Amid DEI Backlash, This Pro-Diversity Venture Capitalist Is Now A Billionaire

Forbes

8 hours ago

Venture capitalist Theresia Gouw is 'smart, opinionated and the only woman in the room,' says Heather Fernandez, cofounder and CEO of healthtech startup Solv and former executive at real estate tech firm Trulia, which Gouw backed in 2005. She's also become a woman of many firsts. Born in Indonesia to parents of Chinese descent, Gouw immigrated to the U.S. when she was three. She later became the first person in her high school to attend Brown University, the first female partner at venture capital powerhouse Accel and cofounder of one of the first female-led VC firms in Silicon Valley. 'The American dream is so central to my personal story,' she told Forbes in 2023.
She now has another 'first' to add to her list. Gouw is America's first female billionaire venture capitalist, worth an estimated $1.2 billion. Much of her fortune stems from her 15-year tenure at Accel, where she was part of the team that led that firm's lucrative early bet on Facebook (now called Meta). She now runs Acrew Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that she cofounded in 2019. Acrew raised $700 million in October to invest in data and security, health and fintech startups, bringing the firm's assets under management to $1.7 billion—with an emphasis on diversity, especially through its Diversify Capital Fund.
Women made up just 17% of VC decision makers (partners, managing directors and principals) in 2024, per a PitchBook report. The private market data firm also reported that firms with at least one female cofounder captured around 22% of VC funding in 2024, down from 25% in 2023. Things likely won't move toward parity anytime soon. On President Trump's first day in office, he issued an executive order mandating the termination of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs—which he called 'radical and wasteful'—that have supported women, people of color, individuals with disabilities and others. In addition, some of the world's biggest companies with powerful corporate venture capital arms, including Google, Meta and Goldman Sachs, have rolled back DEI initiatives.
How Gouw will respond to the new environment isn't clear, but for many years she has been a strong advocate for DEI, doubling down on the practice in several ways: starting Acrew, with an founding investment team that's 83% women or people of color; spearheading an initiative to bring Historically Black Colleges and Universities into the VC world; cofounding DEI-focused fund of funds First Close Partners (now with some $35 million in assets); and cofounding All Raise, a nonprofit that helps female founders and investors in Silicon Valley network and find mentors.
Gouw didn't respond to a request for comment on this story or on Forbes' estimate of her net worth, but she did speak to Forbes in 2023.
'I'm really excited to be able to bring together my professional passion with my personal passion for better diversity and inclusion in tech,' Gouw said at the time, adding that Acrew's Diversify Capital Fund is the largest VC fund focused on increasing diversity of stock ownership in tech startups, then with more than $300 million in assets. 'You see a little bit of progress, and a little bit of pullback. It feels a little bit like two steps forward, one step back.'
Born in Indonesia in 1968, Gouw left three years later with her parents and sister, near the end of the Suharto-led political revolution that targeted people of Chinese descent like her family. They moved to a 2,000-person town near Buffalo, New York, where she learned math by watching Buffalo Bills football games with her father, who'd explain the statistics to her, according to Lowenstein Sandler startup lawyer Ed Zimmerman, who's known and worked with Gouw for nearly 20 years. (In December, Gouw bought a reported 2% stake in the team, worth some $100 million.)
In the mid 1980s, only 40% of students at Gouw's upstate New York high school went on to college. 'Someone once told me that you can improve your chances at luck by working hard and getting a good education,' Gouw told Forbes in 2023. So she worked her way into Brown University, where she majored in engineering (and now serves on its board of trustees), graduated, consulted for Bain & Company for a couple years, then earned an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1996.
She cofounded a software startup around then, but jumped ship in 1999 to work at Silicon Valley-based venture firm Accel, where she spent the next 15 years. There she rose to become a managing partner of the fund that in 2005 bet on Facebook when it was just a scrappy, year-old startup fresh out of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. Gouw has never appeared in Facebook (now Meta's) regulatory filings, but Forbes estimates she held around 8 million shares at its 2012 public offering—worth more than $5 billion today had she not sold any—and slowly diversified her stake over time. Had she not gotten divorced in 2013 in California, where assets are most often split evenly between ex-spouses, she'd likely be worth even more.
Photos, From Left: Daniela Amodei, Selena Gomez, Gwynne Shotwell. Illustration by Ben Kirchner for Forbes
In 2014, Gouw decided to strike out on her own, cofounding Aspect Ventures 'with the idea to create venture the way it was in the late 1990s'—meaning launching a fund that was 'just laser-focused on the early stage,' she told Forbes in 2018. She and cofounder Jennifer Fonstad co-led Aspect for five years before splitting up and spinning off into their own firms.
