Betabeat » women in tech

Despite Gains on the Business Side, Women Lag in Computer Science

Kelly Faircloth — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:15:00 -0400

Where's their tea? Ladies love tea. (Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Things are looking better for the ladies of the tech business, but we've still got a long way to go on the computer science front. That's the conclusion the panelists of Women to Watch seem to have reached in yesterday's premiere of our industry's very own version of The View, your mom's favorite show about ladies sitting around yakkin' about stuff.

According to the Bloomberg News recap, the panelists agreed that things are looking a lot sunnier these days, with many venture capitalists happy to hand out cash and founding teams looking for a female perspective.

However:

The dearth of women in computer science shows in the workforce. Tobaccowala runs the engineering department at SurveyMonkey, a provider of online surveys, and previously founded the website Evite Inc. Of the 26 people on her team, only one of them is female, she said.

“There’s still a pipeline problem of women in computer science and engineering, even from 10 years ago,” Tobaccowala said.

Nor will it be a simple matter to unskew those numbers: “It’s going to take a decade or more to be more representative,” added Accel partner Theresia Gouw Ranzetta.

The tide might be turning, though. A recent post at Women 2.0 pointed out that fully 41 percent of Harvard's 2013 computer science class were women. That's not parity, but it's getting close.

What Women in Tech will discuss now that they've hashed out their most obvious topic of conversation is another question entirely.

Survey Says: Number of Women in Top U.S. Tech Jobs Has Declined Since 2010

Jessica Roy — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:26:05 -0400

According to this survey, Sheryl Sandberg is one lucky lady. (flickr.com/financialtimes)

New York may have double the female founders, but that statistic refers primarily to fledgling startups. What about the ladies leading large technology companies?

According to a new report by technology recruiting company the Harvey Nash Group, the number of women in top-tier IT positions has decreased since 2010. "Nine percent of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11 percent last year and 12 percent in 2010," reports Reuters.

A three percent dip over a two-year period doesn't seem like a lot, but when you consider the fact that the percentages are already so low--nine percent--it's a pretty dramatic decrease. We're in single-digits territory now, ladies. Pretty depressing.

But here's the clincher, according to Reuters:

About 30 percent of those polled said their information technology (IT) organization has no women at all in management. Yet only about half of survey respondents consider women to be under-represented in the IT department.

So statistics clearly indicate that men account for the vast majority of technology professionals, but only half of those surveyed think that women are under-represented? That means that about 50 percent of people don't think it's a big deal that men dominate over 90 percent of managerial IT roles.

*Headdesk.*

Damn, Girl: New York Has Almost Double The Female Founders

Kelly Faircloth — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:22:55 -0400

(flickr.com/flickr4jazz)

Much has been made of tech’s gender divide, with the seeming consensus being that this industry is something of a sausagefest and no one knows how to fix it. But buried within this TechCrunch report, drawing on statistics from Startup Genome, is an eye-catching little factoid: Compared to Silicon Valley and London (which are running at 80:20 versus 90:10 ratios), New York has almost double the rate of female founders.

We’ve remarked upon this trend ourselves, but those numbers are pretty stark. So naturally we can’t help but speculate recklessly as to why this might be the case. Could it have something to do with New York’s comparatively more recent rise to startup hub status? Maybe the lack of an established old boys’ network makes for a different ratio. Perhaps it’s related to demographics, or maybe it’s partly an outgrowth of the boom in female-friendly fashion and beauty startups. Whatever the reason, it's a trend we welcome here at Ladybeat.

A couple of other interesting stats from the report:

In New York, there’s a scale-stage spike--from 45 percent to 67 percent--in high risk companies. That’s four times as many scale-stage high-risk companies as Silicon Valley. But scale-stage startups also raise 27 percent more money in the Alley than the Valley.
Local entrepreneurs are 4.3 times as likely to list “content” as their competitive advantage. (This inspires us to wonder what percentage of these startups are founded and/or staffed by literary liberal arts refugees.)

And lastly, something that comes as a surprise to absolutely no one: hometown hero Fred Wilson is the city’s favorite startup expert. Duh.

