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How Deal with Two Women Points to a Different Silicon Valley

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By Chris O’Brien (Business & Technology Columnist, San Jose Mercury News) Something happened last week in Silicon Valley that was remarkable simply because nothing about it was remarkable. Well, almost nothing. On Monday, a stealth startup announced it had raised $7.3 million from a prominent venture firm. The deal hinged on the long-term relationship between the founder, a serial entrepreneur, and a venture capitalist who has become a leading figure in e-commerce startups. They had worked together in the past and had become cornerstones of each other's networks over the past decade.

In other words, it's the kind of thing that happens every day in Silicon Valley -- except for one crucial detail: They're both women.

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5 Global Women’s Tech Entrepreneurship Journeys (August 25)

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By Francine Gordon (Chair, SVForum Tech Women) BayBrazil and SVForum Tech Women are featuring foreign-born women succeeding in Silicon Valley. The first program earlier this year highlighted a series of female business leaders from around the world. Side discussions revolved around the tradeoffs of having legally required quotas, such as those that have been imposed in some European countries and elsewhere.

This time, the focus is on young women who have become technology entrepreneurs. All of the founders on the "Global Women's Journey" panel on Thursday, August 25 in San Jose

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How to be a Tech Entrepreneur Without Knowing How to Program

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By Laura Forrest (Marketing Manager, Mozilla) Don't have a computer science degree? Don't worry.

Don't let that stop you from founding your own start-up. There are many examples of successful non-technical co-founders who didn't let the lack of knowing a programming language stop them from creating something great.

In this case study, we look at Victoria Ransom who co-founded Wildfire along with Alain Chuard in 2008. Together they took an idea and transformed it into a thriving venture-backed company 140 employees strong. Enter Victoria Ransom:

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Join Women-Led Startups at Tech Cocktail in Boston (September 1)

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By Jen Consalvo (Co-Editor & COO, Tech Cocktail) Back in May, I wrote a post for Women 2.0 about the importance of pitching your early stage startup. If you're in the New England area, I'd like to encourage you to apply to demo at the upcoming Tech Cocktail Boston mixer event at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge on September 1, 2011.

Looking for Women-Led Startups in Boston

Tech Cocktail is looking for 10-14 early stage startups to demo at the event in a casual expo style -- no formal pitches --

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Be Bigger: Lessons from The Big Enough Company

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By Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams (Founders, In Good Company) The blank canvas. When you start your own business you have the opportunity to do, create and decide whatever you want. That’s the most exciting (although sometimes scary) part of entrepreneurship.

This all leads to a tremendous and inspiring amount of diversity in the world of business. Not only does each entrepreneur have unique motivations but they also have different desired purposes, outcomes and goals. Each of us approaches entrepreneurship with a distinct philosophy and idea of what we must get

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Why Is It Important to Hire Women in Your Startup?

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By Cheryl Yeoh (Co-Founder & CEO, CityPockets) "It’s a numbers game. There are far fewer women in tech than men. So anyone genuinely interested in changing the ratio and evening out the balance, has to more than meet women halfway" -- Cindy Gallop in No One’s Blaming Anyone on WIMN’s Voices

The gender ratio and gender biases of the start-up community are long-standing topics of contention. But this piece isn’t about why there are so few women in tech, and it’s not about what it’s like being one of the few. Rather, I want to talk about why it even matters.

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Notes From the Classroom: Assisting Teaching High School Girls Ruby on Rails

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By Anna Billstrom (Developer, Momentus Media) I spent the day TA’ing for my friend’s class. Sarah Mei taught an Intro to Ruby class for 6 hours to 12 high school senior girls. They were in a 4-day intense engineering stay-away camp, that they’d done for four successive years. They take girls freshman year, and the same girls come back every year. This cartoon is from one of our feedback surveys.

Sarah managed to get the ratio of TA’s to girls approximately 1-3, which was awesome. I worked pretty closely with three young women. All of the TA’s were women, too, of different

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Top 5 Ways to Blow Your Startup’s Possible Patent Protection

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By Heather N. Shafer (Intellectual Property Attorney, Independent) The surprised and dejected look on clients’ faces when we tell them their invention is no longer eligible for patent protection is not one a patent attorney likes to experience. The look morphs between a huge exhale to fuming red face with fists pounding the table and screams of “This can not be so, you must be wrong!” Each time I see this, I want to rent a blimp and have it travel the skies streaming information about the Top Five Ways to Blow Possible Patent Protection.

Since I cannot afford a blimp, here it is, plain and simple.

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Why Should Startups Try To Hire Women

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By Jean Hsu (Android developer, Pulse) This gem of an article showed up in my Twitter stream this morning...and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Basically, Penelope Trunk explains why male founders shouldn't hire/work with women in startups. Diversity, she says, is a luxury that is great for large companies, but distracts from the focus that a small startup should have.

At first, I thought the article would be just a brain dump with a sensationalist title, like this other article about Why Women Shouldn't Attend Tech Conferences. But it wasn't.

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85 Broads, Women 2.0 Announce #itswomen Campaign Launch

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By Shaherose Charania (Co-Founder & CEO, Women 2.0) Today, 85 Broads launched a global media campaign called It's Women to encourage companies, VC's, super angels, and high net worth investors to dramatically increase their investment in startups founded by women entrepreneurs.

On October 19, 2004, 85 Broads staged a one-day "Buycott" as a symbolic gesture to encourage Fortune 500 companies to pay greater attention to the enormous purchasing power of women. Business Week covered the Buycott and Trendsight summed up our impact!

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Huffington Post: GenJuice CEO on What Makes Women Better Entrepreneurs Than Men

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By Bianca Bosker (Technology Editor, The Huffington Post) GenJuice CEO Arielle Patrice Scott decided at an early age that she wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Like Facebook CEO Zuckerberg, Scott co-founded her first company, InternshipIn, while in college. Unlike Zuckerberg's startup, however, Scott's venture didn't grow into a multibillion-dollar behemoth -- by her own admission, it failed -- and unlike the famous Harvard dropout, Scott graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, last year. The other key difference: while Zuckerberg, like so many Web startup CEOs, is a white man, Scott is an African-American woman, part of a still-underrepresented group in the tech industry.

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Female Founders to Watch in Mobile

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Earlier this year, Women in Wireless selected a panel of women founding and leading wireless startups. From commerce to location-based services, these women-founded startups have high powered innovation in common.

From technical woman leader Asa Kalavade of Umber Systems to mobile marketing guru Maya Mikhailov of GPShopper, here are some amazing founding executive women from the Startup Powerhouse Women Executive panel at this year's CTIA Wireless conference:

Asa Kalavade (Founder & CTO, Umber Systems) Asa founded Umber Systems, a mobile data analytics company providing visibility into mobile data usage. In July 2011, Umber merged with Ground Truth, raising $8M in funding.

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Getting Your Startup Team to Understand Your Customer

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By Poornima Vijayashanker (Founder & CEO, BizeeBee) It's been 8 months since we launched our first product at BizeeBee. Since launching, my desire to please customers hasn’t stopped. The buzz bee and I spend nearly every week talking to customers on Twitter, Facebook, via email, or on the phone. I’m always asking for feedback on the product, improving how we react to bugs, and listening to their problems.

Why am I so obsessed with talking to customers? And why do I care about their business? Because no one on my team including myself has ever owned or managed a yoga studio!

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