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02/15/13 | Uncategorized

Serial Entrepreneur And DataGravity CEO Paula Long Shares Her Startup Lessons Learned

Today’s Women 2.0 Conference on February 14, 2013 is being livestreamed here today and video will be available post-event.

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

“Don’t go for Series A until you’re in it for life” remarks Paula Long as she takes the stage after the investor panel at the Women 2.0 Conference. She talks about her previous startup, which she sold to Dell for $1.4 billion in 2007. But what Paula Long has been most proud of is the happy customers of EqualLogic, and that Dell has taken the EqualLogic product and expanded on it.

She shifts her talk into a slideshow of one-line quotes with explanations, startingh “If you are worried about more than happy customers, then you are worrying about the wrong thing. I’m a lady of one-liners.”

The slide onscreen stated “God created the world in six days, but He didn’t have an installed base” to which she talked about thinking big, but dialing it down so it’s implementable.

She also emphasized that “the question isn’t can you build it, the question is should you build it.” This is because “we’re playing Bingo, not basketball”. If we have a thousand features that solve nothing, we win by having the five features that solve a relevant problem. For guys, they want to see how many points I can put on the board. But you want to focus and do something really well,” said Paula.

“Customers don’t make mistakes, products do” said Paula Long, to which the audience applauded.

She reminds the audience that “lack of failure does not mean success. Lack of success does not mean failure. You need to measure.” Metrics will tell you what is going on with your business.

One of her last funny one-liners of “Focus on the big stuff – the elephants in the room, not the bunnies (because they reproduce all the time).”

An audience member asked for Paula’s Twitter for more great one-liners, to which Paula responded “I don’t tweet, I don’t Facebook and I’m barely LinkedIn!”

Photo credit: Erin Pangilinan on Twitter.

Follow the conversation on Twitter with hash tag #w2conf today and shout out to Women 2.0 at @women2!

Angie Chang is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of Women 2.0, a media company offering content, community and conferences for aspiring and current women innovators in technology. Our mission is to increase the number of female founders of technology startups with inspiration, information and education through our platform. Previously, Angie held roles in product management and web UI design. Angie holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter at @thisgirlangie.

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