sex-drenched "Book of Longing" and that this same partner told her "the personalities of women" did not lead to success at Kleiner "because women are quiet." Vassallo testified about this on day one of the trial.)īeyond the Nazre situation, Pao alleges that the culture at Kleiner Perkins was generally anti-woman. (Ultimately, Nazre was fired after another female partner, Trae Vassallo, alleged he sexually harassed her, tricking her into a dinner for two and then showing up at her hotel room in a bathrobe. She says she was denied a promotion-and in 2008, didn't even get a performance review-as retaliation for speaking up. (She declined to do so.)ĭuring all of this, she says, Nazre was promoted to senior partner in the greentech division where Pao worked, leaving her with even less power to resolve the situation. Pao claims her attempts to resolve the Nazre situation with their mutual higher-ups resulted in being ignored, being told she should marry him, being forced to have dinner with him outside of work, and eventually being asked to change offices and even transfer to China. She admits she eventually "succumbed" to sex with Nazre "on two or three occasions," but broke off the affair in October of that year. Specifically, she alleges that the firm retaliated against her for blowing the whistle on a fellow junior partner who coerced her into sex and then made her working life miserable when she broke things off.Īccording to Pao's lawsuit, Ajit Nazre-a married junior partner who had been with the company two years longer than she and had substantial influence through his mentor, managing partner Ray Lane-started hitting on her during a business trip in early 2006, and became "distant" toward her when she turned him down. Pao claims gender discrimination kept her from advancing to Kleiner's inner circle, where she would have made millions. The case is now finally at trial in San Francisco. She filed a sexual discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins in 2012, after which she was fired. and MBA from Harvard, she "met everything in the spec," she told Fortune in 2008. Pao started at Kleiner Perkins in 2005 as the chief of staff to billionaire senior partner and investor John Doerr, a job that Fortune reports required "an engineering degree from a prestigious university, degrees in law and business, and a background in enterprise software."Īs a corporate attorney with an engineering degree from Princeton and a J.D. She's currently the interim CEO of Reddit. She's a former junior partner at legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, known for its very profitable early investments in tech giants like Google and. But depending on who you ask, it's either an entire sexist industry or one woman's sex life that is really on trial this month. On the surface, it's a case about whether Pao was denied a promotion and a huge amount of money because of her gender. Ellen Pao's blockbuster lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has been described as " exposing Silicon Valley secrets" and putting the usually secretive world of tech-industry VCs " under a microscope." ![]()
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