How can an entrepeneur planning a startup that’s going to develop some revolutionary software that relates to how people work together discover truly game-changing product and business model possibilities? One approach is to look at a situation in a different way than everybody else. Easier said than done, typically … unless you’re lucky enough to discover a collective blindspot in current thinking.
Scott Page’s book The Difference highlights the importance of diversity in situations like this. The way I think of it is that a non-diverse crowd will fail to explore a lot of the possibilities. Strategically the best opportunties are likely to be in the areas that the are getting marginalized today. So whenever I see a #diversityfail related to the “web 2.0″ and mobile technology/business world, my ears perk up and I start paying attention.
Alex Iskold’s Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites on ReadWriteWeb is a roundup of reactions to Chris Anderson’s new book FREE — as well as his own opinion that free can be dangerous. Alex does a nice job summarizing opinions from Malcolm, Seth, Mike, Fred, Mark, and Brad … hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …
Alex replied to me on Twitter, asking for links to posts by women and saying he’d be happy to add them. Janet Maslin’s Absolutely, Positively Free … if You Think You Can Afford It from the New York Times was near the top of Google’s main page so I sent him the link — and also suggested that he try reaching out to women. After thanking me, he told me that he thought it was better not to reach out.
Responses like this don’t even surprise me at this point. Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) of Social Media Women of Color describes this as a “your problem not ours” attitude: we can’t find them, so it’s not our fault. Intelligent women with plenty to say on this subject are out there, and easy to find if you make the effort. If you don’t bother, who else is responsible?
A big problem with not reaching out is that it tends to confirm your own blind spots. For example, in environments where you’re listening primarily to guys, you’re a lot less likely to hear women’s perspectives. Virtually all the commenters on Alex’ ReadWriteWeb post are male; so is just about everybody who replies to or retweets him on Twitter. And a lot of the guys he’s talking with also seem to be the kind of guys who don’t talk a lot with or about women — look at Chris Anderson’s blog and Twitter feed, for example.* The net effect is what network theorists describe as a clique of male nodes with preferential attachment to other male nodes.
Guys talking to guys who talk about guys.
It’s not like this is new behavior. Shelley Powers described it vividly four years ago in Guys don’t link. Plenty of others have documented it too, including me (1, 2). Same old same old. Oh well. However …
From a startup pespective, great products together with a business model that takes advantage of a collective blindspot creates the potential for a unexpectedly huge opportunity that everybody else is overlooking.
Who knows for sure, but it’s distinctly possible that there are a lot of promising variations of “free”-related business models that all the guys talking to each other on the subject haven’t aren’t explore. And there are may also be some aspects of what makes a product great that the guys aren’t paying enough attention to either. With the right people and company culture, there could be some really interesting opportunities here.
So stay tuned for my upcoming post: #diversitywin: pithy title here.
jon
PS: If you want to check out Chris Anderson’s FREE, he’s providing it in a time-limited free version in a variety of formats: a Scribd ebook, Audible audiobooks, and GoogleBooks. If any women — or anybody else whose perspectives aren’t getting heard in the discussions of “free” business models — have any insights, please feel free to share!
* or Chris’ book Free, for that matter, where almost every name mentioned is male.
jon | 10-Jul-09 at 12:10 am | Permalink
Tonight I went to the Seattle startup event “The Naked Truth: Show me the money”, with four startups and three pundits talking about revenue models. For example, Picnik’s CEO talked about how challenging their “freemium” business model is, “scratching and clawing for every dollar”. [They earn $2000 for every 100,000 unique visitors to their site -- which means that if they get to be bigger than MySpace and attract 100,000,000 visitors they'll be making a grand total of $2,000,000. Yikes! But I digress.]
Here were the panelists:
Hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …
jon
March 2010:
September 6, 2010: A comment from Glenn on one of Michael’s posts:
It’s an interesting exercise to look at what bloggers or reporters you read regularly.* How many are women? Of the guys you read, how often do they mention women?
