Marketing guru Margit Wennmachers' new venture

Margit Wennmachers is one of two female partners at Menlo Park venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Margit Wennmachers is one of two female partners at Menlo Park venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Marketing guru Margit Wennmachers' new venture 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

The six-course dinners that venture capitalist Margit Wennmachers hosts regularly at her pink stucco Richmond District home in San Francisco are always off the record.

The visiting CEOs, investors and media types are encouraged to leave their bags, notebooks and cell phones at the door. Wennmachers kisses her guests' cheeks and shows them around her elegant living room (molded fireplace, tulips everywhere) and garden (with a trampoline for her 6-year-old daughter, Lola) as the first round of hors d'oeuvres comes out on silver trays.

Despite a collection of journalists from the most prominent publications in the United States and Europe, no images of the fennel sorbet, bacon sabayon or rack of lamb will ever make it to Instagram.

That's because everyone in the room needs Wennmachers, who has quietly become one of the most powerful people - man or woman - in Silicon Valley. Behind the scenes, the marketing guru has helped startups brand themselves, making wonky companies not only sexy to journalists, but also appealing to potential buyers.

Silicon Valley mastery

As a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, she's helped teach new CEOs everything from how to dress for work to how to handle a public relations crisis. But her role at the firm goes beyond marketing: She is also a venture capitalist, backing two young CEOs - who happen to be women - in the past year.

"When I was starting, one of the top VCs at the time, Doug Leone, was interviewed about marketing and basically, he said, 'It was so dumb,' " said Wennmachers, 48. "Now almost every firm has a marketing department. I've become the Employment Act.

"A lot of them think marketing is a dirty word - you have to remember, they work in code. They say things like, 'The code works; I don't need a nice headline for it.' But when they go for an IPO and the banker asks them for the story, it's usually the moment they realize this s- might work."

At a recent cocktail party, Wennmachers introduced company presidents and CEOs while tech writers watched from the bar - "She's kind of the godfather," one said.

Her mastery of Silicon Valley was on display in 2012 when she was representing Nicira, a network virtualization startup that was preparing to be acquired. When New York Times tech reporter Quentin Hardy told Wennmachers that he thought Nicira was too wonky for a long story, she asked him out to lunch at Boulevard to make her case for the company. Whatever she said clearly changed his mind.

After Hardy's story - headlined "Startup Nicira plans to disrupt networking giants" - Nicira, which had initially been valued at $500 million, was bought by VMware for $1.26 billion.

"Basically, my job is to focus on the entrepreneur and the idea, because there's often no product yet, just an idea, but it's not hard," she said. "Hashtag: not bragging."

'Fashion addict'

On a recent afternoon at her spare office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the whip-thin Wennmachers wore paisley cropped pants and white leather Prada heels and was chewing gum.

"In the office, there's a lot of debate and swearing," she said. "There are some people who are more harmony driven."

Is she?

"No."

She drives a green Mini Cooper. On her Twitter profile, she calls herself a "fashion addict."

Her daughter, a first-grader at the all-girls Hamlin School in San Francisco, has started horse riding lessons in Woodside, "so it looks like I will, too," Wennmachers said. They do yoga together and, on weekends, hike the Dipsea Trail in Marin County and take a bus back. Her former husband, a boyfriend from high school, is a sailing instructor in the Bay Area.

"He's not famous," she said to the question of what his name is.

She's the only single mother in her daughter's class - "I'm still waiting for someone to say to a man, 'How do you do it all?' "

Rarity in venture capital

Indeed, Wennmachers has had to operate in an industry not known for its female-centric ways. (In Silicon Valley, women make 49 cents for every dollar a man earns - nationally, it's 77 cents for every dollar - and own only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech startups, surveys show. Critics say such inequality was underscored at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, when several male participants resorted to sexual antics while making presentations.)

Statistically, Wennmachers is a rarity in the venture capital world. Sequoia Capital, where Douglas Leone works, has 23 partners, one of whom is a woman. General Catalyst Partners has six partners and no women. Benchmark Capital has 13 partners and no women. Andreessen Horowitz - with 13 partners, two of whom are women - looks great by contrast.

Earlier in her career, Wennmachers said, she tried not to pay attention when her gender became an issue.

"If it did, I'd be annoyed, angry. And then I'd get the coffee and move on," she said. "Even now, I've certainly been in meetings where you say something and 10 minutes later, a man says it, and suddenly it's a thing. But what I don't like, as a woman, is for anyone to walk on eggshells around me - and that certainly doesn't happen anymore."

