Theresia Gouw

Current Company

Acrew Capital — Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Breaking Through Silicon Valley's Glass Ceiling

Theresia Gouw's career in venture capital spans over two decades and includes some of the industry's most successful investments in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and marketplace businesses. Born in Indonesia and raised in a family that valued education as the path to opportunity, she studied electrical engineering at Brown University and earned an MBA from Stanford before joining Accel Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture firms. At Accel, she invested in companies including Trulia, Imperva, Jasper Technologies, and Komodor — building a track record that established her as one of the top-performing investors in the industry.

Despite her performance, Gouw experienced the gender dynamics that have long defined Silicon Valley venture capital. Women represented less than 10% of partners at major VC firms during most of her career, and female-founded companies received less than 3% of venture funding. Rather than accepting these numbers as immutable, Gouw left Accel to co-found Aspect Ventures in 2014 with Jennifer Fonstad — one of the first venture firms founded by senior women who had proven themselves at top-tier firms rather than operating on the industry's margins.

Building Acrew Capital and Investing in Diversity

After Aspect Ventures, Gouw co-founded Acrew Capital, a firm that invests in early-stage technology companies with a particular focus on backing diverse founding teams. The thesis isn't charitable — it's analytical: Gouw argues that diverse teams build better products because they understand a wider range of user needs, that markets serving diverse populations are systematically overlooked by homogeneous investor groups, and that the talent pool of excellent founders has always been diverse even when funding hasn't been.

Acrew Capital's portfolio reflects this thesis, with investments in cybersecurity, vertical software, and data infrastructure companies led by founders from backgrounds that traditional venture capital has historically ignored. Gouw has been named to the Forbes Midas List multiple times and serves on the board of the National Venture Capital Association, where she has pushed for industry-wide data collection on the demographics of funded founders. Her career demonstrates that the case for diversity in venture capital isn't about lowering the bar — it's about recognizing that the bar was never applied equally in the first place.