florence

Tags:

GUEST BLOGS, INNOVATION GUEST BLOG, MILLENNIALS, OPINION, THE STARTUPS ECOSYSTEM

By Lamia Walker (@LamiaHSM), Founder & CEO of HouseSitMatch.com. (Above image courtesy Tech Cocktail)

15 August 2014: Behind every great man, there’s a great woman, so the old saying goes, but in tech, there’s increasingly a great man behind every great woman.

You don’t have to look far beyond the new HBO hit sitcom ‘Silicon Valley’ to appreciate that currently there’s what Bloomberg Businessweek calls a “stereotype of young, arrogant, self-important men in startup tech culture”. This extends so far that this week the magazine felt obliged to run a cover story ‘In Defence Of The Silicon Valley Tech Bro’.

Yes, these men may represent “some people doing some amazing things”, but if you look behind the stereotypes into the stories of the next generation of tech startups – from Zipcar to TaskRabbit – you will increasingly find that it’s the ‘tech bro’ at the service of the disruptive idea of an amazing woman.

Paradigm shift? Not quite yet. Female entrepreneurs still have a long way to go – despite earning over half of all college degrees, and almost half of all doctoral degrees, we start only 3% of tech companies. This figure is even lower than the 4.8% of female CEOs running Fortune 500 companies. A 2013 study, ‘Women in Technology: Evolving, Ready to Save the World’, noted that woman are, “almost absent on management teams, outside of legal and marketing positions.

So what are the breakthrough women in tech startups doing right? And what’s holding the rest of us back?

One theory is that there’s a ‘leaky pipeline’ – a metaphor for the continuous loss of women as they climb the career ladder – that’s holding women back in business and in tech in particular. Another is that women are naturally more risk-averse, easily deterred by statistics like the one from Allmand Law that 90% of all tech startups fail. And for those women who plough ahead regardless, as their embryonic businesses mature, do they then face an unconscious bias against them in venture capital (VC) selection panels?

When asked about the greatest challenges that women entrepreneurs face, Lastminute.com co-founder Martha Lane Fox said:

“When you are not the norm, you have to battle to be accepted as the norm, and so we know it’s harder to get funding as a woman. And again, I don’t really believe that’s because there’s this overt sexism anywhere, it’s just a cultural thing. If you work in a venture capital fund where there aren’t any women in that fund, because we know the finance sector doesn’t have very many woman, you probably see a woman coming in and you maybe have some prejudices. Not everybody, but culturally that might be the case. It doesn’t make anybody a bad person, it’s just the cultural norms I guess. So there’s certainly a lot of issues around financing and you only have to look at the numbers to see that.”

From a personal point of view, as a woman running a startup as sole founder, it’s easy to feel the weight of other people’s expectations, even before you open the door to conversations with venture capitalists.

However, instead of bemoaning the failure rates, and the lack of women involved in tech, shouldn’t we focus our attention on the successful examples and try to learn from them? From the earliest days of the internet through to the new ‘sharing economy’, I have found numerous examples of women creating or at least co-piloting enduring tech startups. We can learn a lot from these women: super marathon runners who can flex to the nth degree, combining great ideas with business know-how, the facility to leverage networks, and unflinching steely determination.

Examples Of Women At The Heart Of Tech Startups

Any entrepreneur knows that holding on to the passion for that good idea and securing the right partner or skill support is critical.

So what makes a successful web start-up? Why do people start these businesses in the first place? Is it just a good idea that seems irresistible? Or one well executed in a timely fashion?

Some early UK examples include Lastminute.com, founded in 1998 by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox. So good were the original idea, brand values and ongoing execution that the company is still going strong today.

Founded six years before Facebook came on the scene, FriendsReunited.com was founded in 1999 by Julie and Steve Pankhurst. Curious about her school and college friends and their recent histories, Julie dreamed up a system that would allow them to re-connect online. It was later bought out by ITV for £120m.

In both these cases, the ideas had broad appeal, and were visible just as many households were gaining access to the internet. And yes, they were developed and led by successful male and female partnerships. Did their diversity of skills and experience bring with it some special magic?

Digging further into the histories of many services I use today, I find similar stories.

Have you used SlideShare, the handy site that enables you to view other people’s PowerPoint presentations online? In this female-male pairing, co-founder & CEO Rashimi Sinha came up with the initial idea, and co-founder and CTO Jonathan Boutelle came up with the technology to make it work. Rashimi was named amongst the world’s Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company. In 2012 SlideShare was purchased by LinkedIn.

Sometimes, these female-male pairings are labelled ‘parentpreneurs’. FindABabysitter.com was founded in 2003 by Vanessa Cook and Tom Harrow, and has gone global. Vanessa is a mother, former nanny and successful business woman; Tom is a father and entrepreneur. Together they built a powerful consumer platform.

Part of the new $3.5bn ‘sharing economy’, Zipcar offers doorstep car rental by the hour. Founded by Robin Chase (a woman), it was acquired by Avis for $500m. Robin has also inspired other entrepreneurs, such as Monique Conheady, who developed Flexicar in Australia. Another example from this arena is Open Shed, whose strapline is ‘Why buy when you can rent?’ In 2011, Lisa Fox and her partner Duncan Stewart quit their day jobs, and, in an effort to reduce their living costs, gave up their inner-city apartment and started house-sitting around Australia. Lisa had been looking for peer-to-peer online ideas, and persuaded Duncan to build the first website. Lisa instinctively honed in on the trust and safety issues which she says are, “the major barriers to people participating in collaborative consumption websites.”

And named one of the ‘100 Most Creative People in Business’ by Fast Company, TaskRabbit.com founder Leah Busque did more than just come up with a great idea – her background was as a software engineer at IBM, where she worked in the messaging & collaboration software development group.

If more women had these excellent foundations in software skills, how many more would be able to jump on a good idea when it hit them?

Follow Your Heart

In particular, the new generation of tech startups under the umbrella of the sharing economy seems less ‘Silicon Valley Tech Bro’ and more idealistic, sustainable and female-friendly in its benefits and values: lower costs, less waste, and the creation of global communities with neighbourly values, solutions or shared goods.

As more children learn coding in our schools, and if we can encourage more female software engineers, ‘tech sisters’ may become better equipped to provide all the building blocks of a tech startup. Yet it still starts with an idea. These examples show that it’s often the busy, creative women who are most readily able to see beyond the planet of the geeks, and come up with the best and most useful ideas for making our lives – and our world – better.

So whether you have been bitten by a great idea that won’t let go of you, or by the build-your-own-business online bug and you are working passionately all hours of day and night to build a user base, don’t be deterred. If you think you have a great idea and your business plan has been checked for sanity, go for it!

And as a great man – who, even after his death, lies behind many of today’s enduring tech innovations – reminds us:

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs.

Connect with Lamia on LinkedIn here