A recap of our fireside chat with Paige Hendrix Butner, CEO of All Raise

Paige Hendrix Butner has one of the most unusual vantage points in venture. As CEO of All Raise, the nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the success of women and non-binary founders and investors, she sits inside conversations that most people only hear about secondhand — with GPs, LPs, founders, and firms trying to figure out what this industry is supposed to look like next. We got an hour with her, and she did not waste it.

The thing that stuck most was not any single number. It was the distinction she kept drawing between title and power. Firms have been handing out partner titles for years — partly as a talent retention tool, partly to get more people in front of founders without giving them actual decision-making authority. The result is that the word “partner” can mean four different things depending on the firm, and what’s on a business card tells you almost nothing about whether someone can actually write a check. For women in particular, this dynamic is sharp: the title arrives without the power, and power inside a VC firm is genuinely hard to see from the outside.

So All Raise has started measuring it differently — looking at how much capital people actually control, what deals they lead, what board seats they hold. The picture that emerges is one where women are present in the industry in ways they weren’t a decade ago, but still sitting at the edges of where the real decisions get made:

• Fewer than 1 in 5 decision-makers at US VC firms are women — and barely 1 in 9 firms has a majority-female check-writing team
• Women- and diverse-owned firms manage less than 1.6% of US private capital assets — less than two cents on the dollar
• Only six women hold a Managing Partner seat across the entire universe of US VC firms managing $1B or more
• The number of women- and minority-owned firms actively raising capital fell 12% in 2025 — the first decline on record

The pipeline into those seats, and what succession planning looks like, is a question the industry hasn’t seriously answered yet.

The more energizing part of the conversation was about what’s gaining momentum beyond the industry’s traditional centers of power. All Raise is tracking hundreds of women-led emerging funds, and the performance case for investing in them is strong — not as an act of charity but as a straightforward bet. Across nearly 2,500 US venture funds over the last 25 years, emerging managers have outperformed established peers by 7.2 points of IRR. Funds with at least one woman GP deliver equal or better returns despite raising under a disadvantage — and carry 20% more unrealized value on average. The challenge has never been performance, but rather access to capital and opportunity. Paige is also watching a real shift on the LP side, driven by a massive intergenerational wealth transfer already underway. Women are projected to control the majority of an estimated $124 trillion changing hands between now and 2049, and she’s hearing it show up in actual conversations — women pushing back on how their money is managed, seeking out women-led funds, wanting their capital to reflect what they actually believe. Female LP participation has grown from 13% to 21% in just four years. That’s a structural change, and it matters.

For founders in the room, Paige’s advice was direct: start your fundraising conversations now, well before you need to be transactional. Know what you actually want on your cap table — the skills, network, lived experience, and capital your specific business needs — and go find those investors deliberately. Build in community wherever you can, because this process is hard and much harder alone.

And on the question of whether women investors have an obligation to invest in women founders — which comes up constantly — Paige was clear. There are nowhere near enough women in venture to fund all women-led companies, and investing out of obligation serves nobody. You want investors who believe in your business. The better frame is that women investors often bring market understanding and lived experience that adds real value, and that’s worth seeking out intentionally.

All Raise is raising $5 million this year to fund the work — the data institute, the community programs, the media platform they’re building to put more women and non-binary voices in the places where the industry’s narratives get shaped. If you want to get involved, email Paige at paige@allraise.org or Kate at kate@allraise.org.

These are the conversations we have every month in our community. Watch the full recording here.