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Getting Value from “The Dinosaurs”

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By Carissa Ganelli (Founder & CEO, Commerce Drivers) Why would a mobile commerce startup founder title a blog post, “The Dinosaurs”? Am I referring to the Steven Spielberg, “Jurassic Park”-type dinosaur? No.

I’m referring to very successful business people who have a wealth of traditional business and maybe even startup experience but know very little about tech startups. They exude confidence in their advice and recommendations because they’ve built successful businesses. The dinosaur part comes into play when they try to apply rules from the past to today’s tech startup environment.

Here’s what I’ve learned from Dinosaurs. They have some good advice that you should heed. They also have a bunch of outdated or inaccurate info that you would do well to ignore. Where to draw the line is up to your good judgment.

The good advice:

  • Cash is important to a startup. The number one reason startups fail is due to running out of cash.
  • You might need a demo (not a video) to show the PowerPoint-phobic how the product would work in real life and to show your product is beyond the idea stage.
  • Your pitch deck should be around 15 pages. You need to provide a good overview of the concept with supporting facts like market size, barriers to entry, and deal terms to whet the investors’ appetite. Investors can request more detailed information from you if they are interested in pursuing it further.

Not such good advice:

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Uncategorized1 min read
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A Day in the Life of a Startup Intern at Wednesdays

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By Crystal Yan (Intern, Wednesdays) I just finished my freshman year of college and I've been interning at Wednesdays for about a month. Wednesdays.com organizes employee lunch programs for companies and lunch clubs for organizations (like the Women 2.0 Lunch Club) and is part of the 500 Startups accelerator.

For anyone looking to work at a startup or start one, I thought I'd share some insights from my experience thus far on why working for a startup is awesome and what I've learned so far.

Reason #1: There's no work for work's sake, you get to do more in less time, every time.

My second day on the job, I sent out some emails and mentioned to the founders that we should have a demo video to keep our emails from being too long. So one of them said, "Great, go for it". On my third day, I wrote a script and pulled together a powerpoint with screenshots. I asked Rick, the UX advisor for 500 Startups, to help me edit the script, and he even helped with the voiceover. By the end of the fourth day, a 1-minute demo video was ready to go and was on every individual lunch club's landing page.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Bootstrapping: Building Fashion the Lean Startup Way

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By Heidi Isern (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) Lindsay Welsh McConnon believes in building from idea to execution. She is the co-founder of Velvet Brigade, a community driven women’s fashion brand. The company showcases aspiring designers from all over the world and makes their products available to the fashion-loving public.

Lindsay didn’t initiate Velvet Brigade with an idea, but rather a person, her former colleague Jena Wang. “We had complimentary strengths and knew we could build a competitive advantage,” she said. Previously a merchant at Macy’s, Lindsay knew how to select apparel. As a previous product developer, Jena knew how to make it. The only thing missing was that "aha" moment to build a company off of their combined strengths.

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Top Women Tech Entrepreneurs in China

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By Edith Yeung (Founder, SFentrepreneur and BizTechDay) There are now an estimated 384 million internet users in China, yes it is more than the population of the United States. The growth rate of China's internet user population has been outpacing that of any countries in the world.

With tens of thousands of startups booming in China, I am glad to see that women entrepreneurs are not far behind of their male colleague in the technology space.

Here is a list of women tech entrepreneurs who are very active in the China web space:

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Customer Development: Where the Startup Rubber Meets the Road

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By Eric Cantor (Participant, Founder Labs) The brainstorms flow, the sketches come together with a final flourish, and the engineers reason through how the database schema can be perfectly laid out. But the tough news for most potential startups comes when they “get out of the building” and go find out if the product fits the market. Who are you serving exactly? Do they really want it badly enough to engage with it in these crowded times where there are 5 apps for everything? What problem are you solving? These questions and more needed to be answered as we intensify the Customer Development (“CustDev”) process during week 2 of Founder Labs.

Getting Out of the Building

The emerging movement around Lean Startup methodology embraces the agile, nimble, incremental build of a product, starting with a clear focus on customer needs and navigating the way to a business model and an ecosystem. This focus on solutions and customers, rather than technology or product, is one I’ve always followed, and has served well in a variety of sectors and segments including my last few years of work in Uganda, where rapid prototyping was a critical step in everything we attempted.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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RailsBridge NYC Outreach Kicks Off Last Month

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By Karen Zeller (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) On May 7th, 2011, RailsBridge NYC held its first free outreach and training targeted at women. Open to programmers and non-programmers alike, the event was booked solid within twelve hours of its announcement. Demand and enthusiasm for the event was so strong, attendees facing family emergencies made time in their busy lives to commit and show up for the cause.

