PHYLLIS NEWHOUSE HAS THE news on four TV monitors before her desk in a glass office tower. Through the window behind her, beyond the manicured gardens of a mansion once owned by Tyler Perry, a haze hangs over downtown Atlanta. She’s facing the monitors rather than the skyline: Kabul has just fallen to the Taliban, which is of interest to Newhouse not just because she served for 22 years in the U.S. Army. She also runs a 6,500-person cyber security firm, whose clients include the departments of Defense and State. “There’s a lot more cyber fallout than you’d expect,” she says gnomically.
Her company, Xtreme Solutions, is busy preparing its clients for a potential surge in digital attacks. Newhouse is also on a Zoom call with three women planning a leadership presentation by women veterans to a group of high-net-worth female entrepreneurs. In a moment, she’ll glance down at her cellphone to text the actor Viola Davis, a friend and business partner. She is extremely in her element-so calm that only in hindsight would you call what she’s doing multitasking.
And Xtreme Solutions is hardly her only gig. She’s the CEO of a venture called Athena, which she took public this year, making her one of a very few Black women whose companies are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and which recently signed a merger deal that valued the company at $2 billion. She sits on the boards of four other companies, nonprofits, and organizations. She has managed more than 20 investments in startups, including Airbnb and Peloton, usually by groups within her network, sometimes teaming up with a major venture capital firm. She’s an LP in two early-stage VC funds. She co-founded and runs a nonprofit organization. She formally mentors five young professionals.
Yet Newhouse isn’t merely a super-achiever with an A-list Rolodex. When you dig into her ventures, a mission emerges. The investment groups she manages largely comprise women. The LPs? Run by women. The nonprofit? Founded with the aim of uplifting women. And now she’s looking to deploy the leadership abilities
