It's All in the Family with Club ChicaCircle
By Pauline Molinari and Lynnee Jimenez (Co-Founders, Club ChicaCircle) Late Night Launching Across the Miles It's midnight and we are on fire...
05/23/11
Conversation
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Results for "Lean In"
It’s All in the Family with Club ChicaCircle
By Pauline Molinari and Lynnee Jimenez (Co-Founders, Club ChicaCircle)
Late Night Launching Across the Miles
It's midnight and we are on fire catching up on site content, product roadmaps and strategic partnership opportunities for our new site for crafty pre-teen girls and their moms. Despite a full day of other work, family priorities and limited sleep, we are finding our second wind as we see our passion come to life through our online village.
Lynnee and I are two sisters working virtually across the miles (Palo Alto and Mission Viejo, CA) despite traditional guidance to not launch with a family member. We have endured through life events, the departure of a friend / co-founder, and bootstrapping strains.
We've done all the "right" things needed to start a business, now only to realize how much more important it is to just move forward quickly. We're sharing our story so you can find comfort in launching your own business without a fully funded base in place and to reinforce the importance of expanding your network.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Challenges Women to Be More Ambitious
By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)
In December, TEDtalks posted Why we have too few women leaders (video) by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, showing the world what a powerful, ambitious woman leader looks like.
This week, Sheryl delivered a powerhouse speech this time at Barnard's commencement. She reminded us that "women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, thirty years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table."
Sheryl challenged women to be more ambitious. She encouraged the young women to stay in the game -- "If all young women start to lean in, we can close the ambition gap right here, right now, if every single one of you leans in. Leadership belongs to those who take it. Leadership starts with you." She reminded women to "take a page from men and own their own success."
This is the same point Lesa Mitchell made in women entrepreneurs are trapped in glass walls -- that "womens’ startups under-perform on key measures of growth. Comparatively, few of them even grow to $1M per year in revenues. Very few build or hire on the kind of scale that can boost a region’s economy, let alone show up on the national radar screen." The takeaway? Think bigger than you currently do, then think even bigger, whether it's a bigger market opportunity or bigger scope.
3 Ways to Request and Get a Face-to-Face Meeting
By Cindy Alvarez (Head of Products and Customer Development, KISSmetrics)
True or false? If you’re asking a favor of someone, it’s best to give them plenty of freedom in terms of how and when they do it. I mean, it seems awfully presumptuous to not only ask for a favor, but also to ask that it be done in a specific manner in a specific timeframe. Right? Wrong.
Most people are happy to help with feedback or advice. However, we are conditioned to avoid uncertainty. We don’t like putting ourselves in situations where we may look stupid. We’re often multitasking and thus distracted. And the busiest people have limited time and they would prefer to spend that time on helping you with the hardest stuff, in the most efficient possible way. Hammering out where and when to meet, or which format to write up an answer in, or which tool to use is not giving someone flexibility, it’s assigning them busywork.
To be as considerate as possible and maximize your response rate, here’s what you do:
10 Skills New Grads Must Have to Work at Startups
By Alicia Morga (Contributing Writer, The Huffington Post)
Soon, another wave of eager college graduates will hit the shores of companies everywhere. The best and the brightest will find jobs at startups. Well, actually, I don't know if they are the best and the brightest, but when it comes to working at startups, you pretty much have to be.
That's because there is no orientation or formal mentorship programs or even direction. Startups are lean and fast and crazy. In my role as a startup founder and CEO, I've seen more than a few fresh college grads chewed up and spit out by them.
So here are my ten skills new grads must have before they show up to work at a startup. You may think they're obvious, but in my experience many recent college grads do not have them.
10 Key Skills New Grads Must Have to Work at Startups:
1. Excel
You should know how to execute basic functions in Excel like summing columns, how to organize data using pivot tables, and how to create graphs/charts of data; you should be able to use Excel even if you are in, say, marketing communications -- it's that important of a tool.2. PowerPoint
You should know how to animate parts of the presentation, import pictures and video, and embed data graphs; you should be able to do this even if you are in, say, engineering -- communication is a part of everyone's job.3. Basic analysis skills
If your boss gives you a spreadsheet with columns of data and says, "Make sense of this," you should be able to look at the data and at least be able to create charts and graphs that summarize the data or be capable of asking your boss, "What are you looking for, specifically?"
6 Female Founders at Ignite SF: Lean Startup (May 21)
By Sarah Milstein (Organizer, Ignite: Lean Startup)
Join us for an evening of Lean Startup talks with a twist. Each brave presenter gets five minutes and 20 slides -- which advance automatically every 15 seconds. Fast-paced, thought-provoking and social, this Ignite features presentations from in-the-trenches entrepreneurs ready to share their lessons learned.
The evening's slate for Ignite SF: Lean Startup Edition --
20 Ways to Not Build Stuff
Cindy Alvarez (Product Management & Customer Development, KISSmetrics)
Follow her on Twitter at @cindyalvarez.
20 Ways to Not Build StuffBuilding Community: Champions, Cheerleaders and Comrades
Kimberly Dillon (Founder, House of Mikko)
Follow her on Twitter at @prettylittleceo.
