Liminal states

“Hellrazr and Nemesis is working with a startup for an interim interim CEO.  Are you interested? If so, I’m going to be in Seattle Saturday night.  Are you free for dinner?”

Interim interim CEO didn’t seem like a particularly empowered job so my first reaction was that I probably wasn’t interested … but hey, never say never: I was trying to keep an open mind as I was getting my consulting business off the ground.  On top of that it had been a few months since we had talked and when I heard her voice I realized that I was really looking forward to seeing her.  So even though I did have dinner plans on Saturday night, after D’s out of the blue Friday afternoon phone call I decided to reprioritize.

She was already there when I got to Rover’s, checking email on her phone as she waited.  She looked lovely as always, in a black velvet dress that highlighted her red-and-purple hair, and had already ordered champagne for both of us.  She seemed happy to see me as well, and as I sat down she proposed a toast:

“To the future!”

“Indeed — because that’s where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives.”

More here …

18 years … wow … and they said it wouldn’t last …

Actually, nobody said it wouldn’t last.  But if they had, they’d have been wrong.

DRAFT! Work in progress! Feedback welcome

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.

— Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, in How to Start a Startup

Christopher Steiner’s The Disruptor in the Valley in Forbes discusses how this essay, along with Paul’s Harvard talk, eventually inspired red-hot technology incubator YC. He doesn’t include this quote, alas, and also doesn’t mention the reports in the Mercury News and Wall Street Journal of YCs #diversityfail or Tereza Nemessanyi’s XX Combinator.  I guess they didn’t fit  in with the article’s subtitle: “Paul Graham’s Y Combinator has stormed Silicon Valley and pioneered a better way to build a company.”

YC has indeed had a huge impact.   Christopher reports that YC typically puts about $15-$20K into the companies in return for a 5% equity stake; with over 400 companies in their portfolio they’re a powerful force in the tech startup world.  With the help of a lot of gushing coverage in the TechCrunch and their buddies in the tech press, 30 of their of the 36 startups in the most recent crop incubator have gotten funding since Demo Day in August, many of them over $1 million.   Collusion is soooo hot these days so it’s as good a time for a fluff piece as any.

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Is it just me, or does WiseDame seem far more disruptive than most of the startups pitching location-based ideas?

— Jon Pincus, on WiseDame’s just-relaunched site; originally from A celebration of disruptive women

J’aime Ohm won the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon as a solo hacker with a personal safety iPhone app.  WiseDame’s tag line is “making safe living easier, one application release at a time”. It takes basic safety practices – letting friends or family know what time you expect to be home,  leaving a note about your plans for the day – and makes them better, faster, and easier.  Brilliant.

And a great case study in agile software engineering, too. J’aime started with an idea for a product she wanted and a set of use cases based her own experience. Next she talked with a bunch of potential early adopters who were variants on a target persona (“women who go out”) and had enough information to build a prototype. Which she did, and iterated rapidly continuing to get feedback, all in less than 24 hours.

As Cindy Gallop of If We Ran The World highlighted in email:

this product came out of FEMALE USER NEED AND EXPERIENCE.  The number of tech ventures meant to deliver a gender-equal UX with all-male founding teams is ridiculous.  And equally, male geeks are going to miss a lot of concepts that can sell to vast numbers of women (the primary purchasers in many sectors and the primary influencers in many others).  Let the women in, for chrissakes!!

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“There are roughly 900,000 people living in Ottawa. A good five per cent are living in a marginalized way. It’s disgusting. It’s a shame. I love my city, I love Ottawa, but we can do better. We have to take care of that five per cent. And I would say three out of that five per cent live in my ward. I want to be Bay Ward’s voice at city hall.”

— Bay Ward Council Candidate Oni Joseph, profiled by Jen Lahey in Ottawa Magazine

Oni is Canada’s best-known slam poet, and her 2006 book Ghettosocracy was a The Globe and Mail Book of the Year.  Since then she’s worked on several political campaigns, advocated for Habitat for Humanity, and raised a huge amount of money for earthquake relief in Haiti.   Back in January, the incumbent council-member Alex Cullen decided to run for mayor, leaving the seat open.  With encouragement from Equal Voice, a multi-partisan organization dedicated to electing more women in Canada, Oni decided to throw her hat in the ring.

A lot of other candidates piled into the race as well — including Alex, who after supporting and mentoring her, dropped his mayoral bid to run against her.  Ouch.

So it’s a very crowded field: seven white guys and Oni.  Some of the other candidates have much bigger budgets.   Yeah, other candidates are passing out buttons that cost them $4 each and Oni’s giving out stickers that cost only nine cents.  In a time of tough budgets, who’s sending a better message to voters?  And one of the amazing things about politics today is how mobile phones and social network technologies give the underdogs a better chance.

