Good morning, Broadsheet readers! UPenn and Harvard presidents are in damage control mode after a Congressional hearing, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner explains why Sam Altman was fired, and a startup founder supports women engineers in Palestine. Have a restful weekend.
– Women in tech. In the fall of 2013, Iliana Montauk was in Gaza for the first time. She heard sonic booms overhead from warplanes and watched contractors install film on windows in case of bombings. Meanwhile, 60 startup founders pitched her their ideas. “Please don’t get distracted by that,” she remembers them telling her. “We’re used to that—it happens here all the time.”
The activity she heard outside turned out to be the leadup to the 2014 Gaza war. Over the next two years, Montauk went on to facilitate some of the first investments in Gaza startups as the director of the organization Gaza Sky Geeks.
When she returned to the Bay Area and worked as a product manager at Upwork, she couldn’t forget the tech talent she’d met in Palestine. “What struck me other than that passion and entrepreneurship that I saw was the female talent,” she remembers. With Laila Abudahi, who she’d met in Gaza, Montauk cofounded Manara, a social impact startup that connects tech companies with tech talent in the Middle East and North Africa, with a special emphasis on women and Palestine. The startup was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 class.
Since war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October, Montauk has tried to balance two realities: supporting Manara’s community of engineers and running a startup in Silicon Valley, where many strongly believe in Israel’s right to defend itself and object to any criticism of Israel’s campaign in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which has killed more than 15,000 people.
Manara’s network of talent currently includes about 70 women throughout the Middle East and North Africa region, who make up half of its total talent pool. In Palestine, 52% of computer science graduates are women—but 83% of those grads are unemployed in a region with the highest youth unemployment in the world. Engineers and students who complete Manara’s training program receive help either securing a remote job with a tech company or relocating abroad for a job. Women are more likely to seek out remote jobs and stay in Gaza with family, while men are more likely to relocate. Companies that have hired through Manara include Google, Meta, Stripe, and Qualtrics.
 Iliana Montauk and Laila Abudahi, cofounders of Manara. Courtesy of Manara Over the past two months, Manara has checked in weekly with its engineers. Montauk and her team have heard about their engineers being injured, losing their homes, living 40 people to an apartment, and losing access to the internet and communications outside of Gaza and the West Bank, which, Montauk points out, has also faced challenging conditions in recent weeks.
“For some reason, people lose sight of the fact that humans are humans everywhere,” Montauk says. “It’s been really disappointing to see people [in the investor community] who tend to be curious, to tend to try to understand the root cause of problems…haven’t seemed to be as thoughtful or nuanced in their responses to what has happened.”
But companies that have actually hired talent from Gaza, Montauk says, have reached out to those staffers to try to help them and their families. “People are disappointed to hear how little it’s possible to actually help and make a difference,” she says.
While the top priority is helping members of the Manara community who are directly affected by the conflict, Montauk also hopes that people take some time to think about the experiences of all Gaza civilians—including the women in tech her startup supports. “I want people to know how important it is to have stability and the ability to dream,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe
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- Secondary explanation. Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill are in damage control mode after struggling with lawmakers' questions about how their campuses would respond to students calling for Jewish genocide. Magill promised to take a fresh look at university policies and acknowledged a lack of focus on “evil” messaging. Gay declared that such ideology has “no place at Harvard.” Whether these defenses can save their jobs—or calm outraged donors—remains to be seen. Financial Times
- Changing the tone. AI researcher Helen Toner, one of four OpenAI board members involved in firing CEO Sam Altman last month, spoke about the saga in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal. According to Toner, Altman's covert plan to oust her from the board after she published a paper critical of OpenAI fueled growing distrust of Altman, eventually leading to his ouster. Toner, who was the target of criticism from Altman's friends and fans during the ordeal, noted that her decisions reflected OpenAI's mission of ensuring AI benefits all humanity. Wall Street Journal
- Fearless fights back. The Fearless Fund venture capital firm filed an appeal on Wednesday to reinstate a policy of investing solely in companies founded by women of color. That mission was halted in September after the American Alliance for Equal Rights argued that the firm was engaging in racially-exclusive practices. The appeals case will begin in late January. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Chip wars. Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su introduced a new chip that can run AI software faster than rivals like Nvidia. Su says the technology to build AI models with human-level intelligence is within reach and predicted that the AI chip industry could be worth $400 billion in coming years. Bloomberg
- Cross-border care. New data from the Guttmacher Institute found that abortions for women out-of-state doubled from 10% to 20% in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2020. More than 92,000 women flocked to legal abortion states like Illinois in 2023, which borders three states with abortion restrictions, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal. Forbes
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Levi Strauss named president Michelle Gass as its next CEO. Initialized Capital added Rent the Runway cofounder Jenny Fleiss as a partner.
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