Kay Koplovitz still remembers her first negotiation. Her family was moving from one suburb of Milwaukee to another in the middle of the school year, and she wanted to finish kindergarten with her class. To cover the bus fare back to her old neighborhood, she persuaded her father to raise her allowance. “I sort of felt, well, my first one was successful,” she now says of the deal. “Why wouldn’t all the rest of them be?”
Many of them have been. In 1977, as the founder of what was later renamed USA Networks, she became the first woman in the United States to lead a television network. Over the years, Ms. Koplovitz, now 79, racked up a lot of firsts. She brought sports to cable before ESPN. She cut deals to bring Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League to cable operators for the first time, and she pioneered a new business model, persuading cable operators to pay a license fee to carry the channel, which was initially called Madison Square Garden Sports Network. In 1998, USA Networks was sold to Barry Diller for $4 billion.
Ms. Koplovitz was one of the most powerful people in cable at a time when women were barred from many of the golf courses and dinner clubs where deal-making happened. “If I thought that not going to the second-floor club at Augusta National — because I’m a woman and they didn’t allow women at that time — was going to be a barrier to me, I wouldn’t have done what I did,” she recalled.
In 1998, after Ms. Koplovitz stepped down from USA Networks following its sale to Mr. Diller, President Bill Clinton appointed her as chair of the National Women’s Business Council. Ever since, she has focused on advancing female entrepreneurs. Her start-up accelerator, Springboard Enterprises, which she co-founded 24 years ago, has admitted 930 companies, including Zipcar, the RealReal and iRobot. More than 200 of them have been acquired, 28 have gone public, and 10 have valuations of at least $1 billion.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
After the sale of USA Networks, how did you decide to transition from cable to venture capital?
When I served as the chairman of the National Women’s Business Council, I went to see one of the founders of an angel investment network, who were mostly men from the semiconductor business. They’d funded 74 companies. This was in 1999. And I said to him, “In any of these companies, were the C.E.O.s women?” And he looked at me, and he said: “Women? We don’t see any women. None of them have even applied to us. We don’t even know what women would be doing in any of these technology areas.” It was really kind of eye-opening to me. I thought to myself there’s just no connection between the early funding market and women in technology and life sciences. They don’t know each other.