Over half of all the employees at this top Silicon Valley VC firm are women
Silicon Valley is historically a boy's club. Women make up just 6% of decision-makers in venture capital firms, and it's difficult for female founders to find funding.
One top venture capital firm is helping to change the landscape. On stage at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen announced women make up 55% of staff at his firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Even more impressive, 10% of employees are African American and Latina women. The Menlo Park, California-based firm employs 130 people.
Andreessen says closing the gender gap in tech is as much an opportunity for his firm as it is for women everywhere.
"If you don't have access to the best talent, if you confine yourself to a certain part of the talent landscape ... then you're just not getting the best people," he said. "You're not going to build a high-quality company."
In spite of the firm's strong diversity numbers, there are currently no female general partners, which is the highest position.
In a 2015 interview with Fortune, Andreessen chalked up the firm's missing female partners to a lack of interest from potential candidates. He and cofounder Ben Horowitz once offered the role to a female tech executive who turned them down five times. It wasn't the first time.
"I think this is true in other firms, and I think this is true at the CEO level as well, is when you talk to female CEOs, they get so many offers," he told Fortune. "Because there are so few and the need is so intense, they get so many offers, that they're just drowning in opportunity."
The solution may be fostering female tech talent earlier in the pipeline. Andreessen Horowitz has partnered with outside organizations like Girls Who Code, which teaches girls computer science skills.
The firm hopes the companies it invests in will adopt a commitment to diversity. Andreessen says the firm encourages founders "very seriously" to consider gender balance.
"One of the things that has become clear, at least to me, is there's no cookie cutter approach to this," Andreessen says. "Every company has to develop an organic sense of itself and how it's going to go about doing this."
Disclosure: The author is in a relationship with an Andreessen Horowitz employee.