Jennifer Stojkovic
- Jennifer Stojkovic, a general partner at Joyful Ventures, commonly turns down founder pitches.
- But after she and her husband, also an investor, both rejected the same founder, he blew up at her.
- The incident struck a nerve with her and other women VCs. She said it was "all too common."
Like most venture capitalists, Jennifer Stojkovic receives dozens of inbound messages a day from founders, asking her to review and hopefully invest in their startups.
She doesn't often have the bandwidth to reply to all of them, she said – par for the course for the job. "We have invested in three companies out of 200 pitches, so it's near 99% rejections," she told Insider. As a general partner at the $23 million social-impact emerging fund Playful Ventures, Stojkovic backs early-stage startups in the alternative or sustainable protein market.
But when Stojkovic sent a short rejection message last week to Aaron Dossey, a founder who had pitched her on LinkedIn, she received a hostile response. After explaining to the founder that her fund doesn't invest in "insects," or insect proteins, the founder replied with several expletives and personal insults.
Dossey declined to comment for this story.
After the exchange, she talked about it with her husband, who also invests in food tech startups as an angel investor. The two realized that he had just rejected the same founder – but he wasn't harassed.
"I was in disbelief. We have a pretty uncommon last name and it should be pretty clear to put together that we're married," she said.
Stojkovic posted about the incident to LinkedIn, with screenshots of the two responses. Hundreds of users reacted to the post within just a few hours. The founder continued to insult Stojkovic in the post's comments, and he appeared to delete his LinkedIn profile on Monday. She also received several hundred direct message from friends and connections, saying that they were subjected to this kind of treatment as women in tech, too.
"I would assume probably about 20% of the interactions I get are probably hostile or passive aggressive in some sort of way, typically from male founders," she said. "It's much more common than you think."
She shared with Insider a screenshot of an expletive-filled email she received from an unidentified email account calling her a "feminist d——-t" as an example. Other incidents Stojkovic said she's faced include a male founder telling her in a recent pitch meeting that she was a "waste of time" and had no idea what she was talking about when she told him his company was not a fit for her fund.
She's also faced bias when speaking with potential investors in her fund, she said.
"When I'm fundraising and asking for people to invest in my fund, I'm treated differently from my male partners," Stojkovic said. "It really is strange that even when you're in a position of authority, where you've actually raised a fund and proven yourself in the industry, that you're still being subjected to this."
It's no secret that the world of venture capital and startups remains male-dominated. In the United States, women make up only 8.6% of all venture capitalists, 8% of firm partners, and 7% of board seats at venture capital firms, according to a 2022 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For Stojkovic, these numbers point to both a lack of representation of women in venture investing, as well as limited opportunities for women to break into venture. "Women VCs need to be very vocal and forward, and call out the type of bad behavior that's happening, but we also need to be sure that we're represented in the media," she said.
Changing the culture of venture capital and startups will only happen when more women feel like becoming a founder or an investor is a viable career path for them, Stojkovic said. "A big focus of mine is talking to young women —particularly female student groups — about how to get into this industry."
Are you a female founder or investor who has faced harassment? Contact reporter Madeline Renbarger at mrenbarger@insider.com or on the secure messaging app Signal at +1-512-968-0540.