The Indonesian immigrant, former figure skater and early Facebook investor is America\u2019s first and only billionaire female venture capitalist.<\/p>\n
Venture capitalist Theresia Gouw <\/strong>is \u201csmart, opinionated and the only woman in the room,\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cThe American dream is so central to my personal story,\u201d she told Forbes in 2023.<\/p>\n She now has another \u201cfirst\u201d to add to her list. Gouw is America\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s assets under management to $1.7 billion\u2014with an emphasis on diversity, especially through its Diversify Capital Fund.<\/p>\n Women made up just 17% of VC decision makers (partners, managing directors and principals) in 2024, per a PitchBook report<\/a>. 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\u2019t move toward parity anytime soon. On President Trump\u2019s first day in office, he issued an executive order mandating the termination of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs\u2014which he called \u201cradical and wasteful\u201d\u2014that have supported women, people of color, individuals with disabilities and others. In addition, some of the world\u2019s biggest companies with powerful corporate venture capital arms, including Google, Meta and Goldman Sachs, have rolled back DEI initiatives.<\/p>\n How Gouw will respond to the new environment isn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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>, a nonprofit that helps female founders and investors in Silicon Valley network and find mentors.<\/p>\n Gouw didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on this story or on Forbes\u2019 estimate of her net worth, but she did speak to Forbes in 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cI’m really excited to be able to bring together my professional passion with my personal passion for better diversity and inclusion in tech,\u201d Gouw said at the time, adding that Acrew\u2019s 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. \u201cYou see a little bit of progress, and a little bit of pullback. It feels a little bit like two steps forward, one step back.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in Indonesia in 1968,<\/strong> 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<\/a> football games with her father, who\u2019d explain the statistics to her, according to Lowenstein Sandler startup lawyer Ed Zimmerman, who\u2019s known and worked with Gouw for nearly 20 years. (In December, Gouw bought a reported<\/a> 2% stake in the team, worth some $100 million.)<\/p>\n In the mid 1980s, only 40% of students at Gouw\u2019s upstate New York high school went on to college. \u201cSomeone once told me that you can improve your chances at luck by working hard and getting a good education,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Harvard dorm room. Gouw has never appeared in Facebook (now Meta\u2019s) regulatory filings, but Forbes estimates she held around 8 million shares at its 2012 public offering\u2014worth more than $5 billion today had she not sold any\u2014and 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\u2019d likely be worth even more.<\/p>\n Photos, From Left: Daniela Amodei, Selena Gomez, Gwynne Shotwell. Illustration by Ben Kirchner for Forbes<\/p>\n America\u2019s Richest Self-Made Women In 2014, Gouw decided to strike out on her own, cofounding Aspect Ventures \u201cwith the idea to create venture the way it was in the late 1990s\u201d\u2014meaning launching a fund that was \u201cjust laser-focused on the early stage,\u201d 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. <\/a><\/p>\n Gouw realized she wanted to build a shop that was \u201cmore consistent with her values as a specialist investor,\u201d and \u201csomething with multigenerational staying power,\u201d says Lauren Kolodny, who cofounded Acrew along with Gouw, Vishal Lugani, Asad Khaliq and Mark Kraynak\u2014plus others that made up a founding team ranging in age from Gen X to Gen Z. \u201cTo build the next great venture firm, you need to be much more culturally akin to our companies,\u201dsays Kolodny.<\/p>\n Acrew launched in 2019 with a core value<\/a> 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\u2019s investors come from \u201cdiverse backgrounds and communities,\u201d meaning women, people of color and immigrants, per Acrew\u2019s website. That fund\u2019s goal is to bring diversity to companies\u2019 investors and boards\u2014thus increasing founders\u2019 access to a variety of perspectives and, hopefully, drive better returns, on the thesis that diverse teams make better decisions.<\/p>\n The firm hasn\u2019t adopted a specific mandate to invest a certain dollar amount or percentage of deals based on a diversity metric. \u201cHaving 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,\u201d says Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of data protection startup HYCU. (Acrew led the firm\u2019s $53 million Series B in 2022.) \u200a\u201dThere’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.