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Hackathons Change Your Life. Seriously.

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The beauty of a virtual hackathon is that you can still have a life. No need to find childcare, reschedule your dentist appointment or not have time to grocery shop. A virtual hack is all about hacking in your free time! By Agnes Lam (Founder, CoderCharts) & Pamela Day (Founder, PocketScience Labs)

I know that might sound a bit dramatic, but it is true. Ask anyone who has participated and you will discover that it is like nothing else.

A group of people, often strangers, coming together to make something from nothing, solving problems, working together, pushing their skills - improving their skills, and having a blast.

It can be a bit frustrating if you live outside of a geography which provides a constant stream to choose from. The solution? A virtual hackathon!

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Doing Good For The World… Effectively

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It’s time for our "feel-good" sector to seriously step up to the impact maximization plate. By Andrea Abel (Co-Founder, International Policy Research & Evaluation Group)

Let’s face it, when it comes to devoting careers, time and energy into the non-profit, foundation/aid sector, women are leading the way. In the US for example, 73% of all non-profit staff is female.

But when it comes to efficiency and effectiveness, this sector lags miles behind the traditionally male-dominated private sector. For years, the stereotype for organizations operating in the sector has been a ‘heart-is-in-the-right-place but loosey-goosey culture’, at which people throw money more to make themselves feel good, and less because they actually think they will do good.

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Is Coding For Women?

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I’m afraid that women may fall into the trap of thinking that it is harder than it actually is and thus approach it with an expectation that they can only scratch the surface and cannot go deeper. By Jane Wang (Hacker, Hacker School)

Why you ask?

David Albert, a co-founder at Hacker School, a program that is targeting towards 50% female enrollment, says software engineering requires less pedigree than other competitive professions, because a degree says less about how good someone is as a programmer than his or her code.

It’s hard to argue with good code. True to the Hacker Ethic, software engineering is a field for real meritocracy.

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Gretchen DeKnikker, Co-Founder Of SocialPandas, Raises $1.5M

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True Ventures invests in what TechCrunch calls "CRM tools to aid the forgotten sales person". By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

"Enterprise is sexy", proclaimed SocialPandas co-founder Gretchen DeKnikker this week - and she's right. Her social customer relationship management ("SCRM") tool startup SocialPandas announced today raising $1.5 in seed funding from True Ventures in San Francisco in what TechCrunch called "an oversubscribed round".

Investor interest in enterprise social marketing/CRM startups founded by women is reaching an all-time high after several high-profile exits: Buddy Media (co-founded by COO Kass Lazerow) was acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $689M),

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This Is What An Angel Investor Looks Like – Prerna Gupta

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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)

Out of Atlanta, Georgia - Khush founder and CEO Prerna Gupta received funding from 500 Startups as part of the Mountain View, California-based startup seed fund and accelerator program in early 2011. By year's end, the intelligent music app startup Khush was acquired by Smule for an undisclosed amount.

As CEO of Khush, Prerna oversaw the growth of Khush and its merger with Smule. Together, the companies' apps have reached over 50 million users worldwide.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 2004 with a degree in Economics, and

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I Don’t Want Your Life

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Women judging each other is one of the key mechanisms for the delivery of gender bias. By Joan C. Williams & Rachel Dempsey (Authors, The New Girls' Network)

Marissa Mayer is naïve. Or so say a million mommy blogs, and I just can't get this issue out of my head. Once the baby is born, say the blogs, she will see that a two-week maternity leave is not realistic. This is a typical gender war. Women judging each other is one of the key mechanisms for the delivery of gender bias.

Mind you, I didn't take a two-week maternity leave. And I was horrified when I heard, in my twenties, of a law-firm partner who said, when a lawyer in his firm took only two weeks, "Now, that's the responsible way to have a baby." But that was me, in my particular situation.

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Enterprise Is Sexy

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Social and mobile are absolutely revolutionizing how the world connects and interacts. It did, however, take a lot of once-alluring hardware innovation and uber-sexy enterprise (and consumer) software to get here. By Gretchen DeKnikker (Co-Founder, SocialPandas)

I think enterprise software is sexy as hell. There, I said it. I think creating value that customers will pay for is extremely hot. A recurring revenue stream makes me giddy. And nothing, absolutely nothing, turns my head more than profitability.

Why is enterprise boring by definition? How can improving or changing the way people do business not get you fired up? Even when I was a noob to the Valley, I still preferred business over consumer. Maybe it’s just because I don’t understand consumers or I don’t want to fall prey to their fickle nature.