Marissa Mayer on Misconceptions That Hold Back Women in Tech and Why She Doesn’t ‘Believe in Burnout’

Nitasha Tiku — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:30:51 -0400

No photography allowed at 92Y :(

For a lifelong perfectionist overachiever, 36-year-old Marissa Mayer (known in some circles as Google employee no. 20), is rather adept at projecting an aura of relatability. Pro-tip: it never hurts to pepper your tales of 130-hour work weeks with verbatim quotes from High Fidelity. Of course, as the longtime friendly public face--sweeter than the acerbic Mr. Schmidt, less aspy than Larry--of a $212 billion company like GOOG, she's had some practice.

That easy demeanor was on full display at the 92nd Street Y Tuesday night, when Ms. Mayer stopped by for an hour-and-a-half Q&A session with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel, who pointed out that her latest job title, "VP, Local, Maps & Location Services," made it sound like she worked at AAA.

To give the Upper East Side crowd some idea of Ms. Mayer's celebustatus in Silicon Valley, Mr. Tyrangiel pointed out that a YouTube loop of her unusual laugh, which sounds kinda like a guffaw being sucked through a vacuum, has been viewed a quarter of a million times. "They've also made it into a ringtone!" Ms. Mayer noted gleefully. But Mr. Tyrangiel needn't have worried. In line for tickets, one heavily-perfumed older woman ticked off a list of influential projects Ms. Mayer has helped define since she started there in 1999: Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail.

Women in Tech

Ms. Mayer, who wore knee-length boots and a fitted-waist jumper with a flouncy skirt, described herself as "gender-unaware," when asked whether she was the only woman in her advanced Symbolic Systems classes at Stanford. In fact, she said, it wasn't until her junior year at college when a "Carrie Bradshaw"-like columnist at the Stanford Daily wrote a piece identifying campus icons (i.e. people you recognized without knowing their names, like the cashier who always gets your sandwich order wrong) that she even realized she was an aberration in her major.

The column called out "The blonde woman in the upper division computer science classes," said Ms. Mayer, leaving her to wonder if she knew this mystery blonde, before making the connection. "Is that descriptive alone enough to just mean me?" Ms. Mayer recalled asking herself, "Am I the only woman? Am I the only blonde?"

Ms. Mayer said she thought not calling attention to her skills in science and math helped her progress. "My teachers never said, 'Wow you're really good at this for a girl,'" she noted. "Just asking that question, I think, can sometimes handicap progress. I think if I had felt more self-conscious, it would have stifled me."

A common misconception about computer science, she added, is the trope that it's populated by boys who have been obsessed with video games since childhood and are therefore predisposed to programming. When this reporter was in an undergrad computer science class, male engineering students looked at me quizzically when I admitted to never taking my computer apart as a kid just to see what it was made of. The implication in both scenarios being that women start off at an incredible disadvantage for not growing up steeped in that world.

But Ms. Mayer pointed out that she didn't get into the field until college when she quickly caught up with the older student who first taught her how to use a mouse and turn on her PC. It was only a matter of time until they were both TAs for a computer science class on equal footing. Can someone start in college? "Absolutely, yes," she said. "Because it's a new and young science, it also means you can catch up fast."

Avoiding Burnout

Somewhere around the part in the discussion where Ms. Mayer was detailing the 14 job offers she had lined up after Stanford, Mr. Tyrangiel felt compelled to ask, point blank, "So, your friends must hate you?" Not at all, insisted Ms. Mayer, "I think a lot of people can [get 14 job offers], but a lot of people don't," she said, citing her need to have a copious amount of choices to exhaustively assess before proceeding—how Google-y! "Does that make sense?" she asked. No, responded Mr. Tyrangiel. The audience shuffled their feet in agreement.

But Ms. Mayer made a much more convincing argument later in the evening when she explained why, "I don't really believe in burnout."

In the early days of Google, Ms. Mayer said, "I pulled an all-nighter every week for the first five years," and so did everyone else. People wondered how she and other employees worked 130-hours when a week only contains a 168 hours, but you can do it "if you're strategic about when you shower and sleep."

