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Not Just a Question of Self-Esteem or Gender Roles

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By Victoria Pynchon (Co-Founder & Principal, She Negotiates) Even when women are overqualified, they question their ability to do the job -– a lack of confidence she does not see in male prospects even when they’re under qualified. So there’s no question that part of the problem for women IP lawyers is self-esteem.

But as a good friend of mine used to say, you build self-esteem by doing estimable things. That’s what this posse of women lawyers is asking their sisters at the bar to do.

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How to Choose the Right PR Solution in a Crowded Market

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By Maura Lafferty (Chief Happiness Officer, Maura Lafferty PR) A couple of months ago, I picked up a copy of Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich's follow-up to Nickel and Dimed.

Like the original, she goes "undercover" as a middle-class laid-off worker seeking a lower-level corporate position. The story details several months of job-hunting and the various travails she comes up against, including the dreaded consultants who try to make money off job-seekers' desperation. Some are mildly sympathetic, especially the guy who lost his own job and got into "coaching" to bridge the gap, others are just out to make a buck, and none of them provide any actually useful help.

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In Search of the Right Co-Founder (Finding Ms. Right)

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By Karen Zeller (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) This is the first in series of three advice articles with Mauria Finley, Founder and CEO of Citrus Lane, a social ecommerce company dedicated to new (and experienced) parents.

As a former eBay executive, Mauria Finley exudes the enthusiasm and passion you would expect of someone who has dedicated years to consumer ecommerce.

Her new Mountain View based company, Citrus Lane, has raised over a million dollars in angel and VC funding

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Interview with Lockerz Founder and CEO Kathy Savitt about Gen Z

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Women 2.0 talks to Kathy Savitt, Founder and CEO of Lockerz, a social commerce site with the mission of being the homepage of Generation Z (born between 1992-2010). Kathy has decades of experience at Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon.com, where she served on Jeff Bezos' elite senior counsel of advisors. Kathy has raised nearly $70 million in VC in the past two years, largely from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is known for rarely funding women-led companies.Women 2.0: How did you get the idea for Lockerz?

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Happy Business Marriage Part 1: The Background Check

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By Heather N. Shafer (Intellectual Property Attorney, Independent) The creative endeavor is one of the most beautiful relationships that two or more people can enter into together. Creative ventures thrive on collaboration and there is no law against how many can join the venture. However, it is important to know a sobering effect of joint works and inventions under both the patent and the copyright laws:

If there is more than one inventor or creator -– each inventor or creator owns an equal and undivided interest in the whole invention or creation.

This means that each of the co-inventors or co-creators can

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Disrupt Yourself: Throw Out Your Current Performance Metrics

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By Whitney Johnson (Founding Partner, Rose Park Advisors) Notwithstanding the considerable career and financial (I am the primary breadwinner) risks involved, it was time to leave my comfortable perch and become an entrepreneur. Time to disrupt myself. We typically define disruption as a low-end product or service that eventually upends an industry. But I've found that the rules of disruption apply to the individual too. Or as thought leader Jennifer Sertl writes, "innovation ultimately begins on the inside."

Six years into my mid-career move, here are some lessons learned from my personal disruptive trajectory:

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Changing the Ratio at SXSW 2012 Starts with the Vote

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By Emily Gannett (Co-Founder, Change the Ratio) So what constitutes an amazing panel? Well, great content presented by smart people, of course, but another initiative important to the SXSW 2012 planning team this year is diversity. As the tech industry continues its rapid evolution, diversity of voices has been key in this growth with women-lead initiatives leading the charge.

Which means that in 2012 we should be seeing even more amazing panels led by women, right? Right -- but it couldn't hurt to vote for a few, just to be safe. To that end, Change The Ratio has

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Silicon Valley’s Scarcest Resource: Technical Founders

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By Laurie Segall (Reporter, CNN Money) Tiffani Bell, a NewMe participant and founder of online appointment booking site Pencil You In, relied on her coding chops to get her startup ready in time for Demo Day -- an event where Silicon Valley investors gather to field pitches from companies seeking funding.

Bell studied computer science at Howard University and went on to intern at IBM and Hewlett-Packard before working as a Web developer for a government contractor.

"It's important to have a technical background to make

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Women Get Mentored, Men Get Sponsored: The Failure of Mentors

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By Cassie Phillipps (Executive Producer, Failcon) I believe it’s not that women need more mentors; it’s that we need to change our relationship with mentors. Erin Wolf made the distinction, and I think it is very valid, that “Women get Mentored. Men Get Sponsored.” If you want to get ahead in business, you need to find mentors who are far more advanced than you, who can (and will) actively influence things in your favor.

This also reflects the problem with the statistic above: that only 25% of people had active mentors. If someone has not agreed that they are your mentor, they will not go to bat for you or seek

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Success Largely a Matter of Hanging on After Others Have Let Go

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By Mara Lewis (Co-Founder & CEO, stopped.at) Entrepreneurs often get asked how many times they’ve failed. It's a typical question in Silicon Valley and one that most of us answer by listing how many startups we’ve built (and how many startups we’ve buried). Failed startups are like entrepreneurial battle scars. The more you fail, the more bad ass you come across... but the real question we should be asking is –- how long did you keep trying before you gave up?

It’s easy to engineer a prototype, test the market potential, and if it doesn’t get above the noise in the first few months -–

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Partner event: App Developers Conference and Hackathon

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App Developers Conference (ADC) and Hackathon are taking place October 26-27, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA. The conference addresses key components of app development, discovery and revenue. Coverage focuses on apps for mobile devices and tablets. More than 50 speakers from Pandora, Walmart, Smule, Samsung, AT&T, Churn Labs, Netflix, Nissan, Nielson, BMW, Pulse, Microsoft, OpenFeint, Qualcomm, Intel Capital, lolapps and others are participating. Save $100 with discount code "women2vip".

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Rebuttal to Penelope Trunk: Redefining Life’s Blueprint

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By Heidi Isern (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) I live in an amazing ecosystem of women who defy convention, reinvent the rules, and passionately take risks to better the world around them.

This isn’t everyone’s habitat and the team at Women 2.0 brought it to my attention. We were sent "A Blueprint for a Woman’s Life” by Penelope Trunk. It wasn’t any blueprint I wanted, nor a doctrine I wanted the women I care about to pay attention to. Perhaps she wrote it to incite controversy and its natural follower, dear ol’ fame. Perhaps she really believes

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Black Founders Host Pitch Party (September 8 in San Francisco)

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By Nnena Ukuku (Co-Founder & CEO, Black Founders) What is a Pitch Party?

A Pitch Party is a chance for founders to practice their pitch and receive feedback from investors.

Confirmed investors in attendance will include Gwen Edwards (Golden Seeds), Nancy Pfund (DBL Investors), Cameron Lester (Azure Capital Partners), and Bryce Roberts (O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures).

You can register for the event here. We have slots for 10 entrepreneurs to pitch for 3 minutes each.

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