By Jolie O’Dell (Writer, VentureBeat)
Every now and then, we hear from a female startup founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money.
She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s a woman pitching an idea to a roomful of male investors.
Women 2.0 CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania came into VentureBeat’s studio to chat about a few issues experienced by a lot of female founders, not the least of which is Read More »
By Joanne Lang (Founder & CEO, AboutOne)
It’s been an amazing journey to get AboutOne where it is today. Through the process of developing an award winning app and raising an over-subscribed Series A with lead investors Golden Seeds, I’ve navigated quite a few hurdles and learned many lessons while juggling my roles as tech start up founder and mom to my four young boys.
As I celebrate the closing of my first series A funded by Golden Seeds and MAG, I thought I would give you a sneak peak at five lessons I’ve learned about the funding process. Read More »
Published on: January 10, 2012 Tags: 500 Startups, 955 Dreams, Apple Hall Of Fame, Dave McClure, History Of Jazz, iPad, Kapor Capital, Kiran Bellubbi, Mitch Kapor, T.J. Zark
By T.J. Zark (Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer, 955 Dreams)
I am co-founder and Chief Design Officer at 955 Dreams, a mobile publishing house with some amazingly successful titles we created last year. How this all happened is a bit unusual. I met a guy in a parking lot. It’s true. I met my co-founder in a parking lot and two meetings later we were up to our ears making incredible experiences for users!
It started for me late in 2009 when my partner took a job with Google and I found myself in Palo Alto, having moved my design business. I had been designing UI and UX design on Read More »
Published on: January 9, 2012 Tags: Advisory Role, Elaine Wherry, Meebo, Transitions
By Elaine Wherry (Co-Founder, Meebo)
It’s a New Year and I’m looking ahead to new beginnings.
In 2011, I found myself with a set of Meebo responsibilities that no longer comprised a 40-hour work-week and a nagging feeling that this was the right point to start gracefully unwinding from my formal tasks.
In October, I started transitioning into an advisory role. It was a difficult decision but nothing makes you prouder than seeing the next generation of leaders take the company to new heights and witnessing the company grow from three people to Read More »
Published on: January 9, 2012 Tags: Bessemer Venture Partners, Flowdock, Investment Road Map, Koding, Nodeable, Pantheon, Pivotal Tracker, Sarah Tavel, Twilio, Wix
By Sarah Tavel (Senior Associate, Bessemer Venture Partners)
What an exciting time to be in this business. The “post PC era” and cloud computing are colliding to create a perfect storm. First, thanks to the post PC era, demand for software is exploding. Second, thanks to cloud computing, software development is becoming increasingly accessible.
There’s an interesting positive externality to these trends: The developer “citizenship” is exploding. Consequently, developers are finally a large enough community with enough purchasing power that you can actually build a company just by selling to developers. I’d love to invest in companies doing just that. Read More »
By Eden Godsoe (Co-Founder & CEO, SkinnyScoop)
I was not one of those women who always knew she would be an entrepreneur. Around the time I became pregnant with my first child, I began looking into the dynamics of female purchase power and how women influence one another. What I saw was a huge, untapped opportunity that I had the know-how and the passion to address.
I am originally from Toronto, Canada where I got a BA in Economics and Philosophy before moving to New York to work at Morgan Stanley. After a few years in NYC, I headed west to Stanford Business School. Post business school, I honed Read More »
By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit)
Happy New Year! 2011 was quite a ride for us at LaunchBit. Jennifer and I are so thankful to everyone who’s helped us.
We started LaunchBit in January 2011 as a way to help entrepreneurs start and grow their internet businesses. This is a problem I’ve become really passionate about, as I’ve mentioned here. But, we didn’t know exactly how to tackle this problem, because we didn’t know *what*, in particular, entrepreneurs were struggling with.
We decided to hold a class on customer development and we built a customer development workflow-tool to learn Read More »
Published on: January 8, 2012 Tags: Kaliya Hamlin, She's Geeky, Unconference
By Kaliya Hamlin (Founder, She’s Geeky)
From the beginning of human civilization women have been engaged in understanding the science of the natural world. Ada Lovelace was the first programmer ever and women programmed the first vacuum tube computer the ENIAC. The stories of their pioneering and innovation in geeky fields like engineering, chemistry, physics and mathematicians are amazing.