And of course it’s equally interesting for other dimensions of diversity …
Here was my experience, back in 2008 when I was more focused on political blogs.
jon | 10-Jul-09 at 7:27 pm | Permalink
Alex and Eve left comments on the earlier draft, and Alex and Allyson Kapin (aka @WomenWhoTech) discussed on Twitter.
Here’s an excerpt of the Twitter discussion involving Jill Miller Zimon (aka @JillMZ), Tracy Viselli (@myrnatheminx), Allyson Kapin (@WomenWhoTech), Shireen Mitchell (@digitalsista) and me. The most recent tweets are at the top:
jon | 12-Jul-09 at 12:17 pm | Permalink
There appears to be some interesting male cliquing behavior in and around the “contact management software” area. Plaxo’s management team is all-male. 37signals, makers of Highrise, has only one woman in their dozen employees. Xobni has two women out of 21. And so on. I’m sensing a pattern.
37signals’ book “Getting Real” describes their company philosophy and engineering process in great detail. From idea to implementation talks about starting wi th the question “What is this product going to do? For Basecamp, we looked at our own needs.” Presumably they did with Highrise as well. This a great strategy for building products for people with needs similar to yours. It’s likely, though, that as a result of the lack of diversity of their team, they’re building products that don’t meet the needs of a large portion of the potential target market here.
This is by no means a knock on 37signals, they have thought a lot about the kind of company they want to create and have a great reputation for very high quality software and support. And Plaxo and Xobni are probably fine products as well. But they’re all competing in the “software designed by guys for people who have the same needs as us” market segment. There’s probably a bigger untapped opportunity elsewhere.
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne distinguish between blue ocean and red ocean strategies. Blue oceans are where you want to be: “the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over.” What we’ve discovered here is a (potential) unknown market opportunity in a very lucrative space. I’m not sure “blue ocean” is the right term for this particular situation, though, because of the gender factor: in Ronna Lichtenberg’s terminology, the companies already competing in this space are likely to be biased towards “blue” organization and communication styles, and that’s not where we want to be.
So maybe it would be better to call it a “pink ocean” strategy.
jon
jon | 13-Jul-09 at 10:37 am | Permalink
Antonia Storr’s excellent interview with Chris Anderson in the Times Online includes this insightful question:
Kelly Samardak’s Something’s Fishy At Chris Anderson’s “FREE” Party on Just An Online Minute makes a good point about people pursuing a freemium strategy:
Andrew Erlichson’s Freemium did not work for Phanfare has some details and analysis of why it didn’t. There’s an excellent discussion between Andrew and several other guys in the comments.
Aaron Levie’s Is Free The Future Of Enterprise Software? Yes And No on TechCrunch also has some good analysis. The comment thread, like on Andrew’s post, is virtually all male.
jon
jon | 16-Jul-09 at 8:18 am | Permalink
It turns out that the copies of Free on Scribd and Kindle are region-locked, so not available outside of the US. Guess I should have called this “US-based guys talking to US-based guys who talk about US-based guys”.
Qworky: the adventure begins! « Liminal states | 16-Jul-09 at 8:05 pm | Permalink
[...] Liminal states Jon’s blog, currently green in solidarity with the advocates for justice, freedom, and democracy in Iran « A #diversityfail as an opportunity: guys talking to guys who talk about guys [...]
Meetings, diversity, and opportunity (DRAFT) « Liminal states | 20-Aug-09 at 1:53 pm | Permalink
[...] danah’s excellent essay, and another by Paul Graham that I’ll discuss below, provide a great chance to expand on the strategic importance of diversity that I started discussing in Qworky: the adventure begins and Guys talking to guys who talk about guys. [...]
jon | 12-Nov-09 at 9:06 pm | Permalink
A friend of mine had a print copy of 37 Signals Getting Real, and so I leafed through it counting who they quoted. 47 guys; 6 women.