Wennmachers' path to the top of Silicon Valley started on a pig farm in Germany.

She grew up in Brücken, the daughter of a farmer. "The mushroom farm didn't work and kind of devolved into a pig farm," she said. Her nickname was Hagish-Hein, or "the little one from Heinrich." The town had a butcher and two bakeries; she's the only one of her three siblings to leave Germany, and she didn't learn the word for stranger until she did.

"It was such a small town - my dad's phone number had three digits. It has four now," she said.

Her mother taught her about style. "It was just a gene; it's not like she had money to throw at the problem," she said. "But she taught me about good taste."

Wennmachers began to learn about the world of marketing and tech when she moved to the bigger city of Lippstadt and then Frankfurt, where she worked in temporary jobs, first at Siemens, then at McDonnell Douglas in the software division. She was running the marketing division for Argon Computer's Germany region by the time she was 24.

"Which isn't that young," she said. "Here, they start coding at 8!"

When her boyfriend, who also worked at the company, moved to Santa Cruz, she went with him.

"I'm not a nerd. I wasn't very good at math or anything, but it was frustrating to not have a front-row seat in technology. My childhood was a good motivator. I got here and had nothing to lose and everything to gain."

The transition was jarring. "You take someone from Frankfurt and send them to Santa Cruz - I was still wearing pantyhose," she said, shaking her head.

Wennmachers moved to San Francisco and eventually landed a job at a PR firm working for Simone Otus, who had started her PR business, Blanc & Otus, when she was 25.

"She was fearless, which I, of course, liked," said Wennmachers. "But I probably wasn't a very good employee."

Otus said Wennmachers was quiet when she started.

"But you could feel her ambition. She was impatient with the process. I'd have to say, 'You can't just start at the top,' " said Otus. "During the early 2000s, in the first boom, a lot of venture firms brought on women, and they were definitely second class. Margit has changed the role of a marketing partner."

Firm's success stories

Wennmachers began to put herself on the Silicon Valley map in 1997 when - out of her small Green Street apartment - she co-founded OutCast, a marketing and communications agency that today works for behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Box and Sephora. She sold the company, now one of the tech world's most powerful PR firms, for $10 million in 2005.

A few years later, Marc Andreessen invited her to meet him at the Creamery in Palo Alto, at the time the temporary headquarters of his nascent venture capital firm. Wennmachers, who was not told exactly what the meeting was about, showed up with a PowerPoint on the history of OutCast. The ice cream scooper, doubling as receptionist, said he'd let her know when Andreessen, who commandeered a booth in back, would be ready.

After the meeting, Wennmachers was still confused as to why she'd been there. But a week later, Andreessen called and hired her to brand his new venture capital firm - essentially, to make entrepreneurs take his money instead of someone else's.

The firm took off. It's now a $2.7 billion fund with success stories like Groupon, Instagram and Zynga - and Wennmachers is a partner.

"She's an incredibly well-rounded adviser," said Hosain Rahman, who founded the wearable-technology company Jawbone and is a client of Wennmachers. "If you're a technically focused new entrepreneur, she'll help you explain what you do, even to yourself. ... And she's not gonna bull s- you and blow smoke. She's like, 'Here's what your board should look like, here's how you should staff, and here's how that'll be perceived.' "

Andreessen called Wennmachers both "a stealth submarine at 3,000 feet and coming at you" and "the mother of Silicon Valley."

"She has Silicon Valley wired, completely coated like I've never seen," he said. "She's incredibly influential. She's fiercely loyal. And she's completely unafraid of controversy. She's very able to speak truth to power. There's no hesitation at all."

Discretion is critical

What has helped make Andreessen Horowitz successful is that when it comes to picking companies, it selects those headed by nerdier, technical CEOs, not necessarily by business school graduates.

"That s- cannot be taught," Wennmachers said. "Everything else can."

That's where she comes in. And you can be sure that discretion will be part of the package.

"There was a guy who ODd in a hotel room," she said. "If I write a book, I could never work, really."

Over lunch at the Grove on Fillmore (one of her favorite spots), Wennmachers, wearing a whimsical shirt with peacock feathers and a metal eggshell necklace, said her people skills have helped her in venture capital. "I have a pretty good radar for people's native intelligence, drive."

She told the story about her meeting a few years ago with economist Lawrence Summers, who told Wennmachers that if he went back to the White House, he'd like to take her with him.

"I was like, 'Dude, you're still interviewing,' " she said. "I haven't come up with a better job yet - I really can do stuff here that will make a material difference. And we're so connected, it's the equivalent of the White House."

This story has been corrected since it appeared in print editions.