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How Do I Become CEO Of A Technology Startup?

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What skills do you need to develop to become the CEO of a tech startup? By Laura Yecies (CEO, SugarSync)

I’m often asked by young women in school, thinking about their careers, “how can I prepare to be a CEO? What should I study? What experiences should I seek?”

To answer this question I think it’s best to think about what skills are needed to be a CEO of a technology startup. First of all, what do companies need to do? Simply put, they need to make things and they need to sell what they make. Typically, the CEO will know more about one of those two, but you need to be able to execute at a basic level on both. Going beyond that, you need to

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Living In The Cloud: Your Office, Your Terms

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Editor's note: This is a sponsored blog post from Microsoft. Thanks to Bing, the first 100 applicants to the Women 2.0 PITCH Startup Competition are FREE! By Maggie Chan Jones (Director of Cloud Services & Office 365, Microsoft)

The United States Microsoft Office 365 team is honored to host the Women 2.0 Los Angeles networking event at our Microsoft Store in Century City mall on December 2, 2011 from 6pm to 9pm.

The event will address and generate discussions around how Microsoft technologies make remote working easier, a topic that is becoming increasingly critical in today’s workplace, particularly among professional women. The event will support Microsoft’s “Your Office, Your Terms” campaign, designed to educate women on the benefits of remote working and

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(Video) Why Your Startup Team Needs Diversity — in Race, Financial Background and Gender

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By Jolie O'Dell (Writer, VentureBeat) The shopworn adage “It takes all kinds of people to make a world” is never more controversial than when applied to technology startups.

“It takes all kinds of people to make a product” is much less accepted; diversity often gets short shrift when meritocracy is a supposed ideal and both time and funding are short.

However, having diversity of all kinds on a startup team can actually end up saving time and money. In this interview, Julia Hu, founder of Lark, explains exactly how and why founders

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3 Ways To Scale Without Losing Savvy Customer Service

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By Natalia Oberti Noguera (Founder & CEO, Pipeline Fellowship) How can a low-tech, high-touch startup scale to a high-tech one without losing users? I asked several tech startup founders, community managers, and users for any lessons learned on how startups can successfully transition their early adopters, who are used to feeling like VIPs, to technology that reduces hand-holding.

Here are three principles they work by as their startups continue to scale from high-touch to high-tech:

  1. Canned answers can be a good thing -- According to Danae Ringelmann, IndieGoGo co-founder and... Read More...
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Mentorship and Networking Especially Important for Women Entrepreneurs (Stories of Leadership)

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Last week, Andreessen Horowitz invited women to their Menlo Park office to hear stories from leaders: Padmasree Warrior (CTO, Cisco), Marissa Mayer (VP Location & Local, Google), Freada Kapor Klein (Founder, Level Playing Field Institute), Angela Benton (Founder, NewME), and Sandy Jen (Co-Founder & CTO, Meebo).

Panel moderator and TechCrunch writer Vivek Wadhwa conducted research with NCWIT, finding that the only difference between women and men to become entrepreneurs is that women feel discouraged from starting up.

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SugarSync CEO On How Star Women Are More Portable

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By Laura Yecies (CEO, SugarSync) I happened to read a fascinating article in Harvard Business Review – it’s a couple of years old but it was part of an email to me by HBS and the title caught my eye, “How Star Women Build Portable Skills”. You can read the full text of the article here.

The thesis is that, unlike men, when star women switch firms, they maintain their “star” performance. The author, Boris Groysberg, attributes this to two factors:

  • “Unlike men, high-performing women build their success on portable, external relationships – with clients... Read More...
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Apply For A Facebook Fellowship (2012 Graduate Fellowships)

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By Jocelyn Goldfein (Director of Engineering, Facebook) Applications for Facebook graduate fellowships for academic year 2012-2013 is now open. The deadline for fellowship applications is December 16, 2011.

We’re also excited to announce that we’ll be doubling the number of awards we give out this year. These fellowships support exceptional Ph.D. students in a wide range of academic topics.

This year, we are also increasing focus in “systems” areas (Compilers, Databases, Distributed Computing, Fault Tolerance, and Networking). These areas represent

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Early-Stage Battery Startup Founder Seeks Commercialization Help

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By Danielle Applestone (Co-Founder, SnipeSwipe) The first company I started was SnipeSwipe, a small, two-person software company. It was me, my then boyfriend, and some books on how to code in Perl. We wrote all the software for an internet-based eBay sniping service, hosted it on some dirt cheap virtual servers, and we were profitable in ten days. We didn’t get to pay ourselves for nearly six months, but now it’s eight years later, we have around 800 monthly paying customers, and we have helped people win hundreds of thousands of items on eBay.

You’d think I might know something about starting

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Who Are The Top 10 Women in U.S. Technology?

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By David Zielenziger (Contributer, International Business Times)  

Nobody would ask who the top 10 men are in U.S. technology because their ranks fill the executive suites at Intel, Apple, Texas Instruments, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Motorola Mobility....and on and on.

Finding the women is harder because there are fewer, especially at the CEO level, where they can really influence the company and the industry.

Here are a few more than 10 to start:

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Palo Alto Research Center Wants to Help You (November Events)

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By Kelly Coupe (Program Manager, Intelligent Systems Laboratory) Those of you starting new companies are executing upon insightful ideas, unique to solving a problem you’ve identified in the world. But what if you’ve found that it leaves a little something desired in order to take it to the next level? Something truly unique that will set your company apart?

Whether it’s building a completely new concept, or finding that you need to implement a never been done before novel technology, you may find that you need additional support to execute. For example, let’s say you have a great idea for an online

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Gamification… The Future of Marketing (November 9)

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By Nelly Yusupova (CTO, Webgrrls International) Are you marketing a product or service? Do you want to create a dynamic team within your company? Are you building a business, website, or a blog? Do you want to create better relationships with your customers?

If you said YES to to any of these questions, then you have to learn gamification on Wednesday, November 9 in New York.

Join NYC Webgrrls and one of the top thought leaders in Gamification, Gabe Zichermann (author of Game-Based Marketing and Gamification by Design), for an interactive

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The Income Disparity of Women in the Creative Class

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By Richard Florida (Senior Editor, The Atlantic)  

"What if the modern, post-industrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?" asks Hanna Rosin in her widely-discussed Atlantic essay, "The End of Men."

"The attributes that are most valuable today -- social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus -- are, at a minimum, not predominantly male." Rosin argues that the post-industrial playing field has been tilting toward attributes associated with women (such as their superior social and communication skills) and away from physical skills essential in industrial

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A Report from Startup Weekend #DCEDU, From 1 of 4 Finalists

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By Ainsley O'Connell (Director of Strategy & Partnerships, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship)  

I arrived at Startup Weekend EDU in Washington, D.C. ready to dive in and work on someone else’s idea. I ran into my friend, who said he was planning to pitch a couple of ideas and encouraged me to go for it, even if I hadn’t prepared anything. After all, why not? Surely I’d been mulling over an idea that had some promise?

I realized that I did have something, I had been thinking for a while about the shortcomings of our existing tools for communicating student data to parents. Complex assessment data increasingly guides educators’ work, effectively cutting

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