And then there’s this:
Virginia DeBolt’s A Tipping Point for Women in Tech? Here’s Hoping! on BlogHer has more, as does Shelley Powers on BurningBird.
jon | 08-Dec-09 at 9:54 am | Permalink
Shifting focus slightly to the technology-in-politics world … there were a lot of kudos for Sunlight Foundation’s coverage of the Open Government Directive announcement today. The analysis was excellent, but have a look at a screenshot of the video and chat room and see if anything jumps out at you:
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here. I mentioned this in the chat room, but the moderators didn’t put my comment through. I also tweeted it to the #diversityfail hashtag, where a couple of guys didn’t seem concerned but a couple of women agreed with me … pattern? Did somebody say “pattern”?
jon | 08-Jan-10 at 10:47 am | Permalink
On Alternet, Don Hazen, Les Leopold and Bruce E. Levine ask Are Progressives Depressed or Too Privileged to Produce Social Change? Or Are We Just Failing to Organize Effectively?
On the Progressive Exchange email list, I commented
In the intro, Don does cite an article by Alternet contributor Adele Stan. Alas, the link is broken.
Update, a couple days later: I tweeted a comment on this to Alternet and Don Hazen. They didn’t respond. Oh well. I wonder if they’re too depressed, or just failing to organize effectively?
jon | 09-Jan-10 at 9:35 am | Permalink
Back on the technology side, here’s the finalists and winner of the “Crunchies”, TechCrunch’s high-profile annual awards:
Gregory K. | 27-Jan-10 at 6:05 pm | Permalink
I’m not sure if this relates entirely, but I wonder if Apple expected “iTampon” to be a trending topic on Twitter today… and iPad no longer trending at 8 PM on its release day?
Update, May 9: Yahoo just released stats on the gender ratio of iPad users on Yahoo: 2-1 male
jon | 25-Feb-10 at 2:55 am | Permalink
Tuesday’s Open Diversity Chat discussed the alarming statistics from Blacks, Latinos and women lose ground at Silicon Valley tech companies, an excellent piece by Mike Swift from the San Jose Mercury News.
July 17 :a quick digression: this is the same Mike Swift who quoted me in Online privacy: ‘Bill of rights’ for social networking debated in San Jose. Small world!
September 2: Vivek Wadhwa’s February 7 Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem on TechCrunch is a really good complement to Mike and Ryan’s article — and a great teaser for the late summer TechCrunch kerfuffle I covered in Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan, where I quote Vivek several times.
jon | 12-Apr-10 at 10:28 pm | Permalink
White, male startup companies get funding for being white and male on Restructure! quotes well-known VC John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins:
Restructure! adds:
PS: Elizabeth Stark also mentioned John Doerr’s quote in her excellent The Gender Gap in Tech: Why Mentors Matter in the Huffington Post.
Update, September 1: Janine de Nysschen’s Why Men Get VC Money and Women Don’t….and How that is Changing on New York Entrepeneur Week’s blog from April 9, has a wealth of data. Thanks to Natalia Oberti Noguera of Pipeline for tweeting the link!
jon | 24-Apr-10 at 8:56 am | Permalink
The 100 Things conference, via @Mike_FTW — who notes that it’s even less diverse than the GOP Heroes page.
jon | 24-Apr-10 at 9:39 am | Permalink
Claire Cain Miller’s Why so Few Women in Silicon Valley in The New York Times:
Why yes, that’s the same Kleiner Perkins whose John Doerr talks about how he looks to invest in white guys because he sees that as a pattern of success. Gee. You don’t think that could have anything to do with why they don’t get a diverse pool?
Update, August 19: In another thread, Cathy Brooks commented that many women in Silicon Valley, including her, felt this article was full of terrible holes. We got a chance to chat a bit about this in person at pii2010, and she added that by focusing solely on the negative, it had wasted a huge opportunity. She also mentioned that Claire Cain Miller did another article a few weeks later on the tech scene in Boulder — and didn’t mention any women.