Are there enough? Definitely not. We need to encourage girls and young women to pursue their passion for STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). We need to Read More »
By Bryce Christiansen (Blogger, YouTern)
As I finished reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, I came to a realization.
We often don’t give comedians enough credit for their business smarts, and Tina Fey is no exception.
As I read her “humor/biography” book, I wasn’t expecting to come away with too many things I could apply at work…but I was wrong.
You see, Tina Fey has come from the biggest business training school on the planet. Show Business. Read More »
By Jolie O’Dell (Writer, VentureBeat)
Buyosphere is web celebrity Tara Hunt‘s greatest gamble, and after some shaky months, it might be starting to pay off.
Following a successful rebranding effort, the team has just closed an oversubscribed seed round of funding — $325,000, to be exact.
The funding will be aimed squarely at new user acquisition as well as a couple key hires.
The round, which eschewed big-name Silicon Valley Read More »
By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)
The TechStars NYC early application deadline is January 10, 2012 and the final deadline is January 23, 2012.
Want to hear how TechStars can affect an early-stage startup? Read this blog post from a TechStars participant:
“What I needed, and what I got from the TechStars process, was a huge shift in focus – from minimizing risk to maximizing the opportunity for Red Rover.
This shift happened over the course of 100 meetings. This happened under the influence of mentors Read More »
By Catherine Cook (Co-Founder, MyYearbook)
When John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale reach for the same pair of black gloves in the movie Serendipity, they meet and fall in love. The goal of social discovery applications is to engineer this kind of serendipity. By leveraging demographic and interest data, and by providing good reasons to interact with strangers, this emerging category seeks to make meeting people feel fun and natural.
And it’s not just about dating. Most people I know I met through serendipitous encounters. Read More »
By Gina Trapani (Creator, ThinkUp & Todo.txt Apps)
Codecademy‘s Code Year is a weekly lesson for people who want to learn how to program. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains a few good reasons why you might want to do that at all, with a quick quote from me.
When Manjoo emailed, he asked, “What are some good reasons for people to be more familiar with programming?” I replied:
“First and foremost, learning to code demystifies tech in a way that empowers and enlightens. When you start coding you realize that every digital tool you have Read More »
By Victoria Wang (Co-Founder, The Story Exchange)
One of the things I hear again and again is that women need role models. After working for years in the financial world, it’s something I personally know all too well. Throughout my career, I had often wished there were more senior women for me to share experiences with and to learn from on issues both business and work/life related.
That’s why we started The Story Exchange to bring the stories of successful women entrepreneurs who can be role models to other women, wherever they are.
Read More »
By Robin Wauters (Blogger, TechCrunch)
Startup Weekend, whose mission is to kickstart and foster startup communities worldwide through events and networking sessions, had a very lively 2011.
According to internal statistics shared exclusively with TechCrunch, the organization held a total of 260 events in 202 cities, in 67 countries (you can find the obligatory accompanying infographic below).
All in all, the ‘startup weekends’ attracted some 21,316 people, who collectively formed 2,817 teams. Read More »
Published on: January 6, 2012 Tags: Caitlin McCabe, Caroline Ghosn, Elizabeth Saunders, Heather Huhman, Jenny Blake, Laura Roeder, Mentors, Mentorship, Sydney Owen, Thursday Bram, Tips & Tricks, Vanessa Nornberg, Windsor Hanger
By Natalie MacNeil (Co-Founder, YEC Women)
The following answers are provided by YEC Women. Co-Founded by Natalie MacNeil and Scott Gerber, YEC Women is an initiative of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.
The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth. Read More »
Published on: January 6, 2012 Tags: Bessemer Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, Funding, Kapor Capital, PIazza, Pooja Sankar, Sequoia Capital, Series A, Stanford Graduate School of Business, SV Angel
By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)
Piazza Founder and CEO Pooja Sankar blogged on Women 2.0 a few months ago: “As a teenager, I never went outside alone, spoke to a boy other than my brother, or wore jeans or a short skirt.”