Building Community: Champions, Cheerleaders and ComradesHow listening to customers helped us raise $700K in seed funding
Mariya Genzel (Co-Founder & CTO, Saygent)
Follow her on Twitter at @mashagenzel.
How listening to customers helped us raise $700K in seed funding
How Following Your Gut Leads to a Product
By Ellie Cachette (Founder, ConsumerBell)
Back in October of 2009, I had the idea of creating a site that collected people’s complaints.
Not in the back-end kind of way but in a crowdsourcing way where people could vote if they had the same issue, which I then could contact the company to work out some kind of deal. Today, ConsumerBell helps companies track and manage product recalls online. They work with consumers and parent bloggers to spread information about product safety.
My main goal from the beginning was to minimize class action lawsuits and find a faster way to resolving product complaints by consumers (which stems from my father getting infected with HIV from a spoiled product in the eighties. Read more here). At the time I had a male CTO and two female interns who worked with me for four months trying to find juicy leads and work with companies but we had absolutely no success and for a lack of better count, essentially zero internet traffic.
I realized we needed to find a different way to solve the problem and re-brand. I especially wanted a blog so we could have a conversation with our consumers and users so we could learn more about the process and issues that can happen from a customer service side.
“A blog is a stupid idea,” my-then CTO told me. “What’s the point of a blog if you have no traffic? Besides we’ll never get funded unless it’s because someone thinks you are hot.” That was an eyeopener. I decided at that very moment that whoever I worked with in the future needed to have full faith in our vision. I killed the project, terminated any ties with that CTO and built the very first version of ConsumerBell myself using Weebly which was, for the most part, ugly and as ghetto as possible -- but it worked.
Partner event: The Lean Startup Machine in SF
The Lean Startup Machine is back in San Francisco on May 20-22, 2011 -- spend the weekend with the stars of Startup Lessons Learned before the big day. Speakers include Eric Ries (creator, Lean Startup methodology), Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits (Co-Authors, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development), Hiten Shah (Co-Founder, KISS Metrics), Laura Klein (Principal, Users Know) and Janice Fraser (CEO & Principal, LUXr).
Apply for your spot at Lean Startup Machine by May 7. For more details and to apply, click here -- and tell them Women 2.0 sent you!
The Lean Startup: A Review of Eric Ries' New Book
By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit) I've read a lot of business books over the years -- for school, for *fun*, for work. Most of them are...
The Lean Startup: A Review of Eric Ries’ New Book
By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit)
I've read a lot of business books over the years -- for school, for *fun*, for work. Most of them are just ok -- largely intuitive and too high level to be useful. I wouldn't recommend most books I've read to anyone. But, I just finished reading a draft of Eric Ries' new book, The Lean Startup. This is a must read for all internet entrepreneurs and a compelling read for anyone who's ever wanted to cut waste out of new projects... including stuffing envelopes!
Partner event: Startup Lessons Learned 2011
Startup Lessons Learned 2011 on Monday, May 23, 2011 in San Francisco, CA is the sequel to last year's inaugural event, which brought together...
Breaking Up With "Technology" Was the Best Thing I Did Before Love With Food
By Aihui Ong (Founding CEO & CTO, Love With Food) "I have a Computer Science background and I'm supposed to love technology." I spent the...
Breaking Up With “Technology” Was the Best Thing I Did Before Love With Food
By Aihui Ong (Founding CEO & CTO, Love With Food)
"I have a Computer Science background and I'm supposed to love technology."
I spent the first 8 years of my career specializing in enterprise financial systems, and made a name for myself in the enterprise world. I've consulted and engineered many Fortune 500 financial systems (Sony, Fox, GM, etc). Counting money and being accountable for every penny seriously killed my love for technology and in 2007, I called it quits. I was so burnt out and sworn that I'll never ever be a software engineer again.
I left Silicon Valley with my passport and a backpack and hopped on the next flight to wherever! It was my "eat, pray, love" adventure to help get back my sanity and recover from my breakup with "technology".
Doing Good
With a backpack and 12 months, I traveled through 20 countries. I met many wonderful people but also witnessed many living in poverty with no clean water or food. Seeing their hardship jolted me back to reality. With so much advancement in technology, why is hunger still an issue today? When I'm angry, it usually gets my brain juice flowing. I was motivated to explore more into social entrepreneurship.
How we developed a winning startup idea in five weeks
Guest post by Sheetal Dube (Co-Founder, Tetherpad).
When we presented our Women 2.0 startup idea Tetherpad, a travel management solution for busy people, on the mobile Founder Labs Final Demo Night, we had no idea that it would be a crowd favorite. For five weeks, Dharini, Everett and I worked diligently on validating our problem/solution hypothesis and communicating our minimum viable product (MVP). The process was a huge learning experience.
As Everett's guest blog post on Women 2.0 Founder Labs suggested, our team went through a number of ups and downs. So when the esteemed panel of John Malloy, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Dan Levine and Tim Connors picked Tetherpad as one of their top teams for a hypothetical next meeting, it was unanticipated and felt a bit surreal when the audience also picked us as their favorite. Personally, this was a huge validation. Five weeks ago, I did not know where to begin, let alone give advice to others.
Partner event: Startup Monthly in Mountain View
Startup Monthly meets on 4 consecutive Friday nights (February 25 thru March 25) at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View with the goal of meeting 5...