jon | 24-Apr-10 at 9:44 am | Permalink
From Doree Shafrir’s “Tweet Tweet Boom Boom in New York:
On Mediaite, Rachel Sklar responds
Yeah really. From earlier in the New York article:
jon | 24-Apr-10 at 7:23 pm | Permalink
It seems that way to me too. I’m not sure if there’s a specific recent igniter; it’s more like critical mass has been reached. Allyson, Shireen, and many other women in technology and their allies have been steadily pursuing a strategy of documenting inequities, highlighting them via new and traditional media, and engaging with others who see the value of change. Sure the cards are totally stacked in favor of the existing Kyriarchy, but still: with such a highly motivated, competent, and diverse group of people working towards a goal which adds a huge amount of value to society, it’s not surprising that there’s starting to be a sense of momentum.
jon | 18-Jul-10 at 2:08 pm | Permalink
As usual, Shireen was onto something: there is a lot of momentum. The successes of organizations like Women 2.0 have a lot to do with it; Adriana Gardella’s Women and Growing Companies has some very useful links. Brad Feld’s The Discussion About The Lack of Women In Tech quotes National Center for Women in Technology CEO Lucy Sanders as saying that we’re five years into a 20 year shift but it seems to me that things are about to start moving a lot more quickly.
Tereza Nemessanyi’s XX Combinator on Mashups, Markets, and Motherhood responded to Scott Duke Harris’ Mercury News article Startup boot camp illustrates dearth of women in tech by suggesting “a Y combinator for women”. Good idea! Y Combinator’s heavily skewed demographics lead collective and self-reinforcing blind spots that mirroring the biases of traditional VCs and the power structures of large companies. There are all kinds of pink ocean opportunites for an XX combinator … Fred Wilson is potentially interested in funding something and adds perspective from his wife Gotham Girl, who talks to and works with a lot of 40 something women entrepreneurs and tells him that this group is “breaking out.” A video interview with Tereza (XX Combinator comes up 4 1/2 minutes into it) and the discussion on Hacker News have more.*
Jessica Bruder’s We Need More Female Venture Capitalists in Forbes Woman also quotes investors Cindy Padnos of Illuminate and Amy Erret of Maveron along with Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek. A comment calls her a feminazi so it is certainly worth a read. Closing the Venture Capital Gender Gap in BusinessWeek goes into more detail on Astia, a non-profit focused on accelerating funding and growth for women-led businesses.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s coverage within a couple of weeks in the Mercury News, Forbes, Business Week, and interest from several high-profile star investors. In classic business strategy terms, we’re crossing the chasm and are about to be inside the tornado: it’s where fortunes are made and dominant market positions can be won — or lost, as the case may be. Gotta like that.
Looks like I should go on vacation more often!
Closing the VC gender gap from TheDeal TV, with Kristine Brandt of Invesco Private Capital, Kauffman Foundation VP Lesa Mitchell, Sharon Vosmek of Astia, and Silicon Valley Bank executive Megan Scheffel.
* Update, August 19: Tereza’s got a Reuters op-ed Will the next Google be started by a woman?, also cross-posted as a guest post on Fred Wilson’s blog.
jon | 17-Aug-10 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
There was a nice article on Alex Iskold’s startup Adaptive Blue on Read Write Web today: 5M Monthly Check-Ins Later, GetGlue Comes to Android.* Chris Cameron’s analysis:
True, although one of the risks of a feedback loop like this is that it if you don’t have a diverse group of participants originally, it can be challenging to broaden your audience later. There’s been a lot of attention recently to checkin competitor FourSquare’s gender ratio: 80% guys. So there’s a huge opportunity here for GetGlue if they can reach a more diverse audience. On the other hand it also highlights a huge potential advantage for Facebook: while there’s plenty of room for improvement, they have very good gender diversity in their user base.
* Alex was the author of the article that I originally responded to in this post, many many months ago
jon | 17-Aug-10 at 3:03 pm | Permalink
From Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff’s Wired magazine cover story The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
Chris and Michael have some perspectives from Jonathan, Yuri, Steve, and so on. There’s also a companion debate between Tim and John.
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.
