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This Is What An Angel Investor Looks Like – Joanne Wilson

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Women 2.0 profiles women angel investors in our "This Is What An Angel Investor Looks Like" series. By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

Prominent NYC angel investor Joanne Wilson will be meeting with the winner of the "People's Choice Award" at the Women 2.0 PITCH Conference & Competition on November 14, 2012 in New York City. Deadline to apply to PITCH is August 31, 2012.

Joanne started her career as a buyer at Macy's and ran a company in the rag trade. She dabbled in a friends' businesses, spearheaded sales at a magazine/e-zine/events startup in Silicon Alley, chaired a non-profit focused on technology in inner city schools (that she is still involved with), sat on her kids' school board/exec board

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How To Stay Focused While Being A Visible, Active Member Of The Female Tech Community

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There are always interesting engineering events on the weekends in Silicon Valley, such as hackathons. By Julia Grace (Co-Founder & CTO, WeddingLovely)

As the CTO of a small startup, my days are almost always spent head down, focused on our business and building our technical infrastructure. I'm writing code, fixing bugs, building features, thinking about what's next on our product roadmap and figuring out how we'll get there.

The adage is that most startups fail because they lose focus. The problem is that it can be difficult to focus when you also have to ensure that potential investors, future employees, and the tech community know that you exist.

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A Founder’s Tale: The Kickstarter Kraze

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Writer's Bloq just launched a Kickstarter campaign introducing themselves to the world. (Golden quills if you support!) Here's a piece on what the experience has been like far for the Founder. By Nayia Moysidis (Founder, Writer's Bloq)

Every time you support, I tear up. I know I'm not supposed to say that. Founders shouldn't show a soft side. Because we've been told that showing emotion is equivalent to being weak. That admitting to feeling pain is a shade of cowardice. I disagree.

We're not supposed to tell you that business is personal, to share the secret we all know is true: we care. If we didn't care - obsessively so - we wouldn't be spending every waking moment and rare sleeping moments researching and thinking and perfecting a product that's invisible to a judgmental world.

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The New Girls’ Network: The Science Of Office Politics

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Mothers are 79% less likely to be hired, only half as likely to be promoted, offered an average of $11,000 less in salary and held to higher performance and punctuality standards than an identical woman without children. By Joan C. Williams (Author, The New Girls' Network)

Advice literature for women is a crowded field and a predictable one. Most advice falls into one of two woefully inadequate camps:

1. Man up! The most common advice assumes that the problem is that women need to act more like men. Men tend to negotiate harder, act with more confidence and go after plum assignments that will require them to stretch and swagger. All this is good advice - sometimes, for some women. It will work for you if you tend to act in traditionally feminine ways: modest, happy to play support roles and attuned to the comfort of others

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Entrepreneurs’ Economic Confidence Slipping While Older Entrepreneurs Maintain Optimism, Says Kauffman/LegalZoom

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Optimism for the economy exists between older entrepreneurs and those between 18 and 40 years of age. By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

According to the third-quarter Kauffman/LegalZoom Startup Confidence Index released last month, expectations for the U.S. economy declined overall while significant optimism emerged between older entrepreneurs and those between the ages of 18 and 40.

The study found that almost 40% of startup founders believe the economy will deteriorate over the next year, an increase from 36% in the second-quarter survey and 31% in the first-quarter survey. Entrepreneurs who were somewhat confident in future profitability fell from 43% in second quarter to 40% in the third-quarter

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“Women Unfiltered” – 2013 SXSW Panel Picker Submission

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Living the dream and sharing the reality - get unfiltered advice from women in charge. By Rudina Seseri (Partner, Fairhaven Capital)

I am looking forward to a substantive panel and to a healthy discussion, which addresses not only the issue of how women in the tech ecosystem approach their careers, but also how the evolution of digital media has created new opportunities for the advancement of women in traditionally male-dominated fields.

