'We're Not Going to Stop Doing More': New Leaders Take Reins as ChIPs Gears Up for 10th Annual Summit

The original CHiPs co-founders in 2011 (frim left): Julie Mar-Spinola, Mallun Yen, Michelle Lee, Noreen Krall, Emily Ward, Mona Sabet and Anirma Gupta. (Courtesy photo)

ChIPs began 16 years ago as lunch among seven women who at the time were a rarity: chief IP counsel at major Silicon Valley tech companies. Today ChIPs has grown into a 3,700-member, global juggernaut aimed at advancing and connecting women in technology, law and policy.

This week the organization is holding its 10^th global summit, entitled Redefine: The Future of Tech, Law and Policy. But Redefine could apply to the organization itself. This will be the first global summit without any of the original seven co-founders as members of ChIPs’ board of directors. The chair passed from Apple chief litigation counsel Noreen Krall to Coinbase Deputy GC Katherine Minarik in March of this year.

ChIPs board members Sarita Venkat and Katherine Minarik (pictured) have used their Heels of Justice podcast to tell stories of women’s achievement in intellectual property. (Courtesy photo)

“Every year we try to bring something new to ChIPs,” Minarik said. “We’re not going to stop doing more. More training, more opportunities for meaningful connections, more pathways to the next level of success for our members. That’s our plan for 2022 and beyond.”

Several of the original founders are no longer practicing exclusively IP law—or law at all. But all continue looking for ways to promote diversity and inclusion. Mallun Yen, who has worked at Cisco Systems Inc., RPX Corp. and other companies, recently started Operator Collective, a venture fund for chief operating officers, general managers, engineers and others. Sixty percent of the founders of their portfolio companies are persons of color, says Yen, who is the fund’s general partner.

Mona Sabet, who was VP for IP at Cadence Design Systems when ChIPs was founded, is now chief corporate strategy officer for UserTesting. She also leads HiPower, a program aimed at helping successful women step up to the next level, whether it be personal significance, a larger community role or a new career path.

And co-founder Michelle Lee became the first woman and first person of color to run the nation’s Patent Office for the first time in its 200-plus year history.

“When the seven of us first gathered together in the Silicon Valley in 2005, little did we imagine that our small group would blossom into a 3,700-member organization with 17 chapters across the globe,” said Lee, who is now vice president, Machine Learning Solutions Lab at Amazon Web Services Inc. “We uncovered a tremendous unmet need for camaraderie, mentorship and inspiration amongst women in intellectual property.”

The Aha Moment

The genesis for ChIPs came from a Recorder article by Brenda Sandburg about Yen’s promotion to managing director of worldwide IP at Cisco Systems in 2005. Sandburg had asked Yen how many other women held comparable positions. “It was like an aha moment of sorts,” Yen said. “There are so few of us. We should at least know each other, and we got together for lunch.”

The seven were Yen; Krall, who was then VP of IP for Sun Microsystems; Lee, then deputy GC for patents at Google; Julie-Mar Spinola, then VP for IP and litigation at Atmel Corp.; Emily Ward, then VP and chief technology counsel for eBay; Anirma Gupta, then head of IP for Intuit; and Sabet, then associate GC for IP at Cadence.

The group soon broadened beyond meals to professional events. Dorian Daley, promoted to general counsel of Oracle in 2007, was a speaker at ChIPs’ first event. “What attracted me was the substance—the topics and discussions were meaty and insightful, without being boastful—and the style, which was collaborative, collegial and relaxed,” Daley said. It was “as if we were all good friends with different views gathering to discuss important issues affecting our IP practices.”

Soon ChIPs was inviting lawyers from outside firms and Northern District of California Judges Fern Smith, Marilyn Hall Patel, Phyllis Hamilton and Susan Illston to speak at their events.

Krall came to believe that, to have more impact, ChIPs needed to move beyond Silicon Valley. At first the idea was to have a cocktail party in Washington. That was expanded to a panel discussion. “And then we were like, ‘We have so many great people, let’s make it a conference,’” Yen recalls. “That’s how much thought went into it back then.”

ChIPs was not yet incorporated as a nonprofit, nor did it have a bank account. Somehow the seven women, in between their day jobs, put the event together in four weeks at Mandarin Oriental hotel in D.C. “I ran the fundraising. Mallun handled logistics. We all worked on content/speakers/invites, whew!” Krall said. “We never did anything this large, our local events were usually around 50 people.”

“It was a labor of love, but we almost died that first year we put the summit on,” Yen said.

The four women judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit at that time—Pauline Newman, Sharon Prost, Kimberly Moore and Kathleen O’Malley — spoke at the event and would join ChIPs, as had the Northern District judges.

“I remember being in awe and seeing how many successful women in IP were in one place,” Mar-Spinola said. “The energy at the event was high from beginning to end.”

“It was a huge success and underscored for all of us the need for this community to be there for women in the field of intellectual property,” said Sabet.

That was the first summit. From Wednesday through Friday of this week, ChIPs will hold its 10^th—virtually, due to COVID—putting together thousands of members from chapters coast-to coast and in France, Italy Germany, Canada, Ireland and the U.K.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg signed a copy of Notorious RBG at her induction into the ChIPs Hall of Fame in 2015.

Along the way, ChIPs established the Rachel Krevans scholarship, named for the pioneering Morrison & Foerster IP lawyer who passed away in 2017; the ChIPs honor roll of firms that score highest for diversity and inclusion in law firm leadership and IP practice (now a joint effort with Diversity Lab called the Inclusion Blueprint); and the ChIPs Hall of Fame to recognize leaders, barrier breakers and public servants.