Maybe they don’t know any women. Maybe they don’t think that any women have anything useful to say. Or maybe they’re just so used to talking to guys who talk about guys that they — and everybody that reviewed and edited the article — don’t even notice the pattern or think about its implications.
jon | 19-Aug-10 at 3:15 pm | Permalink
Chris and Michael’s article sure stirred up a lot of reaction. MediaGazer has links to posts by Evan, Matthew, Dave, Mike, Rob, Erick, Damon, vanelsas, matt, Alan, James, Nick, Randall, Nathan, Jason, Choire, Michael, Kirk, John, Alexis, Ryan — and Nitasha Tiku in New Yorker. Hey, what’s she doing here?
Well, maybe it’s just MediaGazer — who like techmeme is known for their gender bias. So I checked Google instead, and found articles by Fred, Richi, Steve, Shane, Tim, Sam, John, Rob, Chris, Nate, and Evann along with Caron Carlson in FierceCIO and Helen A. S. Popkin on MSNBC.
And of course, a lot of the guys link to each other, but I couldn’t find any links to Nitasha or Caron, and only one to Helen (an uncredited story in Periscope Post ). For more on this phenomenon, see Shelley Powers’ classic Guys don’t link.
Meanwhile on Twitter, @missrogue and @jescarter thought I had brought up a good point, and Tracy Viselli had a theory for what’s going on:
@comradity tweeted me that I had been quoted in a comment on Fred Wilson’s post, so I checked that out too. Fred shares perspectives from Howard and Saul. I waded through out the comments from Dave, andy, Niccai, Richard, Morgan, Aviah, afinanceguy, scottythebody, Eric, Mark, and Steven before giving up.
Hey wait a second. I’m noticing a pattern here …
Funny, though. None of the bloggers or commenters seem to have noticed the gender imbalance.
jon | 20-Aug-10 at 12:14 pm | Permalink
Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter put together a great chat today Why Do We Need Female Journalists with Technical Expertise?. Cindy Royal of Texas State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and and user experience “engineerette” Tiff Fehr of msnbc.com led a great discussion, with attendees including Wendy Norris, Lorraine Hopping Egan, Shireen Mitchell (aka digitalsista), and Jill Miller-Zimon (@jillmz) who started the #diversitywin/#diversityfail hashtags and many others. Wendy posted a great link to Cougar coders [or gray hairs need not apply], which is a great complement to the XX Combinator discussions earlier in this thread. And a few people weighed in about Wired as well:
Y’know, it sure is a different conversation when it involves women …
The context and full chat transcript are well worth reading — good stuff!
jon | 25-Aug-10 at 8:09 am | Permalink
Meanwhile …
Wow, nice coverage. Here’s a few excerpts from Tomio Geren’s Wall Street Journal article
Hmm. InDinero was co-founded by Jessica Mah (who along with Amanda Peyton of Message Party is one of the very few women co-founders in this years crop of 36 Y Combinator companies) but I guess she wasn’t important enough to mention. But at least women aren’t totally absent from the coverage. Tomio mentions that Demi Moore was there with her husband, actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher.
Wade Roush does quote Jessica in his Definitive Demo Day Debrief on XConomy: “What Mint did to Quicken, we are doing to Quickbooks.” Wade describes their product as “a real-time financial dashboard that small businesses can use to track their spending without having to rely on a bookkeeper” which sounds pretty good to me. His August 11 profile, InDinero Co-founder Sees ‘Humongous’ Market in Small Business Expense Tracking has more.
Wade adds:
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.
September 2: w00t! A #diversitywin after a #diversityfail! 20 Year Old Founder Jessica Mah Gets $1 Million Put Into Banking Startup InDinero, Alexia Tsotis reports on TechCrunch. Congrats to Jessica, co-founder Andy Su, and to Y Combinator! And score one for Wade Roush and XConomy …
At the risk of being pedantic for a moment: a success like this is a particularly good example of several aspects of structural oppression that it is not always so easy to see. inDinero and Jessica both benefit hugely from being involved with YCombinator. 90% of the people that have a chance to benefit from that are guys. And as Alexia reports:
Hmm, let’s see, previous investors where Keith, Kevin, and Intuit’s David. I’m noticing a pattern here …
if inDinero is as successful as it seems like it will be, its early investors will come out way ahead. As they should: they spotted a winner early on and seem to be doing a good job nuturing it. But once again, 90% of the people benefitting from this are guys. Thus does patriarchy reproduce itself.
in a comment on the Seattle 2.0 blog, Lizb shared this March 2005 quote from Paul Graham of YCombinator:
Liz comments “Way to pave the way for capable women to climb the ladder there, Paul.” Yeah really. Looks like a good time to reread Tereza Nemessanyi’s XX Combinator and Reuters op-ed Will the next Google be started by a woman?.
* Long-time readers might recognize Naval’s name from the discussion of VentureHacks in Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n
** Alexia suggests that Jessica might be the next Mark Zuckerberg … wow, I wouldn’t wish that on my own worst enemy. I’m sure she means it as a compliment.
Cindy Gallop | 25-Aug-10 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
Love this post.
My startup http://www.ifwerantheworld.com – a simple web-meets-world platform designed to turn good intentions into action, one microaction at a time – is what I describe as ‘emotional software’: the synthesis of technology and psychology.
My startup team is 4 women, 3 men. My head of user experience, my designer and my programmer are all female.
It was a long hard slog to get my startup funded – I represent a double whammy of VC unfundability: female AND older
I mentor and advise many female entrepreneurs of all ages. They struggle too – with startups that are highly innovative and creative but not the ‘next Foursquare/Twitter’ template male VCs and investors are looking for.
I can’t wait for your #diversitywin post.
Jill Miller Zimon | 29-Aug-10 at 8:26 am | Permalink
Jon – thank you for this excellent thread.
You know about the Politico piece a couple of weeks ago on political bloggers who run for office? Primary source included a post I wrote on The Moderate Voice, plus a more than hour interview with me by the writer? And “all I got was my lousy city name in the article” while 11 men were mentioned (and two other women). When Alan Rosenblatt and I were trying to ID poli bloggers who’d run, for a while, it appeared I was in fact the only woman who’d done it (and won) at the level I’m at (many under the radar possibilities out there too though – state party orgs for example).
So – it’s a media coverage thing as well, as I know you know. Very many layers to attack.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40925.html
jon | 29-Aug-10 at 8:54 am | Permalink
Thank for the comments, Jill and Cindy — totally agreed.
Cindy, I firmly believe that more diverse teams come up with better experiences for everybody, so I’m really looking forward to seeing where If We Ran the World goes — it’s off to a very promising start. Great point about other dimensions of oppression too. I’m mostly talking about gender in this thread but age, race, ableism, and language all have similar patterns. And I also work with a lot of women of all ages who have similar struggles — as entreneneurs or as politicians, as Jill points out.
[I was once quoted in The Economist in an article on software engineering with 12 other guys and no women. When I mentioned this afterwards to the author, he said yeah, there were a couple in his original article but they got edited out. Sigh. And of course as I highlight in my blog post there were plenty of women whose input would have been very valuable ... but I digress.]
More positively, a very good thing about the Politico article was that it focused on the Blogher conference panel as empowering women who wouldn’t otherwise have considered running for office.
As you say, it’s a media problem as well as a funding problem. And Rachel Sklar of Medaite made a great point in Shira Ovide’s excellent WSJ article Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups:
Jill Miller Zimon | 29-Aug-10 at 10:02 am | Permalink
Yup – the Politico writer tweeted that it was a space issue. So I said well, my name is 17 characters and Pepper Pike is 11 – give me a break. (Pepper Pike, Ohio is in fact 17). Not to mention I am a paid freelance writer, I know how these things work. Don’t BS me. Whatev. Yes, need to move on – but that does not mean making a point to highlight these instances. Just crazy in 2010, crazy.
Liminal states :: Yes it’s hard. Stop whining. Take some responsibility (a response to TechCrunch’s latest #diversityfail) | 29-Aug-10 at 10:21 am | Permalink
[...] I think of articles like this as a fascinating snapshot of how privilege, combined with the “guys talking to guys who talk about guys” cliquing behavior, leads to a remarkably convenient blind spot for Arrington — as well [...]