Gouw realized she wanted to build a shop that was 'more consistent with her values as a specialist investor,' and 'something with multigenerational staying power,' says Lauren Kolodny, who cofounded Acrew along with Gouw, Vishal Lugani, Asad Khaliq and Mark Kraynak—plus others that made up a founding team ranging in age from Gen X to Gen Z. 'To build the next great venture firm, you need to be much more culturally akin to our companies,'says Kolodny.
Acrew launched in 2019 with a core value of diversity of perspective and two main funds. It invests anywhere from $1 million to $20 million in startups, with smaller amounts for earlier-stage companies. The vast majority of its Diversify Capital Fund's investors come from 'diverse backgrounds and communities,' meaning women, people of color and immigrants, per Acrew's website. That fund's goal is to bring diversity to companies' investors and boards—thus increasing founders' access to a variety of perspectives and, hopefully, drive better returns, on the thesis that diverse teams make better decisions.
The firm hasn't adopted a specific mandate to invest a certain dollar amount or percentage of deals based on a diversity metric. 'Having a board member like Theresia who values DEI reinforces the idea that people will be judged on merits and not on what they look like or where they come from,' says Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of data protection startup HYCU. (Acrew led the firm's $53 million Series B in 2022.) 'There's a misnomer sometimes when you talk about DEI, that you're making exceptions for people. Not in her case at all. She wants to make sure her portfolio companies have access to talent, board members or other contacts that might be diverse.'
One notable investor in Acrew's Diversify Capital Fund: Fisk University of Nashville. In 2020, lawyer and Fisk trustee Zimmerman approached Gouw with an idea to get Acrew to donate a fully-funded investor interest in the fund to the historically Black university. ' I'd love to,' Zimmerman recalls Gouw saying immediately, then writing a $1 million check to Fisk to cover the investment in Acrew's fund. Zimmerman, who has represented Acrew in fundraising transactions and is himself an investor in Acrew, added that Gouw has quietly become one of the largest donors to Fisk.
Regardless of what happens to the investment, Zimmerman says the inclusion of Fisk as an investor helps because it's shown Fisk that 'this is what happens when you're in a venture fund.' HBCUs like Fisk—which has a $37 million endowment, tiny compared to Stanford's $37 billion—and other smaller colleges have never really been able to access the top VC funds that have helped to drive the exponential growth of the country's biggest university endowments. Gouw's initiative later expanded to other firms and HBCUs as well: The Historic Fund, which involves ten VC firms, including Acrew, General Catalyst and Union Square ventures and nine HBCUs, launched in 2023 with over $10 million in donations to the universities along with matching allocations in their venture capital funds.
In the five and a half years since it launched, Acrew has made around 150 investments, according to PitchBook. The firm has had some wins, including an investment in fintech Chime—which is planning to go public at an $11 billion valuation, and for which Acrew partner Kolodny landed on Forbes' 2025 Midas List of top venture capitalists—and real estate tech firm Divvy, which sold in 2021 to Bill.com (fittingly, Gouw's first investment at Accel) for $2.5 billion. Five portfolio companies have gone out of business so far, per PitchBook. Acrew's initial fund, which made its first investment in 2019, has an 8% internal rate of return so far, per data provider Preqin, putting it in the third quartile of firms that started investing that same year.
Taken together, it's too early to tell how the firm's strategy will play out, since venture returns typically materialize over the course of a decade. Plus, succeeding as an upstart venture firm is certainly harder than it was a few years ago. It's more difficult to raise funding now amid rising interest rates and threats of sweeping global tariffs. That's coupled with a more hostile political environment for diversity-forward businesses.
'Diversity, equity and inclusion have become terms that people now shy away from,' Zimmerman says. ' The waters have receded in terms of the popularity of both the sentiment and putting dollars behind the sentiment … but the problem has not changed,' referring to diversity among venture capital leaders, investors and founders.
Acrew appears to be hedging a bit, too. In the firm's October announcement of its fresh funds, there is no explicit mention of diversity or diverse voices—but rather a focus the firm's thesis-driven approach of investing in companies in the data & security and fintech sectors. In December, Acrew announced a new thesis focused on companies in the health space. In April, the firm released a report called 'All In on AI.'
'Funds are optimizing for fundraising ability instead of necessarily the substance,' says independent venture capital investor Andrew Chan, who wrote a blog post titled 'The Failure of DEI In Venture Capital' earlier this year. 'They'll play to trends that work.'
Still, Acrew touts the diversity of its founding team prominently on its website: 55% identify as female, 48% as Asian/Pacific Islander and 14% as Black, Indigenous or other people of color. And Kolodny says that Gouw's success stands on its own as a way to encourage diversity in venture capital.
'It's important for young women and young Asian American women to see someone like [Gouw] achieve what she's achieving,' she says. Or, as Zimmerman put it in a 2022 social media post: 'Theresia leads by quiet example. It has, however, been brought to my attention that if we are more public about these examples, others will follow.'