The panel is titled "Women Unfiltered" and provides unfiltered advice from women in charge - exploring topics ranging from career advice to personal stories of challenge and achievement from these three female executives (a Fortune 500 Vice President, a Partner in a Venture Capital firm, and an Agency President) who

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Women In Business Challenge Finalist: Lois Gicheru Of Solafrique

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"Everything worth having is worth working for, so never give up." - Lois Gicheru (Founder, Solafrique) By Joëlle Payet (Marketing & Communications Coordinator, BiD Network)

Lois Gicheru, this week’s Women in Business Challenge finalist, was born and raised in Kenya, and through her business endeavors is starting to resolve issues regarding access to clean, sustainable and consistent energy in Kenya.

With little proven reserves of oil or gas and an erratic supply of hydro-electric power, advances in consistent renewable energy are highly advantageous for Kenya, allowing it self-reliance. It was these inconsistencies in the supply of electricity which prompted Lois Gicheru to form Solafrique.

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L’Oréal Supports Women Entrepreneurs, Offers $25k Cash Prize

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L'Oréal will award one finalist team at the PITCH NYC Conference & Competition a $25,000 cash prize! By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

This year, we've seen an energetic new wave of businesses focused on the female market, thanks to the L’Oréal Women In Digital Program which put a stake in the ground, focusing on women working in technology and digital marketing by providing recognition, testing opportunities and recruitment opportunities from the beauty industry.

Recently, the L’Oréal Women in Digital Program awarded five women entrepreneurs identified as pioneers in the new beauty industry: Bettina Hein (Founder & CEO, Pixibility), Doreen Bloch (Founder & CEO, Poshly), Kathryn Minshew (Founder, The Daily Muse), Sarah McIlroy (Founder & CEO, FashionPlaytes) and

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Why AboutOne Uses Gamification

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Gamification technology was something we could harness to benefit our users; adding a game element instantly brought the fun! By Joanne Lang (Founder & CEO, AboutOne)

The Deloitte annual Tech Trends 2012 study reported the latest figures on who plays social games online. Their results were surprising to some, but validating to the rest of us.

The average online gamer is a 37 year old woman. The articles that came out after the study portrayed this gamer as compulsively tending to an imaginary Farmville crop on Facebook.

What they missed was what I saw – these gamers are Moms.

When I created AboutOne, my goal was to help moms

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Being Comfortable In Your Skin

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I’m not sure where this road will lead, but I am excited to find out. By Mili Mittal (Co-Founder & CEO, mor.sl)

I was on the phone with my 13-year old niece today. She recently launched her own jewelry website and 4 days post-launch was deflated by the fact that she had no customers. I’d been dreading this call.

She’d had hopes of instant success. And it’s no wonder — with all the hype about entrepreneurship these days, it seems that anyone can get customers, get bought, or get funded “overnight”. The hype is false. The media tends to leave out the arduous tale of toiling and pivoting that most startup founders go through before they “make it.”

Here’s my tale (still in progress!) and some of the big

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Sophia Amoruso’s Los Angeles-Based Fashion Retail Website Nasty Gal Raises $40M Series B From Index Ventures

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From eBay store to major online retail destination, CEO Sophia Amoruso goes big with Nasty Gal. By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

Los Angeles-based shopping site Nasty Gal raises $40M Series B from Index Ventures.

In 2006, Nasty Gal started as an eBay store "Nasty Gal Vintage" curated and painstakingly grown by founder and CEO Sophia Amoruso, who hired friends as employees to grow Nasty Gal into its own web domain and major online retail destination. Forbes reports that without outside financing or marketing, Nasty Gal took in $28M in revenue in 2011, up from $10M in 2010.

Index Ventures' portfolio companies include UK-based

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Democratizing Entrepreneurship: The Next Generation Of Networks

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Online connections give entrepreneurs access to a global network of founders, mentors and advisors. By Lesa Mitchell (Vice President, Kauffman Foundation)

In 1950, Ewing Kauffman launched his pharmaceutical company, Marion Laboratories Inc., in the basement of his modest home in Kansas City. During his first year in business, he had sales of $36,000 and a net profit of $1,000. By the time he sold his company to Merrell Dow in 1989, it had become a global diversified healthcare giant with nearly $1 billion in sales.

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple. The first world headquarters for their world-changing venture was Jobs’ family garage.

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