Valley Girls : Lessons from Female Founders in the Silicon Valley and Beyond

2025 Business Book Awards Winner for Business Journey

Women who are smart enough to have the kind of big ideas that can change the world are also smart enough to understand that the odds are stacked against them.

In the past decade, all-female founding teams never received more than 3% of the US venture capital pool. Women seeking capital run up against negative stereotypes, cultural biases, sexual harassment, and discrimination. These factors push some of the most innovative ideas and talents onto the sidelines.

And yet, there is a path forward for any woman with a great idea and the passion to succeed.

Author Kelley Steven-Waiss, founder and CEO of Hitch Works Inc., a cloud-based skills mapping and intelligence platform, ought to know. She experienced the dynamics of raising capital as a woman founder firsthand. Leaving the safety of a career as CHRO of a major technology company, she dove into the challenging waters of venture capital first as an intrapreneur and then an entrepreneur. What she encountered wasn’t always an easy road. And yet, she not only succeeded, but just two years later, she helped to steer her company through a strategic acquisition to a major platform company.

Now, Steven-Waiss is paying it forward by giving inspiration and insight to others pursuing a big idea while female. In her book, Valley Girls, she provides readers with a roadmap of how she and a dozen other women like her beat the odds. With clear eyes and hard-won insight, Steven-Waiss presents their exhilarating and sometimes disappointing experiences alongside her own, demonstrating the unique obstacles that await women founders and showing that there is hope.

She offers inspiration, role models, and a clear path to empower women to get into the game. Each founder’s story provides a guiding light for a different element of the female entrepreneur’s journey including:

• Mastering the idea stage and whiteboarding
• Navigating early setbacks
• Pitching venture capital
• Bootstrapping and angel investment
• Managing the post-funding stage
• Thriving through intrapreneurship
• Balancing family and personal commitments
• Handling stress and anxiety
• Overcoming inevitable setbacks
• Crafting the successful exit.

Valley Girls speaks to women at every stage of their entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial journey and to every C-suite executive and venture capitalist, male or female, who wants to find the next big thing. As Steven-Waiss demonstrates, the winners of the next decades will be those able to tap into the best ideas no matter who brings them to the table. This impassioned call-to-action and clear-eyed guide shows the way to that better future.

KELLEY STEVEN-WAISS is a Chief Transformation Officer at ServiceNow. Prior, she was the founder and CEO of Hitch Works Inc. (acquired by ServiceNow in 2022), a cloud-based skills mapping and intelligence platform,that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to match project-based opportunities to internal employee skill profiles. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she spent over twenty-five years in executive management and consulting, including 13+ years as a CHRO. Kelley is a sought-after speaker on the future of work, a board director for FormFactor, Inc., and is passionate about promoting and mentoring future female founders. Her first book was The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity (2020). Currently based in Los Gatos, California, she is married and the mother of four.