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Where Do Entrepreneurs Get Their Money?

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By Brad Feld (Managing Director, Foundry Group) My friend Paul Kedrosky who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family.

It’s a creative 3-minute video with plenty of meat to it.

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On A Culture Of Constraints In Product Development

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By Poornima Vijayashanker (Founder & CEO, BizeeBee) In 4 days, it will be the 1 year anniversary of launching BizeeBee my second startup. When I started BizeeBee, I was determined to put in place engineering principles that I hadn’t been able to at previous companies. I also wanted to avoid a lot of bad practices that I had experienced throughout my career such as splitting the responsibilities of development and testing, and product bloat.

I know most startups like to take the quick and dirty approach to product development, and then go back and refactor or rebuild their product. That’s great and we’ve certainly refactored a lot of our code base too. But I started charging customers from

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Startups Go Holiday Shopping Too! (Corporate Gift Giving)

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By Lynley Sides (Founder & CEO, The Glue Network) 'Tis the season for media advice and commentary about consumer shopping, but what about the $17 billion businesses spend each year on gifts and branded items?

At Red Herring, we received a spread of "thank you" items during the holidays -– chocolates, branded mugs, shirts, gift baskets. We shared most of them around the office and some invariably wound up in a landfill.

The only memorable gift was a donation to one of a few wonderful causes of my choice given by small agency, Swirl and 10 years later, I’m still telling people about it. I have no doubt that some of the gifts and incentives given away by companies this year are really cool.

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To Solve The “Woman Problem”, End Your Stereotypes Of Women

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By Cristina Cordova (Business Development, Pulse) What is this? Mad Men?

Penelope Trunk wrote another ridiculously egregious article on VentureBeat about the “Woman Problem” in tech startups. She’s written similar posts on Techcrunch before like Women Don’t Want to Run Tech Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children and Why Diversity is Bad for Startups.

I’ve always wholeheartedly disagreed with her remarks about women in technology, but she’s continued to push her views as guest posts on several of the blogs I read.

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Notes From My 1st Startup Weekend: Women 2.0 Startup Weekend

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By Lukas Black (Build & Release Engineer, Mozilla) On November 18th, 2011 -- I jumped into the deep end of the Bay Area startup culture I have been lurking on the periphery of for the past two years of living here.

After going to my first Girl Geek Dinner at Microsoft a month ago, and preparing to talk about women in open source at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, it seemed very much up my alley to sign up for the Women 2.0 Startup Weekend held in San Francisco at The Hatchery.

I do always have ideas for new projects/apps though

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Partner event: O’Reilly Tools of Change (February 13-15 in NYC)

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O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) is happening February 13-15, 2012 in New York City. TOC is where the publishing and tech industries converge, as practitioners and executives from both camps share what they've learned from their successes and failures, explore ideas, and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation.

Women 2.0 members save 15% with discount code "toc12women".

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Why You Should Apply To Business Plan Competitions

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By Karen E. Klein (Contributor, Businessweek)  

Editor's note: The Women 2.0 PITCH: Startup Competition application deadline has been extended thru December 7, 2011. Apply here.

Entering business contests is a great exercise, not only because you have a chance at gaining cash winnings and outside investment, but for the chance to get expert feedback on your plan and do some networking and marketing on behalf of your company.

“Depending on what’s most important for you and what stage your venture is in, that will indicate which contests you enter and whether you want to use other

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Webgrrls International Holiday Celebration in SF and NYC

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By Nelly Yusupova (CTO, Webgrrls International) The 2011 Holiday Season is fast approaching!

To kick it off we are organizing a dual-city Webgrrls International Holiday Celebration December 6 with the San Francisco Webgrrls and December 7 with the New York City Webgrrls.

When the Webgrrls Community gets together, it becomes an industry event not only about revelry but also about the celebration of the achievements of women in technology and business.

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IDEO Design Consultant Alison Wong And The Story of Gusto (Women 2.0 Startup Weekend)

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By Alison Wong (Participant, Women 2.0 Startup Weekend 2011) I had an idea about creating an online classes service a few weeks before Startup Weekend. My friend and seasoned developer, Dean Mao, also thought it had potential and we started talking about it in more detail. He thought about development, while I conducted user research in the field to gather insights and user needs.

After Dean and I decided we were going to pursue the idea, we realized that Women 2.0 Startup Weekend was coming up and signed up last minute. We hadn't written any code or decided on our business model, so we thought attending would challenge

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Be Your Own Technical Co-Founder (CodeLesson Startup Series)

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By Jeffrey McManus (Co-Founder, CodeLesson) When we started CodeLesson in 2010, we knew that people could benefit from a place online where they could learn to program on a flexible schedule. We figured we'd be most useful in helping people who code for a living stay on top of the latest languages and technologies.

But we were surprised when novice coders asked if we could help them become more technical. In fact, in our first PHP courses, more than one of our students described themselves as startup CEOs.

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Good Intentions Alone Won’t Help Women Rise To The Top

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By Leah Eichler (Contributing Writer, Femmonomics) When Jim Leech took the helm as president and CEO of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in 2007, he inherited an executive team that, except for one member, looked largely like him -- male. The gender balance now tilts the other way, with 5 female members out of 9 on the executive team, including the chairwoman of the board.

“I think that it is a classic mistake to hire in your own image,” Mr. Leech says. “The stereotype of ‘CEO equals male’ doesn’t resonate with me. I’ve been de-conditioned,” he jokes light-heartedly. To explain their success at promoting female talent, Mr. Leech references its in-house mentoring program

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Stop Reading Startup Advice – Learn By Doing!

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By Deena Varshavskaya (Founder & CEO, Wanelo) Startup culture encourages startup advice. Entrepreneurs want to write it. Other entrepreneurs want to read it.

You can read all sorts of things from people who know exactly what they are talking about. Don’t raise funding. Raise as much as you can. Build an amazing product and they will come. NO, don’t worry about your product, just figure out your distribution - it’s the only thing that matters. And so on.

This creates a temptation to learn by reading

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Collaboration Tools For Entrepreneurs To Create, Communicate

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By Sara Rosso (VIP Services Engineer, WordPress)  

I created this presentation for entrepreneurs who need online tools to make their ideas happen (I gave it earlier this year at the Professional Women’s Association in Milan).

The presentation “Tools for Entrepreneurs: Create. Collaborate. Communicate.“ started out as a way to explain very technical things to non-technical people, but I quickly realized that most people when approaching technology get intimidated by the “What’s DNS? Do I need a dedicated server?” kind of questions and therefore feel they can’t understand technology.

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Startup Lessons Learned: Dreams, Teams, and Strategies

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By Liza Deyrmenjian (Founder & CEO, Afingo) My initial idea for Afingo was a business-to-business social network for the fashion industry. In 2008, that was the buzz word.

I had a lot to learn, but I was lucky. An angel investor found me and I was on my way. I did what many new technology entrepreneurs do; I built out websites that probably should not have existed and spent a tremendous amount of capital in the process.

The first iteration of Afingo was a social network, and advertising was the only model that made sense to us. We were up against the beast called Facebook.

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.