Mimi Hui, a product strategist and founder of the consulting firm Canal Mercer of NYC, was the chief instigator and organizer of the event. Without her tenacity the event would not have been able to support the number of attendees as successfully as it had.

According to Mimi, “The attendees were surprising, we had the usual entrepreneurs and women who were interested in transitioning from HTML / CSS but additionally, we also had a woman who is trying to build a prototype to monitor world hunger in real time from the United Nations.”

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Announcing DEMO Partnership and Scholarships for Women-Run Startups

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The DEMO Conference and Women 2.0 announce a partnership and DEMO's offerings of multiple scholarship opportunities to enable a select group of companies to launch at DEMO. The DEMO Scholarship Partner Program will feature a total of 20 full scholarships for bootstrapped companies (valued at $18,500 each).

Of these DEMO scholarships, a minimum of 4 will be dedicated to women entrepreneurs; 10 partial scholarships will be awarded to angel-funded companies and 10 full scholarships will awarded to college students.

DEMO Fall 2011 will take place this September 12-14, 2011 in Silicon Valley. Scholarship application deadline is July 1. Apply now!

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What the Startup Genome Means to Female Founders: Very Little

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By Kaitlin Pike (Marketing & Community Manager, Web 2.0 Expo) Since it was released just two weeks ago, the Startup Genome report has inspired hundreds of blog posts, articles and discussions about the “science” behind successful startups and the causes of business failure here in Silicon Valley.

While the team behind the Startup Genome still has miles of analysis to wade through (including information from their new updated survey), they’ve already put together a number of summaries about the data including their post on VentureBeat -- The 7 signs of failure for internet startups and 14 key findings on their own blog. Here is a quick flavor of what the report authors are saying:

  • “Founders that learn more are more successful.”
  • “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money.”
  • “People who work half time are able to raise money, but ~24x less than founders who go full time.”

As startup business folks, we’ve learned to rely on data, data, and more data to test, plot, and move forward with our ideas, so it’s only natural a report of this nature has sparked such fervent interest. It’s also generated a significant amount of (hopefully helpful) criticism.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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PyLadies Python Hackathon in Los Angeles on June 18

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By Audrey Roy (Co-Founder, Cartwheel Web) After a hugely successful Beginner's Python Workshop in May, the PyLadies were inspired to keep the momentum going for those excited about learning Python and becoming a part of the local dev community.

Last week, the PyLadies hosted a social gathering of lady Python developers in glamorous downtown LA. Next Saturday, the PyLadies will hold the first of several hackathons to take place all through the summer.

For the June 18th hackathon, attendees can continue to go through the tutorials from the workshop, but are also encouraged to bring their own ideas to work on, or to collaborate with others on open-source projects.

The event will conclude with more of the ever-popular PyLadies lightning talks - and, of course, a social hour.

Border Stylo, who most recently released the Retrollect iPhone app, has generously donated the use of their cozy, hacker-friendly office in Hollywood for the June 18th event. The Python Software Foundation is also sponsoring the hackathon, in a show of their enthusiastic support of the PyLadies' efforts to increase the diversity of the Python community.

Tickets are still available at http://pyladies-hackathon.eventbrite.com/.

Questions should be directed to [email protected].

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Something Worth Waiting For — A Founder’s Calling

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By Katherine Hague (Marketing, ecobee) It’s hard for me to believe it’s almost been 5 years since I attended my first entrepreneurship event through Impact in Canada. I had always been the kid setting up lemonade stands or trying to sell hand made greeting cards to unsuspecting teachers [looking back they were really terrible cards, my poor teachers!]. I knew that one day I wanted to start a company but I had no idea there were other people, even kids my age, out there trying to do the same thing.

After a couple of years of standing on the sidelines of startups, planning events, I decided I needed to get some hands on experience. I started working with a number of startups that my friends had founded and ultimately found myself as an independent consultant on digital media and marketing projects.

I stumbled into tech.

You can only spend so long in the startup world without realizing that it’s dominated by tech companies. I loved the fast pace of innovation, the people, and the idea of building something that could change the way people live their lives. I would stay up at night reading Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work or any startup story I could get my hands on. One of my favorite founder stories is Tony Hsieh of Zappos. I even got to tour their office a couple years ago when I was in town for CES. Next time you’re in Las Vegas, skip the casinos and take the Zappos tour instead, you won't be disappointed.

I’m lucky to be surrounded by great people. I never fail to be impressed by the projects and people that surround me.

Here in Toronto, whether it's Startup Drinks, DemoCamp, BarCamp, Mesh, Girl Geek Dinners, Startup Weekend, Rails Pub Nite, SproutUp or Hacks and Hackers, there always seems to be something going on for startup founders and developers. It’s a close- knit community and everyone is always eager to help.

Programming was always this far away, intimidating concept.

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Uncategorized2 min read