Ariadne Capital: Press

Julie Meyer, founder of investment firm Ariadne Capital, lost patience with the machismo of male corporatism and built a company in her own image

At school in California, I tried hard to be top of my class. But I didn't want to bend the rules by dropping the subject I found most difficult - physics. So I studied physics, got only a B in the exam, and ended up second.
The guy who came first avoided physics and got straight As. I cried all night when I learned I was not going to graduate top of my high school class, but it was an object lesson in free will and accountability: men make the rules, so they know how to bend and even break them.

In any field, it's comforting to know what the rules are. I searched high and low for them as I explored France as a young woman of 22; Paris was where I grew up, professionally and culturally. I eventually realised that culture was the software of the mind, and that one had to reprogram the mind to live successfully overseas.

Despite their current problems, America and France have much in common. Both modern-day countries were founded on revolutions, and after I had lived and worked in France for a while I began to understand what a lot entrepreneurs and revolutionaries have in common. They coolly assess what currently exists, and dismiss it with a shrug, vowing to create something better. I know - I surround myself with entrepreneurs, and the best have that magical ability to sell their view of the world.
Unless women in business become revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, most will end up achieving far less than their true potential. Someone else with a different value system wrote the rules; they're outsiders in someone else's maze. It's like being colour blind; until you know that you see red as green, you wonder if you are crazy.

As a result of having started my professional life outside my native country, I believe I started earlier than most to think of myself as an asset that I would have to continue to develop; a brand that it was my responsibility to enhance. The standard job ladder didn't apply when you were in a foreign country. It was important for me to know what I could do as an individual, stripped of any home-turf advantage.

I also found that expectations for me - which had always been extremely high in my family when I was a child - became very low in the workplace. I couldn't understand it at first, and I chalked it up to working outside my native culture. They didn't know what to do with an ambitious but introverted American woman who had studied humanities.
By the age of 30, I started to understand what was going on, and I began to compete fiercely with myself. When I set out to accomplish something, I was extremely focused. However, I never benchmarked myself against my (overwhelmingly male) peer group.

Corporate life, though, is all about positioning yourself vis-à-vis your colleagues to shine in front of the boss. I only cared how I fared compared with the standards I set for myself, so corporate life was never going to work for me.
I have a clear vision in my mind of the world that I want to live in, and it's considerably different from how it looks now. I know many women who feel the same way. My strategy for living is to try to be the change you want to see in the world. That implies building new structures and being attuned to new requirements. It helps if you are not of the status quo; if you are from the outside; if you want to see what is not visible yet, but is inevitable.

Most of my girlfriends are women entrepreneurs, and women make good ones. They are strong on accountability, and that corresponds nicely to the life of an entrepreneur. Whether sales are good or bad, and whatever the market conditions, the buck stops at the feet of the founder, who has to see the bright side of things day in and day out. Complaining only wastes time. Women are also good on transparency, building relationships and creating the context of trust in an environment that allows people to fulfil their potential.

What women are not good at is saying 'I'm worth $10 million'. So since that didn't come naturally to me, I started practising.
As Madeleine Albright famously said, 'there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women'.
I couldn't agree more. What saddens me is how the average 32-year-old, well-educated woman spends more of her time trying to find a husband than trying to build herself into a unique asset and brand. If these women were to expend as much energy developing themselves as professionals, they would find that they would become much more attractive - to a more attractive type of man - and have multiple strategies for happiness throughout their lives.

When I was 29, a key promotion that had been promised was delayed because of an affair my boss was conducting with our client's senior executive. She was worried that I would get too close to the truth. I was devastated, eventually promoted, and vowed that I would never allow someone's agenda to stop me from achieving my potential.
When I was 32, I was running a network of entrepreneurs that helped start-ups to grow and secure funding. I thought investors - again overwhelmingly men - were smarter than I was. They must be: they were sitting on billions of dollars of funds under management.

But the downturn in the market left a lot of those investors surprised - without any answer as to how to systematically create high-growth companies once the public markets weren't providing exits.

I had a vision for a very different kind of global investment and advisory firm. I couldn't see myself in any of the banks, bankers, venture capital firms or venture capitalists that I had met. All the firms were founded and run by and for men.
They didn't value what I saw as the critical factors for start-up growth: alignment of objectives; focus on relationships; integrity; strength without aggression; ambition without ego. So I had to found Ariadne Capital - choosing the mythological princess who helped Theseus through the labyrinth with a golden thread as my namesake.

Time will tell whether we become the leading global investment and advisory firm; watch this space. But entrepreneurial women have finally arrived. They don't try to break through the glass ceiling - they create their own cathedrals.

www.ariadnecapital.com