Shellye Archambeau: A Veteran Silicon Valley Leader
FemWealth Issue #48
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
Shellye Archambeau had lived in seven US states before going to high school. Growing up in the 1960s as a Black girl, she faced a lot of adversity. When she moved to the Los Angeles Granada Hills area, she was the only black girl in her class. But her multi-culturally rich family lineage tracing back to ten generations gave her a sense of direction in life.
After a fateful conversation with her guidance counselor, at 16, she decided she wanted to run a company. Seeing that none of the top company leaders at the time looked like her, she asked herself how she could improve her odds to become CEO. Researching their backgrounds, she started setting goals and objectives and planning how to achieve them.
She set her sights on Wharton Business School and started thinking about what industry to focus on—deciding on the fast-growing tech industry. Wanting to be even more specific, she aimed to become the CEO of IBM, then the best in class among tech companies.
After graduating, she started her career in sales at IBM - a counterintuitive career step in the eyes of her colleagues who chose more prestigious jobs, but one that was consistent with her goals.
“You’ve got to have the strength and the resilience to believe in yourself and take big risks.”
“Risk taking is really important, you learn so much more when you jump into opportunities that are risky.”
At IBM, she set clear timelines and milestones and laid out a detailed step-by-step plan that required commitment, hard work, and risk-taking. Working in sales, she learned how to be resilient, negotiate, listen, and solve problems. Most importantly, she realized that “a no is not the end of the world” and that you get far more nos than yeses in life.
She rose through the ranks at IBM as one of the youngest black executives, ultimately taking on an overseas assignment in Japan - the company’s first African American woman to take on an international executive role - and leading IBM’s Asia-Pacific business for the public sector.
Eventually, she reconsidered her career trajectory at IBM and decided to leave the “mothership” to pursue a new path to a CEO role. A hard decision and a big risk.
In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, she took an offer to become the President of Blockbuster.com, where she launched the entertainment retailer’s first online presence. It proved not to be the right place for her after the CEO turned down a partnership proposal with Netflix, then still a small but promising startup.
Her next career move was becoming Executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Loudcloud, a pioneering cloud technology company founded by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. Soon after, the tech bubble burst, and it was time to readjust the plan.
At the recommendation of Vinod Khosla, a partner of Khosla Ventures, she joined the troubled company Zaplet as CEO. Running out of money and short of clients, the company was in distress. Archambeau led it through a successful pivot and a merger with MetricStream. As CEO of MetricStream - one of tech’s first Black female CEOs - she built the company into a global market leader in the governance, risk, and compliance sector, with over 1200 employees serving customers worldwide. After 15 years at the company's helm, she passed the baton.
“There aren’t a lot of people who look like me that have built and led successful companies in Silicon Valley. And I want others to see that it’s possible.”
Currently, she is a Fortune 500 board member, serving on the boards of Verizon, Nordstrom, Roper Technologies, and Okta Inc. She is also a strategic advisor to Forbes Ignite and to the President of Arizona State University and serves on the boards of two national nonprofits, Catalyst, and Braven.
Archambeau is the author of Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers and Create Success on Your Own Terms.
Learn more:
Getting Your Seat At The Table by Shellye Archambeau
Is ‘Fail-Fast’ Strategy A Non-Starter For Women And Minorities?
Get Many Mentors - Shellye Archambeau, Verizon, in conversation with: Tina Seelig, Stanford University
TAKE BIGGER RISKS - Shellye Archambeau, Former CEO, MetricStream on Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
Startups: 💸 Tech-enabled homebuilder Homebound raises $75M Series C led by Khosla - Homebound, co-founded and led by Nikki Pechet, started out to help people rebuild after California wildfires destroyed their houses in 2018. It now aims to address the housing shortage.
💸 Stitch raises $21M for its API infrastructure and embedded finance platform - The South Africa-based startup, co-founded by Natalie Cuthbert (CTO), is one of the prominent players building and operating embedded finance APIs in Africa.
💸 Equip Raises $58M in Series B Funding - Co-founded by Kristina Saffran (CEO) and Dr. Erin Parks (COO), Equip provides virtual, evidence-based eating disorder treatment in the US
💸 Blueland Raises $20 Million To Eliminate Single-Use Plastics From Home Cleaning
“Having a child, I developed a deep-seated desire to do something more meaningful. And surprisingly, instead of focusing my time and energy on just my own family, I developed a strong urge to want to do something to help create a better world for all future generations.” - Sarah Paiji Yoo, cofounder and CEO of Blueland
💸 Found has raised $60M in equity financing led by Founders Fund - Founded by Lauren Myrick, Found is a financial platform for self-employed workers.
💸 Agreena has raised $22.5m for its platform assigning carbon credits to farmers - Co-founded by Ida Boesen and Julie Koch Fahler, Agreena builds a platform where farmers can earn carbon credits for turning their land into carbon sinks.
