Paul Vronsky didn’t know what he was getting into. When he joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2012 as its general counsel, the first thing on his mind was making sure the company complied with new filing requirements under Dodd-Frank. He had virtually no litigation background. But after just three months on the job, the company would be hit with a discrimination lawsuit by now former partner Ellen Pao. The firm—and Vronsky—was thrust into a legal battle that involved ugly gender discrimination claims and reverberated throughout Silicon Valley’s tech industry.
It was a tough moment. “When you start at a place and these types of allegations come in, it would give a normal person some pause,” Vronsky says. But he ultimately was convinced that the accusations against the firm and its executives were distortions of the truth, noting that women like CFO Susan Biglieri either hold or have held key positions in the firm. “Here we are being hoisted on this petard almost of being symbols of all these negative things,” Vronsky says, “things that are symptomatic in our industry, while at the same time we’re leaders in some regard.”
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