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Back in April, four NYU students decided to raise money to spend the summer hacking on their project: a privacy-friendly open source social network. They put up a page on Kickstarter, a crowdsourced funding site. Talk about being in the right place at the right time: after a great article Four nerds and a cry to arms against Facebook came out in the New York Times, in a few weeks Diaspora* had raised $200,000.

At which point they moved to San Francisco, got free office space, spent the summer hacking, went to Burning Man … and on September 15, released their software to the community. Basic functionality is in place: status updates, photos, “aspects” to control who sees what. Kudos to them.

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Originally published as “Hold that thought”
(Part 5 of “TechCrunch, disrupted”)

The day after TechCrunch Disrupt ended, a fascinating study on “collective intelligence” led by Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University appeared in Science.   The researchers found that a group’s success in solving problems wasn’t correlated to the average intelligence of the group, or the IQ of the smartest person.  Instead, it was related to “social sensitivity”, whether everybody got to participate in the discussions, and the number of women in the group.

The article’s behind a paywall, but Malicia Rogue’s On savvy and groups discusses it in detail and provides a lot of background.  There’s an excellent discussion on GeekFeminism, a podcast on CBC, and good articles in National Geographic, NPR, Science Daily, and The Globe and Mail.

Nobody mentioned it in the press coverage, but these results also align with Scott Page’s underlying model of the value of cognitive diversity in problem solving. Diversity = Productivity summarizes Scott’s work showing why diverse teams perform better than individual experts or even teams of experts — if they can work together effectively, that is.*   So while there’s a lot more to discuss about this study, for now let’s just accept its results at face value and hypothesize that they apply to larger teams as well.

Now consider a group that we’ll call “TechCrunch and friends”.  How effective would we expect them to be at problem solving?
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It’s counter-intuitive to think of Microsoft as a poster child for security.  But the progress they’ve made since 2001 along with the challenges they continue to face have a lot of lessons for anybody in this space — including Diaspora, the “privacy-aware, personally-controlled, open-source, do-it-all social network”.

Several of the comments on my previous post Diaspora: what next? were from former colleagues at Microsoft, and they made excellent points.  Here’s my attempt to build on the list that Adam, Jason, and Alem started off.
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Security warning: If you don’t intend to share your phone number on Facebook, ask a friend to check their Phonebookand see if it’s there.  And it’s a good time to check to your privacy settings — my brother Greg has instructions on The Happy Accident.

Update, October 7: See the Twitter discussion in the first comment.

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TechCrunch Disrupt wasn’t the only conference happening this week. The tenth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is currently going on in Atlanta, and this year’s theme is Collaborating across Boundaries. There’s no streaming video, alas, but things have been hopping on Twitter.

Since it’s Follow Friday on Twitter, I figured I’d mirror the theme of celebration and devote this post to recognizing and paying homage* to some of the women involved with the Disrupt conference this week.

Let’s start with the three female CEOs who pitched in the Startup Battlefield: Tara Hunt of Shwowp, Melanie Moore of ToVieFor, and Sumaya Kazi of Sumazi.   They all did excellent jobs, and if I had been judging would have put all three of their companies in the finals.**  Kudos as well to the other female founders who were part of other pitches.  It’s really great to see this.

Update, October 4: oops, Women 2.0’s list of female founders to watch points out that I had missed Julia Hu of Lark.  Sorry about that!

It was also great to see J’aime Ohm win the Hackathon with WiseDame.  In a short video below, she describes the concept and also gives a brilliant description of how to do iterative, human-focused, software development.   Is it just me, or does WiseDame seem far more disruptive than most of the startups pitching location-based ideas?

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DRAFT! Work in progress, feedback welcome!
Revised version to appear on the NWEN blog

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One of the few areas of consensus of the panelists at yesterday’s trainwreck at TechCrunch Disrupted is that it would be better if there were more women involved with technology and tech startups.  And everybody on the panel does a lot as individuals to help: mentoring, encouragement, being on unpleasant panels.  I saw at least three female CEOs present as well in the startup battlefield, so shout outs to them as well — and to Hackathon Winner J’aime Ohm as well.   So the first order of business is to spotlight them all as great examples of successful and inspirational women who have taken different paths to get there, and thank them for everything they do to help change the ratio.

What are you doing?

If you’re interested in doing more, the second installment of my series on Women in tech startups: how each of us can help change the ratio is up on the Northwest Entrepeneur’s blog.  Part 1 discussed: Commit to putting some energy and resources into it, Mentor women, and Get out of your cultural cocoon.  Part 2 covers Reach out when you’re hiring, Reach out even when you’re not hiring, and Ask “what’s wrong with this picture?”.
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