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There Is Something To Be Said About Working In A Company First

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There is something to be said about working in a company when you get out of college or even graduate school before immediately jumping into your own startup. By Joanne Wilson (Blogger & Angel Investor, Gotham Gal)

The more I talk to investors and entrepreneurs, the more I have come to think that there is something to be said about working in a company first. There is no doubt a handful of entrepreneurs who have been at some type of business or another since they were able to walk and that is a unique breed. They have an innate understanding on how to grow a business and understand when the business needs to be tweaked.

Yet there are also many entrepreneurs who are stubborn and refuse to do it any other way but their own.

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Pissed Off For Greatness

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"If you ain't pissed off for greatness, that means you're okay with being mediocre." - Ray Lewis By Ellora Israni (Co-Founder, she++)

It's extremely hard to sit down and write a blog post when you're not entirely sure that what you have to say is interesting or relevant or even remotely helpful to the rest of the world. You feel kind of like an impostor, like everything you say can and will be used against you.

I spent a lot of time on Thought Catalog and Buzzfeed avoiding my text editor in the last couple days. Until it occurred to me that this is the exact same apprehension I experience almost every day at work, and that maybe this paralyzing fear of failure is precisely what I should write about. So here goes.

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Lean Startup Machine Returns To Los Angeles (Win A Free Ticket)

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A hands-on experience where you learn Customer Development and Lean Startup principles. By Edlin Choi (Workshop Coordinator, Lean Startup Machine)

Three months after a sold-out first Lean Startup Machine Los Angeles, the world’s leading workshop on Lean Startup methodologies returns September 21-23, 2012 to make even more LA startups, entrepreneurs, and corporate intrapreneurs leaner and meaner.

The first LSM LA wrapped up with a bang - 12 teams went through a challenging three days of lean startup learning, out of the building getting, hypothesis testing, assumption (in)validating, and lots of pivoting that culminated in a 5-minute pitch.

More of a show-us-what-you-learned story than

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Tech Talk: Frontend Vs. Backend

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The frontend is the part of a web site that you can see and interact with, while the backend is all the rest. By Adda Birnir (Co-Founder, Balance Media & Skillcrush)

The frontend is the part of a web site that you can see and interact with, while the backend is all the rest.

You know how the tip of an iceberg pokes out above the water, but they’re really hundreds of feet deep? That’s a lot like a web site. The parts you see and interact with on a web site – the buttons, the dropdown menus and big bold fonts – make up the frontend.

The frontend of a web site has specific technologies attached to it. HTML makes up the text on the page, CSS makes it pretty, and JavaScript makes it interactive.

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How to Find Your “Soulmate” Investor

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When you’re looking for funding, it’s good to be a woman in a man’s world. By Tanya Marvin-Horowitz (NY Managing Director, Allegiance Capital Corporation)

At some point, your startup is going to need outside investment. You’ve got the ball rolling, the future looks bright, but you need to get your hands on some growth capital to take it to the next level.

And by next level, I am referring to the capital that will expand or restructure your operations, enter new markets, offer expanded product offerings, or acquire your competition.

Depending on the size of your company and your growth objective, you might be looking for angel investors, venture

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Learn From Successful Women Entrepreneurs In Tech (Premium Videos From February’s PITCH 2012 Conference)

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Get inspired by these women leaders sharing stories of fundraising, team building and more. By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

The sound bytes that were tweeted from February's PITCH 2012 conference were golden.

"Know what you have to prove," said ZipCar co-founder Robin Chase on building a minimum viable product. Just the minimum and then iterate fast. Katie Mitic at Facebook agreed, recommending entrepreneurs to “let go of the idea of a perfect product.”

Care.com CEO Sheila Lirio Marcelo delivered a strong message for women to let go of “that image of perfection” because this will give you more confidence and help take risks.

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6 Tips For Outsourcing Game Development (No CS Degree, No Problem)

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As a non-technical sole founder, outsourcing development enabled me to stop waiting and act immediately to bring my game to life. Here are some lessons I learned working with contractors while building my game. By Stephanie Cheng (Founder, Seesaw Games)

Working with outsourced developers can be a mixed bag. On one hand, it enables you to start product development right away without having to learn code or bring in a technical cofounder.

On the other hand, misstep can be a waste of time and money, not to mention nail-bitingly stressful.

Depending on where you are in your process, outsourcing may be a quick and cost efficient way to get the ball rolling on a functional first version.

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Pinterest: An Amazing Place For Female Engineers

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Software engineer Tracy Chou answers the Quora question "What are some particularly female engineer-friendly companies to work for in San Francisco?" By Tracy Chou (Software Engineer, Pinterest)

At Pinterest, we have a great company culture (read my breathless rant here). Women are as integral and respected a part of our diverse team as anyone else, and certainly not treated any differently.

It's the first place, in school or professionally, that I've not been aware or made aware of my gender, ever, in any situation. I don't feel like a female engineer.

I'm just an engineer, and I'm expected and empowered to do great work like every other engineer on the team.

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