Board Diversity and "The Hottest New Companies"

The New Yorker has an article on Sheryl Sandberg, who jumped from Google to Facebook. How is it for women on the board of "the hottest new companies" in high tech?  Not good.  According to the article:

• Among the hottest new companies— Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Foursquare—none, as Kara Swisher reported in the blog All Things Digital, has a female director on its board. PayPal has no women on its five-member board; Apple has one of seven; Amazon one of eight; Google two of nine. When I asked Mark Zuckerberg why his five-member board has no women, his voice, which is normally loud, lowered to a whisper: “We have a very small board.” He went on, “I’m going to find people who are helpful, and I don’t particularly care what gender they are or what company they are. I’m not filling the board with check boxes.” (He recently added a sixth member: another man.) The venture-capital firms that support new companies have even sharper imbalances; Sequoia Partners lists eighteen partners on its Web site, none of them women.

Id. at p. 3.  So the problem of board diversity isn't a matter for old line companies but extends to the most innovative or as the New Yorker puts it, the hottest, companies.