\u201d<\/p>\n One notable investor in Acrew\u2019s 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. \u201c\u200aI\u2019d love to,\u201d Zimmerman recalls Gouw saying immediately, then writing a $1 million check to Fisk to cover the investment in Acrew\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Regardless of what happens to the investment, Zimmerman says the inclusion of Fisk as an investor helps because it\u2019s shown Fisk that \u201cthis is what happens when you\u2019re in a venture fund.\u201d HBCUs like Fisk\u2014which has a $37 million endowment, tiny compared to Stanford\u2019s $37 billion\u2014and 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\u2019s biggest university endowments. Gouw\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In the five and a half years <\/strong>since it launched, Acrew has made around 150 investments, according to PitchBook. The firm has had some wins, including an investment in fintech Chime\u2014which is planning to go public at an $11 billion valuation<\/a>, and for which Acrew partner Kolodny landed on Forbes\u2019 2025 Midas List <\/a>of top venture capitalists\u2014and real estate tech firm Divvy, which sold in 2021 to Bill.com (fittingly, Gouw\u2019s first investment at Accel) for $2.5 billion. Five portfolio companies have gone out of business so far, per PitchBook. Acrew\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Taken together, it\u2019s too early to tell how the firm\u2019s 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\u2019s more difficult to raise funding now amid rising interest rates and threats of sweeping global tariffs. That\u2019s coupled with a more hostile political environment for diversity-forward businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cDiversity, equity and inclusion have become terms that people now shy away from,\u201d Zimmerman says. \u201c\u200aThe waters have receded in terms of the popularity of both the sentiment and putting dollars behind the sentiment \u2026 but the problem has not changed,\u201d referring to diversity among venture capital leaders, investors and founders.<\/p>\n Acrew appears to be hedging a bit, too. In the firm\u2019s October announcement of its fresh funds, there is no explicit mention of diversity or diverse voices\u2014but rather a focus the firm\u2019s 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 \u201cAll In on AI.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFunds are optimizing for fundraising ability instead of necessarily the substance,\u201d says independent venture capital investor Andrew Chan, who wrote a blog post titled \u201cThe Failure of DEI In Venture Capital\u201d earlier this year. \u201cThey\u2019ll play to trends that work.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s success stands on its own as a way to encourage diversity in venture capital.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s important for young women and young Asian American women to see someone like [Gouw] achieve what she’s achieving,\u201d she says. Or, as Zimmerman put it in a 2022 social media post<\/a>: \u201cTheresia leads by quiet example. It has, however, been brought to my attention that if we are more public about these examples, others will follow.\u201d<\/p>\n \nMore from ForbesForbesInside Forbes\u2019 Ranking Of America\u2019s Richest Self-Made Women 2025By Kerry A. Dolan<\/a>ForbesAmerica\u2019s Richest Self-Made Women Under 40By Sylvan Lebrun<\/a>ForbesAmerica\u2019s Richest Women Celebrities 2025By Matt Craig<\/a>ForbesWhy Selena Gomez Isn\u2019t A BillionaireBy Gigi Zamora<\/a>ForbesThe Unlikely Path From Iranian Revolution To Billionaire Biotech CEOBy Kerry A. Dolan<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Indonesian immigrant, former figure skater and early Facebook investor is America\u2019s first and only billionaire female venture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[70783,70782,70781,2540,51,5426,3134,600,70784,3322,70780,16,15,3141],"class_list":{"0":"post-169693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-accel-partners","9":"tag-acrew-capital","10":"tag-americas-richest-self-made-women","11":"tag-billionaire","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-diversity","14":"tag-entrepreneurship","15":"tag-facebook","16":"tag-first-woman-vc-billionaire","17":"tag-startups","18":"tag-theresia-gouw","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-venture-capital"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114652274462040635","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nForbes\u2019 Ranking Of The Country\u2019s Most Successful Women Entrepreneurs, Executives And Entertainers<\/p>\n