💸 Ethereum’s hippest wallet app Rainbow banks funding from Alexis Ohanian - Co-founded by Jin Chung (CTO)
💸 Novoloop says it’s worked out how to upcycle plastic waste, raises $11M Series A - Co-founded by Jeanny Yao (COO) and Miranda Wang (CEO)
💸 Spoke launches music therapy app for Gen Z, raises $1.5M round led by Ada Ventures
“Spoke brings together the seemingly opposing worlds of music culture and mental health.” - Ariana Alexander-Sefre, founder & co-CEO of Spoke
💸 Toy figurines and hybrid learning app for kids play in €3.35 million for Munich’s women-led startup - Co-founded in 2021 by Irene Klemm and Franziska Meyer, Edurino offers a hybrid approach to reading and writing for preschoolers aged four and above.
💸 Lovewick, An App to Help Couples Stay in Love Beyond the Match, Raises $1M Pre-seed - The relationship wellness app used by 100k + couples is founded and led by social scientist Ali Maggioncalda
VC: 💸 The Future Forerunners - Forerunner Ventures, founded by Kirsten Green, closed a new $1B fund to invest in consumer businesses
💸 Jaclyn Johnson Launches New Money Ventures, To Fund And Mentor Next Gen Of Female-Led Brands
Web3: 🎥 Why can't I just screenshot an NFT? - By Cleo Abram
👀 A collection of witch NFTs is catching fire with women, generating over $20 million in sales. Here's how 5 friends created the 'crypto coven.' ($ Business Insider paywall)
🙌🏽 These women are investing to fix the ‘diversity problem’ in crypto: It isn’t ‘just male dominated. We want to show representation’ - Featuring Olayinka Odeniran, founder of the Black Women Blockchain Council (BWBC), Manasi Vora, founder of Women in Blockchain (WiB) & co-founder of Komorebi Collective DAO, Kinjal Shah, a partner at VC Blockchain Capital, and Medha Kothari, co-founder of she25
Women’s Wealth: 💳Is a Joint Bank Account Ever a Good Idea?
Women’s Health: 👩🏽⚕️Unlocking opportunities in women’s healthcare
💯 Increased funding for research in women’s health issues could unleash staggering returns
🙌🏽 Scientists developing single test to detect risk of four cancers in women
🤰🏻Caesareans or vaginal births: should mothers or medics have the final say?
👶 Gaia, a platform to finance IVF treatments, closes $20M Series A led by Atomico
🤱🏽Founder of She Matters developed an app for Black women with postpartum depression - After experiencing postpartum depression herself, Jade Kearney decided to create an app for Black women, together with co-founder Marguerite Pierce.
“While I was trying to finish my second master’s degree, I had to figure out how to navigate that space alone because between cultural stigma and medical neglect for Black women in the postpartum period, there was really no outlet for me.” - Jade Kearney
👩🏻🦳 Decades After the Pill, Another Revolution for Women’s Health - Great Britain plans to make hormone replacement therapy, used to treat menopause, more accessible.
Culture: 🏆 Women dominate Berlin film festival as Alcarràs wins Golden Bear - Best director prize, both acting awards and two of the three best film prizes were won by female film-makers, led by the Catalan-language drama Alcarràs directed by Carla Simón
💃🏾 A Model Parent: Naomi Campbell Opens Up About Motherhood On Her Own Terms
“I can count on one hand the number of people who knew that I was having her. But she is the biggest blessing I could ever imagine. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” - Naomi Campbell
Sports: ❤️ Venus and Serena Williams on Their Own Terms
“From such a young age, all we’ve done is work. For Serena and I to explore that freedom is surreal.” - Venus Williams
[Winter Olympics] 🥇Erin Jackson of US 1st Black woman to win speedskating gold
“Hopefully, we’ll see more minorities, especially in the USA, getting out and trying these winter sports.” - Erin Jackson
🏎️ Female NASCAR drivers on the challenges in competing in the male-dominated sport
“It's great that men and women can compete in NASCAR. But I think that inequality is still there and it kind of stems off of the fact that we are lacking on funding.” - Toni Breidinger, NASCAR driver
Things to Ponder
More than 1 in 4 women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetimes, global study finds - The study published in the Lancet medical journal found that 27 percent of those ages 15 to 49 had experienced physical or sexual violence by intimate long-term partners. It uses statistics from the World Health Organization’s global database on the prevalence of violence against women from before the coronavirus pandemic (2000 to 2018).
“Although this study took place before the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers are alarming and research has shown the pandemic exacerbated issues leading to intimate partner violence such as isolation, depression and anxiety, and alcohol use, as well as reducing access to support services.” - Claudia García-Moreno, a WHO public health researcher
The Uber Blog offered companies three frames of reference for progress that remain salient: Clean up contaminated cultures; fix broken structures; and empower workers, victims, and bystanders. Fowler revealed how leaders, especially those in management who engaged in or ignored sexual harassment in their organization, shape culture.
Female Managers Earn Less Under Female CEOs Because Organizations Are Gaming Diversity - In a new study, researchers in the US have found evidence that organizations with a female CEO have less incentive to retain other senior female managers.
Thank you for reading FemWealth! Wish you an exciting week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth