The sold-out Women 2.0 PITCH Conference’s opening keynote features Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch,* on “Making and the True Path.” The rest of the sessions look great too: case studies by Robin Chase of Zipcar and Julia Hu of Lark, and the “$50 Million Panel” featuring Deena Varshavskaya of Wanelo, Leah Busque of TaskRabbit, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo of Care.com. There are a bunch of intriguing finalists for the pitch competition — including Tara Hunt’s Buyosphere! And the judges for the competitions are no slouches either: Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy of JOYUS … looks like a #diversitywin to me, and some great networking too!
A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with Pemo Theodore, who’s interviewed dozens of investors and entrepreneurs for her excellent Why are Women Funded Less than Men?. We both had the same feeling: momentum has steadily built over the last couple years** and it feels like there’s a tidal wave in progress. The women-in-tech and women-near-tech communities are extraordinarily well networked. And the data is compelling. Here’s Vivek Wadhwa’s summary from his recent Inc article:
An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men. Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those run by men, and that organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders.
So while there’s still a long way to go, the trend is in the right direction. Kudos to all the amazing women, the much smaller number of equally-amazing guys, and the outstanding organizations like Women 2.0, the Anita Borg Institute, Astia, Pipeline Fellowship, Women Who Tech, She’s Geeky, the Level Playing Field Institute, Geek Feminism and so many others how have worked so hard to make this happen!
Combine the momentum and community with great content and plenty of opportunity for networking, and it should be a great conference.  I’ll be live-blogging it in comments — and feel free to jump in as well. Stay tuned!
jon
* and strong pseudonymity advocate!
** here on Liminal States threads like Guys talking to guys who talk about guys, A #diversitywin as an opportunity, Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan, The third wave and the anatomy of awesome, and Changing the ratio have some of the highlights
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 10:35 am | Permalink
The house is packed! Shaherose Charania’s starting things off with some he broader perspective: connecting and empowering women improves productivity and helps the economy. Yeah really! Next she described her experience when she got to Silicon Valley. She got a big laugh with her line “I realize these amazing world-changing companies looked like this: (pictures of a lot of guys). They’re cute, but …” And thus Women2.0 was born!
A few other miscellaneous notes:
– For the PITCH competition, 40 judges went through over 170 applications to get the finalists — about the same ratio we have for First Look Forum
– from a quick show of hands, at least 1/3 of the people here are starting their own companies. it’s a mix of developers, product managers, marketing folks, with a handful of designers and investors
– Something to look forward to: cupcakes at 2 pm!
Next up: Caterina Fake!
Here’s the initial tweetstream, via Storify:
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 10:58 am | Permalink
Here’s my notes from Caterina Fake’s opening keynote …
Why is Caterina an entrepreneur? “I like making things.” The best thing about being an entrepreneur? “Making products people love.” True success is when people make cakes and cupcakes with your logo on it.
“Without money, your startup can’t go anywhere. The biggest reason for startups ending is lack of money.” Quotes Disney: “I don’t make movies to make money; I make money to make movies”.
“The internet is built on a culture of generosity.”
Caterina’s investments include Etsy, Kickstarter, 20×200. All of them are deeply human, soulful, fun. “VCs will tell you to build a company based on one of the seven sins — greed, lust, envy, gluttony are all perennial. I think this is a terrible way to design software, totally misguided.”
Computers do some things well — they’re good at handling bits, making connections. But computers do somethings badly. they don’t handle emotions, they don’t forget, they don’t forgive, they can’t handle love — happy Valentine’s Day! Those require people. And worst of all, computers treat people like things. So technology can be dehumanizing.
One of the terrible things about computers is that they never forget. This is one of the things that makes us human, makes us able to love. I often think we should build in some forgetting mechanisms. Heidegger: “Forgetting is not a failure to remember, but rather a positive mode.” We should be building in Proustian memory: not what memory recalls, but what memory evokes.
Unfortunately, we live in a plague of fantasies. If the central idea of enlightenment was reality, the central idea of our time is imagination. Many of us have studied game mechanics that keep people collecting things, getting kudos and hearts, compulsively trying to level up. The neurochemistry of why we check social media sites is very similar to addiction, the same reason we like pornography. FOMO: “fear of missing out” Social media feeds FOMO, creates FOMO. Instead, we should be taking our lead from …
The Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but if you look a little closer it’s a lot more complex than you might thing. They’re some of the best makers, hackers, tinkerers … very much technologists, just not the way we think of them. This is the kind of technology we should be building: brings us closer together instead of apart, very human.
Each of us is an individual. Everybody sitting in this room can build a product that makes us better. We can humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 11:38 am | Permalink
And from Robin Chase’s keynote case study
Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and CEO of Buzzcar
“When I launched Zipcar it was in the aftermath of the doctor crash. But the die
Zipcar didn’t invent car-sharing. It had been going on for 50- years, in a low-tech way. The lightbulb went on: this is what the internet is for! It’s something I really really want. I’m an urban dweller, one car, family of 5, it sits in an officer park most of the time — I want part of a car.
September 1999, got the idea, we shook hands. I spent the next three months working on a business plan. In December, it was the unveiling: made an appointment with the man who was the dean of MIT’s Sloan business school. He said, “Robin, this is an amazing idea. You have to go much faster, much farther, scale it up.” Left the meeting, and I was shaken: “wow, I really have to step up.” My kids were 6, 9, 12. So I mulled it over for days. My oldest daughter said “what’s up?” “I have to decide whether to do this or be a fabulous mom.” She said “could you make money and help save the children?” I said “yes!” She said “go for it!”
Class at Sloan, 200 people, 36 women — one of whom was a millionaire. Had her over to dinner, asking about what it was like to do a startup. She turned and said to her husband, “honey, should we invest $50K win Robin?” Lesson: you never know where your money will come from! All the initial money was raised on a bridge note that was convertible to series A, so there was no discussion of valuation.
In corporated in January, first investment in February, but a beta car on the street in May. Spent $50K on the webiste, the database behind it, and the ability to make a reservation. They key to the car was hidden under a pillow on a couch on my back porch; the first 22 drivers would come there and get the key. But they could reserve online!
Networking, networking, networking. I felt like a mole underground. Wanted to go up, not sure just way up is. Looking back, you can see there was a path; but wasn’t clear at the time.
So we were going to launch in June. I went to the leasing company to get the three cars, and they said “we need $7K/car.” I only at $68 left from the first $50K. I was at Salesforce.com, ran into an angel investor, he said “Hey Robin, what do you need?” I said “I need $25K by tomorrow morning.” He said “OK” and wired me the money.
We launched the company on $75K — and I’m not an engineer.
Over the summer, we raised another $500K on a note. Angel investors, friends … the very first car was a lime green VW Beetle — one of only 10 Beetles in Boston. We put the logo on the car, first company to do that. I got a call from AP, “I saw one of your cars:” They did a story on us, three days after we launched, went viral around the world — including NPR. Another classmate of mine was driving down the road in Kentucky, heard about Zipcar, and sent me $50K.
We raised the A round in November, $1.3M (but had already spent 600K). Launced in DC in September 2011. Raised a $2M bridge in late 2001 — raising money without a valuation is a snap! Launched in NYC in Feb 2002, in December did a B round for $4M.
My first big pitch was in April, I had practiced and had it down. The 2 minutes of Q&A was all about “who puts the fuel in the car?” Every single time I did the pitch, people would ask that. Every single person you talk to is a free consultant — their questions aren’t dumb; if you’re not explaining it, you’re dumb. And my real-life elevator pitch I was at a Goldman Sachs event for female CEOs, and wound up in an elevator from floor 36 to floor 5 with the female CEO of Enterprise.
Focus and technology development: know what you have to prove. What is minimum needed? Iterate fast,. Remember and remind yourself. One of our first failures: thought we’d have a device in the car where people would put in a PIN number to give us feedback. (Back then only 25% of people had cellphones.) We did a couple iterations on prototype devices. Each time it was a fiasco within three weeks — LED didn’t work, connectivity didn’t happen, etc.. So we decided to cut it. The simplicity of Zipcar’s technology today wasn’t my first vision. It was a big mental shift.
Lessons:
Can be done fast if you are clueless
Money comes from unexpected places: be alert
Listen and learn to all feedback
Luck happens — when preparation meets opportunity
With the first $1.3M, I was proving that people can reserve cars without a warm body next to them. I wasn’t spending huge sums on marketing, just needed to make the technology work.
Staffing: try before you buy. People initially were working for free, or paid hourly at low rates. Some of them turned out to be fabulous … and then you hire them. Diversity and expertise are so critical. You start with your experience, and then your co-founder’s. Every one of the “hobbies” lines on a resume is so important — you’re doubling your expertise set. Are you a person when you see something, do you say “I can buy that” or “I can make that?” If you’re an entrepreneur, you say I can make that.
As your company goes, you have to stop thinking “I’m the guy who knows everything.” Hire people whose values you share and who you respect, trust their judgement — that’s how you can grow the company without being a jerk. Intellectual honesty: we all like to think we can be CEO together, but is that really the best? I didn’t hire my co-founder when we got funding, and she was very pissed off. She told me “Robin, you’ve ruined my life — I was going to retire at Zipcar”, and I thought “wow we have such different expectations.”
Zipcar today, went public in April, 900,000 cars. Each Zipcar takes 10-20 cars off the road. Here’s some maii we got recently
I encourage you to build companies that people write love notes to.
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 1:13 pm | Permalink
Drat. There were some great pitches — and great feedback from judges — in the firt competition session, and I had a very nice Storify with the tweetstream. But then I lost my internet connection, and Storify hadn’t saved. Sigh. Oh well, guess you had to be there 🙁
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 3:44 pm | Permalink
Notes from the “$50 million panel”
Deena Varshavskaya (Founder & CEO, Wanelo)
How did I get here? A long and messy path. It started in 2006 with a conversation with a fried about the future of advertising. In 2007, left my full-time job,m did consulting, built an agency. 2009-2010: launched a bunch of features, nobody cared. I couldn’t even get my parents to use the site! so removed all the features that were optional, got to a bare-bones experience … first time users started caring about the site. 2011: closed agency, move to SF, in August went up on AngelList. 2 weeks later, first term sheet, but terms weren’t very good. So started the rollercoaster ,… meetings, no, maybe, meetings, repeat. But kept growing. December 2011: raised $2M
Lessons:
– optimize for people and control, over money
– keep going, target 30-40 rejections
– make your own mistakes
Sheila Lirio Marcelo (Founder & CEO, Care.com)
Raised money in 2006. #1 thing to emphasize: experience. At the time, I didn’t have experience on the internet; graduated with a JD/MBA, went to work as a project manager making half of what I could have as a strategy consultant. Wrote product requirements, learned about technology. Passion is critical as well; my own child was a huge motivator for me.
Pitched to VCs about finding caregivers for loved ones, they didn’t get it. It was all guys! I asked “how many of you are the primary caregiver for your loved ones?” None of them. Many of them are used to funding ideas based on their own experience, so I asked them to put themselves in other shoes.
I believe that it isn’t so much that women lack confidence. We have an image of perfection in our head that gets in the way. Get rid of it! It’s going to give you so much more confidence when you present.
We got funded with the PowerPoint deck — we hadn’t launched yet. Got funded based on the people I had worked with in the past. I collect people in my life. The team is what got funded.
By now, we’ve raised $62M. It’s been pre-emptive rounds.
Key lessons:
$100M in 5 years. Do I meet the criteria? Am I clear on milestones?
– don’t get caught in a twiner round by not raising enough or being overvalued
Do I want headache of politics on the board? Quality matters
– be prepared months in advance and have lots of coffee. get to know the investor who will join your board
– make sure you like the firm. the mother-in-law is the managing parterre
Why get more diluted if you don’t have to? Raise when you don’t need it
– strategics take a long time to close, be patient and manage expectations
My board doesn’t work for mel; it’s the other way around. Fundraising isn’t over when the money is in the bank
– dinner with board members 1-1 at least twice a year
– removes a lot of grandstanding. frees up your time to run the company
Leah Busque (Founder & Chief Product Officer, TaskRabbit)
I was an engineer, didn’t know anything about fundraising. I just wanted to run the company!
Taskrabbit started in 2008. Leverage social networking into “service networking”. Social, Location, and Mobile were the technologies I was excited about.
Coded first version in my house, launched in September 2008. Tough economic times, bootstrapped it, which was difficult. March 2009: raised $150K from Boston Angels. June 2009: participated in fbFund incubator program. October 2009: $1.9M; March 2011, $5M series A. By this point we had understanding of economic model and user experience. Had focused on Boston and SF, now started to roll out. Dec 2011: $18M series B. Investors were coming to us and saying “we want to help you grow faster”
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
notes from Cathy Edwards of Chomp talking about “Pivots, Processes, Postitioning: Key Decisions in the First 90 Days of Building a New Product”
“Don’t be scared of the technology. If you’re not a technical founder, it’s fine. People who code give off the aura that it’s sooooo hard, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of leaving it all to them — but that’s a mistake.”
Background in mobile, Australian, decided to come to Silicon Valley to work for startups to learn the lay of the land. Did interviews over Skype. A few years later, started Chomp.
The 4 rules of early stage product building
1. over-invest in user research. your primary job is to really understand what it is you’re building,. Sounds easy, but it’s really difficult. When we started Chomp, we knew we wanted to build AppDiscovery … and that’s all we knew. We could have written 100 ideas on the whiteboard for potential solutions. We sat down with users of Craigslist, and asked them questions about how they’re finding apps today. Incredibly valuable. Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” (http://www.sensible.com) is a great read.
2. Size the market. Do a sanity-check: am I actually building something that’s big enough? If you’re going to have to earn 20%, 50%, 80% of the market to have a business, that’s not good. When founding Chomp, we looked at numbers like “15 billion app downloads on Apple’s App Store, 10 billion on Google’s Android market”. Look at how much devs are spending on app advertising for a back-of-the-envelope computation to see big the pie is.
3. Put just enough process in place. “Minimum Viable Process”. Engineers tend to be fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. It’s great in the early days, but it can get you into trouble. So, talk to the technical teams about putting it in place Use version control. Set up commit emails. Don’t track bugs in email. Have a wiki for documentation. [With my software engineering hat on — great advice!]
4. Know what’s going on inside the system. If you have a catastrophic failure, need to understand what’s going on. Tools like nagios, munin, cacti, ganglia: you have to use them, and start before launch.
Bonus rule: Just ship. Unless you have some compelling reason why not, you should be shipping in the first 90 days.
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 6:27 pm | Permalink
Notes from “Future Trends & Technical Innovations – What’s Next?
Danielle Fong (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, LightSail Energy)
Jean Hsu (Engineer, Obvious)
Jeff Clavier (Founder & Managing Partner, SoftTech VC)
Leah Culver (Founder & CEO, Grove)
Jeff: reducing cost of development has opened up markets. What are people’s experiences?
Leah: my first site I developed myself in 2007, using the Django framework — open source frameworks were a new concept. Companies now use opensource for a lot. And hosting’s gotten a lot cheaper too.
Jean: I just learned Javascript a couple months ago, now using it for prototyping almost everything. It’s all about learning the libraries and frameworks.
Jeff: instead of developing the entire stack, now start by looking what you can reuse from others, and focus in on what your unique value is
Danielle: similar dynamics in the energy space. I left grad school when I realized that the wrong things were getting funded — “big science” isn’t the answer for everything. We were able to develop a prototype for under $100K. It’s not the whole story, but showed the key features, and we were able to use that to raise money. Then we targeted an off-the-shelf natural gas system to show next phase; that took about $6M. Now moving on to the next stage, targeting car engines etc. Outsourcing 90% of what we’re doing, very cost-effective. That’ll take an additional $20M, but at east step we show a lot of the risk is taken out. To get to profitability, it’s about $50M. I think we’re at the cusp of a hardware revolution — there’s no Ruby on Rails for hardware yet, but we’re close.
Jeff: let’s talk about distribution channels, and how social networks let you access hundreds of millions users
Leah: it’s been a hot topic for the last couple years. build up the networks and the base to start marketing. i spent time building my network, getting twitter followers, meeting the press. Funny, nobody’s really talked about it yet in this conference.
Jean: one of the things we’re working on is products that are obvious in retrospect. it doesn’t have to be something on the cutting edge of technology. at first we were thinking a lot about “what’s innovative, what’s new”, but it’s really much more about solving people’s problems.
Danielle: whenever you do something, it seems like the entire world is asking you “so what? i’m sure that lots of smart people have thought of this before”. it’s harder to try to explain why others haven’t succeeded than just do it!
Jeff: the utility drives the adoption; the community drives the retention
Jeff: how to balance passion and analysis — for your next startup idea, do you think it or feel it?
Danielle: both! if your idea is successful, you’re going to be spending years working on your startup. having something you’re passionatee about is extremely important, because there will be some tough times and you’ll think of quitting. something that’s really important in my career is that I knew I wanted to be a major player in solving the energy problem. I’ve pivoted many times: started in academia, then thought about doing a web startup to make billions and finance the research that wasn’t happening. but after two different startups I started on, Ii was excited by the topic but wasn’t totally committed to it, the idea I couldn’t keep myself from working on was related directly to the goal. I was lucky enough to meet co-founders who to work with. you have to let the opportunity pull you, you can’t just be pushed by a fad
Leah: fads come and go. what you’ll often find is that founders are passionate about a particular space. for me it’s communications — chat et. al. Sometimes there’s luck involved, so you may have to wait for the right time.
Jean: I used to work doing Android development full time, and when a new platform like iPad comes out there’s a real rush to say “how can I use the new features?” there’s not a lot of lasting products that come out of it, unless it’s something you’ve been thinking about and really understand
Jeff: we see 2000-3000 plans a year, and there’s a lot of me-toos and ideas that aren’t big enough to build a sustainable company. Sometimes people don’t want to go with the ideas because they think it’s too risky; but it’s much better to try something big than something too small.
Jeff: what are you excited about?
Leah: our current product is IRC for businesses — group chat as a service. one of the reasons why is that there already products for IRC on all the devices: iPad, Android, everything. the diversity of platforms is really cool
Jean: in the mobile space, phones are so much more advanced than even just a couple of years ago. right now having GPS on all the time or continuously pinging a server will kill your battery life; but the hardware’s moving soo quickly
Danielle: technology is spreading everywhere — from here, and from other places, spreading into the real world. There’s an extremely exciting company called Solen (?) that’s revolutionizing agriculture, keeping people from over-utilizing fertilizer.
—–
Audience questions …
Q: Having a hard time explaining to my audience what “cloud computing” means.
Jeff: try to make it feel simple. the consumer doesn’t care that it’s implemented in the cloud; focus on the value to the consumer and sell that. “Use this because …” as opposed to focus on the technology.
Q: which of the different emerging areas are the ones where we’ll see the biggest number of successful startups?
Danielle: there are more possibilities than I can fit in my head.
Leah: I almost think it’s the wrong question to ask. If you’re thinking about starting your own company, pick something you’re passionate about, aligned with your interests. get really immersed in the area, and you’ll see where it’s going.
Jeff: all these areas can support billion-dollar companies.
Q: when you’re building a marketplace or community, how do you determine whether it’s ready for prime time?
Jeff: it’s really hard. often you prime the pump on one side of the marketplace (typically supply). building the marketplace is like climbing a mountain one grip at a time.
Q: any time of ETA on the fusion reactor?
Danielle: I don’t believe the approach people are taking today is likely to be commercially relevant. it may work. nobody can fit the $30B project in their heads so nobody can answer. A wide-open scientific question.
Q: Kaitlyn … just launched Lovestragram, on top of Instragram’s API. Want to know about innovating on top of others’ platforms.
Lean: great question. It’s a great short-term traction approach, but you don’t develop your own community or network. so if you get acquired by the company, great, but if not then you’ve got a real challenge.
Jeff: look at the Twitter ecosystem as it was a few years ago. then Twitter decided they wanted to build it themselves; and a lot of the ecosystem got wiped out. so it’s very risky
Q: how do you recommend dealing with the fatigue of having to change, adapt, add one more social app and network. Disruption is exciting, but it’s also really hard to drag people along.
Danielle: Disruption is really hard. You don’t want to say “we have a disruptive technology” to entrenched businesses — they don’t like it at all. Often, though, there’s disruptio coming from somewhere else that the entrenched businesses fear, and you can use that to your advantage.
Jeff: another approach is embrace, leverage, and then disrupt. bring people to your system from where they are. building your new social network from scratch would be tricky today. instead, go to existing networks and build the value there.
jon | 14-Feb-12 at 10:41 pm | Permalink
And I ran out of power right before they announced the winners of the pitch competition. Oh well. Here’s the tweets …
Congrats all around!
jon | 15-Feb-12 at 11:33 am | Permalink
Some tweets from the afterglow …
jon | 22-Feb-12 at 12:57 pm | Permalink
There’s quite a few excellent blog posts after the conference … I’ve collected them on Pinterest