Hall of Fame inductees have ranged from Federal Circuit Judge Newman to Ursula Burns, former chairman and CEO of Xerox Corp.; to ChIPster Michelle Lee, to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her daughter, Columbia Law School professor Jane Ginsburg. Newman presented Ginsburg with the award in a 2015 ceremony.

“The Hall of Fame recognition became our marquee event and really put us on the map,” said Krall. “Each year we aimed higher in our selection of nominees. The year we recognized Justice Ginsburg and her daughter Professor Ginsburg was one of our highlights.”

The New Guns

Over the last five years, the leadership has transitioned from the seven original co-founders to the next generation. Daley was the first new member. When she joined the board, “ChIPs had evolved well beyond straight IP to a much broader set of issues and problems centered around that intersection of law, technology and policy,” Daley said. “It allowed for a dramatic expansion of topic areas and how they intersected. But the focus on substantive topics, as well as connecting and providing opportunities for women, has remained core to the organization.”

As the last co-founder on the board, succession and sustainability were top-of-mind for Krall. She saw to it that ChIPS create a concrete business plan while helping recruit a new bench of leadership. Three other board members have worked previously for Krall: Jennifer Yokoyama, Deputy GC for Cloud and AI at Microsoft, was once principal counsel for patents at Apple; Slack IP chief Cyndi Wheeler spent 11 years in Apple’s patent and litigation departments; and Sarita Venkat is head of global IP transactions and has worked previously in the company’s litigation department.

ChIPs board members Sarita Venkat (pictured) and Katherine Minarik have used their Heels of Justice podcast to tell stories of women’s achievement in intellectual property. (Courtesy photo)

“Our founding board members were visionaries who pulled together an entire organization from a grass-roots movement, all while juggling their day jobs and families,” said Venkat. “We continue to lean on their giant shoulders.”

The organization is growing both generationally and geographically, Venkat said. “Our generational growth has been fueled by our law school scholarship programs, student chapters, and our Next Gen programming—all geared toward promoting and advancing the pipeline of incredibly talented women lawyers,” she said.

Minarik and Venkat created the Heels of Justice podcast, after they saw that too few stories of women in IP were being told. “Women’s credentials are still sung less. Women’s ambitions are still questioned more. The playing field remains unlevel,” Minarik said. “But every time we tell the story of a woman’s success or talent or triumph, we make things a little more level.”

Still Promoting D&I

The co-founders haven’t given up on diversity and inclusion. Far from it.

Yen said she stepped away from the ChIPs board in part because she hadn’t been practicing law for a long time, and in part because it was time for the next generation. “Like anything, the best day is when you can actually pass it on to someone else who can go and do things, far beyond what you could have done,” she said.

She also had been frustrated with one aspect of ChIPs. “I thought that with ChIPs if you could got a bunch of women in a room together, that revenue-generating business would happen,” she said.

Yen wrote an article for Fortune about her frustrations. She concluded that the personal and intimate friendships women tend to make sometimes actually get in the way of doing business. The article went viral and led to new connections for her in the tech and venture capital community. “I was an outsider coming into the VC world,” she said. “And so I just assumed all these tech women knew each other. Same thing with ChIPs, right?”

Just as with ChIPs, that proved not to be the case. So Yen put together a lunch to bring together women COOs from tech startups in the enterprise software space. Before long Operator Collective was born, with Yen is its general partner. The limited partners are CEOs, COOs, CTOs and other people who are help make the tech economy run. Yen believes their experience helps them discern where the fund might best place its bets. They also tend to be more diverse than traditional venture investors.

“I wanted to expand wealth creation,” Yen said, instead of relying on “the same group of, you know, ultra successful people who have had those early hits, that don’t look like the rest of us.”

Krall says, in the early days, it was true there wasn’t a lot of business being generated through ChIPs, but that’s no longer the case. “Things have evolved since then, and I have seen many careers advanced through participation in the ChIPs network,” she said.

In any event, there are no hard feelings between Yen and ChIPs. She has spoken at ChIPs events about her Fortune article and the challenge of “scaffolding” from personal to business relationships. ChIPs co-founders Krall, Gupta and Sabet and current board members Daley and Venkat are among the investors in Operator Collective.

Gupta, who is now GC at Carbon, is also part of the Neythri Futures venture fund, which is geared toward funding South Asian women.

Ward is now CEO of multi-view video streaming startup AlcaCruz. The company’s workforce is one-third women and “extremely racially diverse,” Ward says. “My own personal ChiPs highlights are the friendships shared with committed women that unselfishly gave of their own time, energy, networks and resources to improve the paths for women around them,” she said.

Mar-Spinola is chief IP officer and VP of legal operations at Finjan Holdings and has served for the past seven years on the USPTO’s Patent Public Advisory Committee. Her work has included advising the PTO on implementing the SUCCESS Act, a congressional initiative for measuring the diversity of patent applicants. In her current role as PPAC chair, she has set up two committees on issues she sees as critical to the PTO’s future: artificial intelligence and diversity and inclusion. With her service winding down at the end of this year, “I am confident that the USPTO and PPAC will continue to place high priority on these issues and are resolved to show improved equity,” she said.

On Wednesday, ChIPs scored another win for D&I. Winston & Strawn partner Kathi Vidal, a longtime ChIPs supporter and member of its advisory board, was nominated by president Joe Biden to be director of the USPTO. If confirmed she will be only the second woman to hold the position, along with Lee.

“Kathi played an integral role in ChIPs,” Mar-Spinola said.”She shared ideas, shared her network and contributed her then-firm’s, Fish & Richardson, resources. Importantly from my perspective, she’s been the epitome of what an effective mentor or sponsor of others should be.”