Top women tech entrepreneurs speak on their companies and their success| Startup advice

Top women tech entrepreneurs speak on their companies and their success

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Orange Labs hosted a fantastic women in tech event last week featuring speakers like:

Rashmi Sinha – Co-founder and CEO of SlideShare

Silvia Console Battiana – Co-Founder and Member of Board of Directors of Auctionomics

Beatrice Tarka – Co-founder and CEO of Mobissimo

Sandy Jen – Co-founder and Engineering Chief of Meebo

Here are the talks of all these women along with my major takeaways.

Rashmi Sinha – Co-founder and CEO of SlideShare

Accidental entrepreneur–went from studying Literature and Cognitive Neuro-Psychology to a Technology company
Accidental venture–Slideshare was a side project built while running a previous profitable venture. That venture was let that go to focus on SlideShare since it was more exciting
Total users 20 million overall on SlideShare–sites and apps
SlideShare’s April Fool joke–adding 00s in the middle of slide views, sent emails telling Slideshare users you are very popular why don’t you tweet this. Never do this as it led to some negative reaction among users.
Revenue model–coming soon involves premium services
On initial negative feedback
- they were told that people will not share their slides on SlideShare, but their experience with people’s actual behaviors during prototype testing was different so they persisted with the product
- when receiving negative feedback determine if it means concept won’t work or does it mean that implementation is not meeting people’s needs well

Heather Harde – CEO of Techcrunch

traditional media background prior to Techcrunch
Techcrunch is seeing lots of early stage and big scale innovation despite the bad economy. Some examples:
- concept of what a web page is, is changing dramatically
- Chrome announcements of anti operating system
how can startups get new media promotion?
- email techcrunch at tips@techcrunch.com
- think about how to restate your message in a way that is appropriate to blog format
what drives you to strive for excellence and how do you promote that in your team?
- hire passionate people
- divide founders and management by different roles and responsibilities with little overlap (allows her to work well with Mike Arrington)
- hire a team that you trust, this leads to less of a need for management
your book based on your techcrunch experiences what will it be called?
- coopetition not competition

Silvia Console Battiana – Co-Founder and Member of Board of Directors of Auctionomics

Auctionomics–Adds another layer of auctions control to auctions on the web
Allows users to bid on substitutes and complements
Her entrepreneur experience involves dealing with both the men versus women divide as well as young versus old experience in economics divide
Ivy League school is not necessary to doing a startup, school helps in first connections but Valley is based on what you know

Sandy Jen – Co-founder and Engineering Chief of Meebo

Three co-founders, two women who did the coding
Two initial ideas they tried failed, Meebo was the third try
Started with 3 people, now 50 people located in Mountain View offices
Key to success pulled the trigger and got started rather than spending a couple of years to learn things (aka analysis paralysis)
Did not realize being a woman made her different–know where you are with your company you can stay true to your values and that is what leads to respect and success
Funny quote: Regular employees steal office supplies to bring them home. Entrepreneurs steal office supplies from home to bring to work. If you are doing this then you know that something big is coming
Business model: advertising, but one that does not ruin user experience. CTR 1-2% range. In 8 months it will be even better
What was the reaction by VCs when you mentioned advertising as a business model?
- series A funding VCs don’t care about business model
- They invest in people more so than idea or business model since they know you don’t have a clear idea about this, even if you have an MBA in the team (which was the case with Meebo)
Advice on scaling for a successful team
- hire slowly and fire fast
- have people work on simulations of real business scenario to assess their skills
- hire according to what is right for lifestage of your business