The venture capital-backed startup world is a bubble. People outside of it think we’re risk lovers, which is reasonable since the our failure rate is so high. I think that the best entrepreneurs are risk managers.Most people are enveloped by the emotion of risk, and it freezes them. They think about how terrible it will be if they fail, how awful every conversation with be explaining what...
I spoke today at Philly’s best tech event, PSL’s Founder Factory, using these slides. They’re borderline misleading without the narrative, nonetheless…
My 17 year old daughter is a sophomore in college, studying computer science. She is one of <5% in the major who are women, and he loves the work but her male peers make her wildly uncomfortable. She shared an NPR story with me (go listen!) that got me thinking about my own start in the field. I graduated from high school in 1981. We had a computer area in the student lounge with a couple...
sometime around 2000 i gave up using capitals in most emails. lots of people mention it, and some people are annoyed by it. no one has ever asked me why i do it, which i find curious. regardless, i want to go on the record explaining myself. 1. it was really hard to write on early pdas (i used a series of treos.) dropping the capitalization made it a lot easier. it...
This is my favorite story about my mother. She is 84 and lives in NYC. Recently, she was running cross-town from her job (yes, she still works) to meet a friend for lunch (the woman has more friends than anyone I know). She is tall and thin and wears enormous sneakers, which hit a divot in the sidewalk, right near the curb and sent her flying into traffic on Madison Avenue where she landed, face...
I’ve founded a new company, this time all by my lonesome. Depending on how you count, this is at least my sixth startup: Dial Info/Automated call processing – went there right out of school as a secretary, ended up as a product manager Infonautics – joined to run product management as about employee 30, left less than a year later after we’d gone public and grown to 150 Destiny...
If I needed any more reason to get my name back: Even after controlling for education levels and work hours, a woman who took her husband’s name earns less €960 compared to €1156. Probably because: Despite the fact that other than their name choice the women were identical, the participants overwhelmingly described the woman who had taken her husband’s name as being more caring, more dependent...
I just finished reason a really terrific book, Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall. An acquaintance suggested that I read it after I mentioned that I recently started and am loving barefoot trail running. I’m very grateful that she followed through and got the book to me.It’s a shaggy-dog story that leads through the crazy world of ultra marathons, the Sierra Madre and the Tarahumara, and the...
In addition to being full-time Mom, I’ve been spending my post-ClickEquations time: Advising Kerathin and PartySpace.com Serving on the Board of Directors at Monetate Consulting with London-based social analytics platform UberVU As Acting Executive Chairman Semprae Labs Talking with lots of entrepreneurs and companies Working with a team on a possible next venture...
