Our Investment in Callisto
As has been reported and documented, sexual coercion, harassment, and assault have unfortunately become the experience of many women and women founders in tech. In June of 2017, I published “The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs” (fka #DecencyPledge) as a response to news media reports of sexual harassment and assault in the venture capital industry. My goal was to inspire the venture capital industry and other Silicon Valley professionals to take more explicit and deliberate steps in recognizing and combating sexual harassment in our industry. I strongly condemned the immoral and outrageous behavior from some powerful men in VC, and in that blog post, I wrote:
“I think the industry should actively work on building a kind of industry-wide HR function, so that venture capitalists who engage in such behavior face the same sort of consequences that they would if their overtures were directed at an employee.”
As we saw from news reports that poured in from the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment and assault are often perpetrated repeatedly by the same individuals. In most cases, predators are exposed when survivors realize they are not alone. As Callisto Founder and CEO Jess Ladd stated in her 2016 TED Talk,
“Knowing that you’re not alone tends to change everything. It changes the way you frame your experience. It changes the way you frame your perpetrator. It means that if you do come forward, you’ll have someone else’s back and they will have yours.”
But even with all the news reports coming out, founders in tech still have no scalable way of knowing if there are other victims of their same perpetrator, and no way to find out or protect their community, other than using the “whisper network” or going to the press.
This is why I am thrilled to announce Greylock’s multi-year commitment to fund and support Callisto, an online platform that will help tech founders privately report professional sexual coercion and sexual assault committed by investors.
Callisto is slated to launch this summer for the tech industry, but the team has already proven the model works at scale. Callisto has been operating on college campuses for nearly three years. Student sexual assault survivors on participating campuses are five times more likely to report their assault and do so three times faster. An estimated 90% of college sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. Callisto has also detected serial perpetrators of sexual assault who would have normally gone unreported.
The talented team behind Callisto — comprised of engineers, researchers, educators, victims, and legal experts — are using tech to solve one of the most urgent and critical challenges for victims of sexual misconduct. Jess Ladd (CEO), who studied infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, created Callisto after researching how sexual networks impact the transmission of diseases. Last summer, when the venture capital community was reckoning with multiple stories of sexual misconduct, Jess began to explore the possibility of bringing Callisto’s work to the tech industry with her long-time collaborator and Callisto advisory board member, Anjana Rajan. Anjana, who studied engineering at Cornell and was working with Palantir at the time, immediately decided to join Callisto full-time as CTO.
Callisto’s online systems are designed to detect repeat perpetrators and empower victims to make the reporting decision that is right for them. Because their product is designed to scale across industries, Callisto has the potential to make the same kind of positive impact in tech — and many other industries over time.
Callisto is changing the equation. They empower victims by providing them with the options, information, and support they need, giving them the ability to disclose in their own time and own way. Callisto safely and privately connects victims of the same perpetrator to validate each other’s experiences and take collective action.
We are proud to support Callisto as they scale their impact, empowering victims of sexual harassment and assault across all industries, support their wellbeing, and change the culture of sexual violence that has persisted for far too long.
