Aileen Lee is the founder of Cowboy Ventures, one of the first venture firms to be launched and led by a woman. Not only does she have many years of experience bringing tech-driven startups to life as a seed-stage investor, she has also also been vocal about fighting for gender equality in Silicon Valley throughout her career. As such, it is not a surprise that she has appeared on Forbes’ list of the world's 100 most powerful women and on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people.
Lee first graduated with a bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1992 and then worked as a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, before earning her MBA from Harvard Business School a few years later in 1997.
She later joined the American venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and stayed there for thirteen years until her departure in 2012 to establish her own California-based firm, Cowboy Ventures.
The latter invests in seed-stage enterprise and consumer tech businesses. It has backed companies like August, Accompany, Branch, Brandless, DocSend, Dollar Shave Club, StyleSeat, Lending Home, Tally Technologies, and Lightstep.
In 2013, she famously coined the often-used Silicon Valley term “unicorn,” referring to companies valued at over $1 billion. She explained in that respect, “I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.”
As a public diversity advocate, she is also a founding member of All Raise, a non-profit created in 2018 by female investors and focused on accelerating success for women in tech.
“I think it's embarrassing for our industry that we have such low diversity across senior-level management at all of the mainstream, top-tier venture capital firms,” she once stated.
And so, she works to change that. Since its formation, All Raise has made a great impact by building a network of 20,000 people across four U.S. tech hubs, and the industry now counts 13% of female investors compared to 9% before. All Raise’s aim is to push the number to 18% by 2028.