The former Facebook engineer went to an all-girls high school in India and then was admitted to IIT Kanpur, India. She was one of a handful of girls in the midst of many boys. Pooja described herself as “shy and studied alone, while the boys worked together – benefitting tremendously from the collaboration.”
As the founder and CEO, Pooja built Piazza to provide a collaboration tool Read More »
Published on: January 6, 2012 Tags: Amanda Aitken, Ashley Bodi, Becky McCray, Caroline Ghosn, Danielle LaPorte, Doreen Bloch, Elizabeth Saunders, Gina Bianchini, Heather Huhman, Jenny Blake, Lisa Nicole Bell, Nathalie Lussier, Pamela Slim, Randi Zuckerberg, Sarah Shaw, Tara Gentile, Thursday Bram, Tory Johnson, YEC, Young Women Entrepreneurs
By Natalie MacNeil (Co-Founder, YEC Women)
The following answers are provided by YEC Women. Co-Founded by Natalie MacNeil and Scott Gerber, YEC Women is an initiative of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.
The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business’s development and growth. Read More »
By Einy Paulsen & Kine Paulsen (Co-Founders, Ingri:Dahl)
Looking back over the last year, my sister and I have done a lot of things that people told us would be impossible. We got celebrities to wear our glasses, we got to be a part of LA fashion week, and we got press in major publications – all without spending many marketing dollars. What was our key to achieving our goals? Doing things our way and blocking out the people that told us that we couldn’t!
My name is Kine, and in April last year I launched Ingri:Dahl with my twin sister, Einy. We had lived in the world capital of movies, Los Angeles, for a few years while studying at USC Read More »
By Erica Etelson (Founder, Sharemore)
When I started telling friends about my plan to launch a startup, eyebrows were raised. People who know me wondered aloud how I would fare without going to the gym, sleeping eight (okay, nine) hours a night and being home by five o’clock to spend unhurried time with my family.
They have a point: I’m a 44-year old mother who does not have the expansive time and energy of a single, childless 23-year old. Is it possible to found an e-commerce website without losing my life? Tech founders have Read More »
By Twain Liu (Founder, Senseus)
The global financial crisis is causing $100+ trillion of effects to our households, communities and economies, and its root causes go beyond the behaviors of a few dozen bankers and the responses of regulators and politicians.
The system’s failings are actually also in the code and mathematical models underpinning the technologies that are supposed to support intelligent decision-making but which are sub-optimally smart because their Y logic is missing female X factor.
Since 2008, there have been calls to increase the Read More »
By Lauren Perkins (Founder & CEO, Perks Consulting)
Networking events are a fantastic way to meet new business prospects, potential partners, and leverage relationships within your existing network for referrals.
These events can certainly seem intimidating if you don’t have an action plan to keep you focused and on task.
To make the most of networking opportunities, business women can treat each event as they would treat a date. Following the same rules that you would typically follow on a date provides some guidance for how to prepare for the event, what to do Read More »
By Jim Gilmartin (President, Coming of Age)
According to a new Nielsen study “Women of Tomorrow: U.S. Multicultural Insights”, women are the world’s most powerful single demographic. They control the majority of household spending decisions, their influence is growing, and they are increasingly exercising this new-found power in a variety of ways.
From 21 countries, representing 60% of the world’s population and 78% of GDP, there is one very positive commonality: women believe their roles are changing for the better.
As overall consumer demand shrinks and Read More »
By Jazmin Hupp (Director of Awesome, Tekserve)
“Best practices are things you should have done if you had thought of them first.”
If all your competitors are doing it already, you won’t get the returns you’re looking for by jumping in late.
Try taking best practices from other industries and reusing them.
This quote is from Byrne Hobart, who taught the Advanced SEO course at General Assembly I attended last week. Read More »
Published on: January 4, 2012 Tags: big data, O'Reilly, Santa Clara, Strata
Strata 2012, the leading big data conference, happens February 28 – March 1, 2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Strata debuted to a sold-out crowd last year and has become the leading event for the people and technology driving the data revolution. Strata delivers the nuts-and-bolts of building a data-driven business—the latest on the skills, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.
Women 2.0 members save 20% on Strata conference tickets with discount code “WOMEN”. Read More »
