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Dealmaker: All-Male AI Boards; General Catalyst’s AI Head Count Savings

Dealmaker
The topic of whether startup boards have enough women on them has been muted lately. Not only has President Donald Trump's administration targeted diversity mandates, but federal courts have overturned related laws, such as those passed in California requiring a certain number of women and underrepresented minorities on public company boards.  But Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump critic, wants to draw attention to what's happening on private boards at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom. A nonprofit she co-founded said in a recent report nearly half of AI startups in California only have men on their board, while only 15% of director seats in private AI startups are held by women. 
Sep 25, 2025

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The topic of whether startup boards have enough women on them has been muted lately. Not only has President Donald Trump's administration targeted diversity mandates, but federal courts have overturned related laws, such as those passed in California requiring a certain number of women and underrepresented minorities on public company boards. 

But Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump critic, wants to draw attention to what's happening on private boards at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom. A nonprofit she co-founded said in a recent report nearly half of AI startups in California only have men on their board, while only 15% of director seats in private AI startups are held by women. 

The study's findings included more than 140 AI companies headquartered in California, the majority of which were private companies. 

The study came from the California Partners Project, the nonprofit Siebel Newsom set up in 2020 to focus on increasing women's representation in California leadership. It did its AI startup study in collaboration with Crunchbase and Illumyn Impact, a public benefit company focused on board representation. 

Siebel Newsom argues that AI startups need to diversify their boards before they become public companies, in part because women bring an important viewpoint to this emerging technology, which promises to exert an impact on society as powerful as social media.

"We're trying to get ahead of AI so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past before it's too late—by not creatively putting guardrails on this technology," she said. She believes that process includes having diverse board directors. 

Her organization recommends that companies boost board representation by appointing more independent directors, since they don't need to be investors or founders, roles overwhelmingly held by men. It also asks companies to commit to looking for diverse directors outside their existing networks. 

"There's been some regression because of all of this DEI nonsense and fear," she said. "It is just good for business to have diversity at the tables of power." 

There's been a lot of chatter lately about whether the hundreds of billions of dollars that companies including OpenAI need to train and run AI will lead to commensurate spending by businesses and consumers. 

In the latest report that rains on the AI parade, Bain & Co. this week estimated that spending by businesses on AI for functions like sales, customer support and research will still fall $800 billion short of the revenue needed to fund $2 trillion in expected data center investment.

Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture firm General Catalyst, an investor in Anthropic and Mistral AI, noted that the study focused on the amount of money companies could shift from spending on software toward AI. But they'll have a lot more to spend on AI than their IT budgets—because AI will replace some of the work humans do. 

"The equation becomes hard if you think about the market size in the context of software budgets of companies," he said Wednesday in an interview on TITV, The Information's new streaming video show. "But if you start to think about the fact that the ultimate revenue opportunities are labor budgets of these companies, that's when it really starts to make sense."

Taneja laid out a scenario that consulting companies are dealing with: "How do we go from 50,000 employees today to 100,000 in five years—but only 10,000 of them are humans?"

Of course, if AI replaces human workers, "that obviously creates a whole other set of issues," which, says Taneja, the tech industry must counter with massive worker retraining, perhaps supported by the AI companies themselves

General Catalyst is itself in the midst of integrating AI throughout the company. Taneja said he could see the 300-person firm growing just 15% to 20% in head count in three years, "even though our aspirations as a business are to grow far far greater than that."—Laura Mandaro

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