238th Roundtable Recording On November 13, 2014: With J.T. O’Donnell, Careerealism

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

You can find the dates and register for upcoming roundtables here.

Book: Bootstrapping With A Paycheck.

Women Entrepreneurs: How To Deal With Sexual Advances From VCs

Over the last few months, we’ve read a number of stories of male VCs hitting on women founders. These situations typically arise when the founder is an attractive woman.

My first observation about the issue is that a beautiful, charismatic, smart woman is extremely powerful. Often, young women who fit this description, are unaware of exactly how powerful they are. As a result, they do not fully appreciate the kind of impulses they trigger when they walk into a situation with one of the following categories of male VCs on the receiving end.

Let’s examine each of these scenarios in a bit more detail.

1. The Casanova: Many powerful, rich men have a track record of misbehaving. They have a Casanova complex. They chronically want to seduce. It is instinctive. If you run into one of these fellows, and get the impression that they are more interested in you as a sexual phenomenon than in your business, you should just move on. The dynamics CANNOT be changed. Don’t waste your time trying to. Just stop following up.
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Women Entrepreneurs: VC Rejection Does NOT Equal Sexism

I am stating the obvious – or at least what should be obvious – that rejection by a venture capitalist does not automatically equate to sexism. However, of late, the media has started sensationalizing a lot of stories of VC rejection and transposing them as stories of sexism.

These are two different issues, and the cause-effect relationships of the two are ambiguous at best.

In some of these stories, the VCs have exhibited rather stupid behavior, no doubt. However, did they reject the deals because the entrepreneurs were women? I don’t think so. Let’s examine in a bit more detail.
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Mompreneurs Love To Sell Baby Products

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

The e-commerce model of business allows women entrepreneurs to have greater flexibility in their lives. That is probably why we see several mompreneurs launching home-based businesses, and some of them scale to much bigger outfits. Of particular significance are mompreneurs selling baby products online. Here are three inspiring stories of mompreneurs who used their love for babies, clothes, shopping, and sharing to create successful ecommerce ventures.

Women Love To Share

Smocked Auctions sells children’s smocks and other clothing through comment-selling on Facebook. It was started by two friends and mompreneurs, Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer. They met in 2008 while trying to get back in shape after having their first children. They had a lot in common – their sons were of the same age and they soon had little girls. They became great friends and it was in the summer of 2010 while attending a sample sale in Dallas that the idea of doing business together was born.
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Women Entrepreneurs: Are We Whining Too Much?

I wonder!

In my recent post, Women ARE Raising Venture Capital, I said, there is no bias among Silicon Valley VCs against women.

I got an earful on that one.

What? There are hardly any female VCs. So few female CEOs. So few blah blah blah.

Right. Yes. I know. But it is what it is. How is whining going to help us change any of those factors?

I countered with: >>>

For Women In Computer Science, Tech Is A Golden Opportunity

Google recently released report acknowledging the lack of diversity in their workforce kicked up a storm. The company says, most of its workforce is white (61%) and male (70%). Worse, a mere 17% of Google’s tech workforce is women.

By and large, this is not Google’s fault. It simply reflects the fact that the nation’s education systems have not been able to attract enough women and minorities into their Computer Science programs, hence, for Google (and other tech companies who have similar demographic distributions) there is no supply of trained workers to hire from.

Opportunity in Scarcity
For those women who do have a Computer Science background, this is a golden opportunity. Here are some strategies that you can use to catapult yourself to highly successful careers in the technology industry. Notice none of them actually have anything to do with your actual computer science skills. I am assuming, you have learnt those well, and continue to keep yourself current. These strategies are the extra elements that may get you to a much larger role in the industry:
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The Best Part of Being the Boss: Offering Balance

The motivation for Steals.com came to Jana Francis right after she had a daughter, her third child, when she had to head back to work in the sales management team for a dotcom at the end of her maternity leave. She realized she was a smart, capable woman who could work from home. Once she started thinking along those lines, the ideas started to flow.

Jana was always the one you could count on for online shopping deals – her friends called her the dotcom princess. But when it came to online shopping in the baby space, she was disappointed. There was no website that would tell you the story of the product, why you would want it, and what problem it would solve for you. She developed a burning fire to create a new kind of website that would launch new steal deals every day – a steep 40% to 80 % discount on premium baby products.
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Venture Capital in Slow Growth Markets: India, EdTech, Cleantech

There are a number of relatively slow growth markets in which we do a lot of business: India and EdTech are two examples. These are also two markets that I am passionate about, and have covered prodigiously for a long time. In a way, these markets, and many others that have similar characteristics, share very similar trajectories vis-a-vis entrepreneurship, venture capital, and exits. Another market in which 1M/1M doesn’t have much presence, but I have invested in, is Cleantech. The story is somewhat similar there as well. Let’s take a look at these slow-growth markets, and how they will emerge over the upcoming years.

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