"People have the sensation that it just happened," she said of Google's success, offering a version of a quote from the movie Titanic, "I assure you the experience of it was quite different." Sometimes, said Ms. Mayer, she goes around to other startups who sheepishly admit they're not quite on their way to becoming Google, and she thinks, well, they're "working categorically less hard."

So how does someone with that kind of work ethic and drive not believe in burnout? "My theory is that burnout is about resentment," she said. "Know yourself well enough to know what you're giving up" by staying at work. Ms. Mayer says she often asks employees about their rhythm. What's the thing that if you miss it, it ruins your week? For one engineer it was about missing Tuesday night dinners with friends. If he had to cancel, especially when it was his turn to host, he lost his motivation to stay late. "Okay, Nathan, now we know you can never miss Tuesday night dinner," Ms. Mayer said, describing their conversation.

For an executive in Google Finance, the 1 a.m. conference calls to India were no problem, but missing her kids afternoon soccer practices and recitals was demoralizing, especially when they could see her walk in late. So now, said Ms. Mayer, if there's a meeting and someone asks if she can't just stay five minutes to finish something up, she says, "No, Katie's gotta go."

For Ms. Mayer, the trigger that makes her resentful is inability to travel. "I never get a lot of sleep at night," she said, but every four to six months, she wants to go somewhere she's never been before. It's good for her and her team's sense of self-sufficiency, she said, if she "misses every standing meeting" for a week every once in awhile. Figuring out those rhythms, "empowers you to work really hard for a really long period of time on something you're passionate about."

Even with her burnout theory in place, however, Ms. Mayer says she still finds herself weighing the cons of unplugging from the office before telling herself, "Oh, just take that trip to Croatia already." Hmm, maybe we will buy that ticket to China after all.

Goooood Morning, Silicon Alley! Gary Sharma’s Picks for the Week of September 19: The Billionaires & Supermodels Edition

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:14 -0400

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (a.k.a. "The Guy with the Red Tie"), founder of GarysGuide, mentor at ER Accelerator and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over forty red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.org.

So, last week NY Mag wrote an article titled Bubble Boys which takes a look at some of the young upcoming hackers & coders (future Mark Zuckerbergs) in Silicon Valley. While the piece itself was pretty interesting, one thing gave me pause. No girl hackers or coders were profiled. Not to give author Christopher Beam a hard time as this probably was just an inadvertent omission, cuz surely there must be at least one profile-worthy hacker girl in the valley. Hopefully he's working on fixing that flub. :)

Meanwhile, I thought this is as good a time as any to shine the spotlight on some amazing folks in the NY tech scene who are working tirelessly to help bring more women into the startup and tech world, cuz while the ratio is improving, it still isn't where it needs to be quite yet. These include Sara Chipps and Vanessa Hurst of Girl Develop IT, Rachel Sklar and Emily Gannett of Change The Ratio, Adriana Gascoigne and Tommy Jenkins of Girls In Tech NYC, Nelly Yusupova of Webgrrls NYC, Tania Yuki and Jamie Lee of Women in Media, Shaherose Charania of Women 2.0 and Founder Labs, Janet Hanson of 85 Broads, Anna Akbari and Nicole Skibola of Womens Collaborative NYC, Stephanie Hanbury-Brown and Peggy Wallace of Golden Seeds, Angie Grabski of Step Up Womens Network NYC, Cindy Gallop of If We Ran The World and many many more. If I've missed any, lemme know.

Also check out Betabeat's 25 Women Driving the NY Tech Scene and the New York Observer's 50 Media Power Bachelorettes, LuminaryLabs' Sara Holoubek's Field Guide to NYC Female Founders, Influencers & DealMakers and HonestlyNow's Tereza Nemessanyi's post on the need for an XX Combinator incubator for women.

There are also quite a few women-in-business themed events this week in NYC including Crain's 50 Most Powerful Women NYC, The WomenSphere Summit, Women in Media Meetup, Womens Collaborative NYC and SheStreams Conference.

So go check them out and spread the word!

And now, onto our awesome lineup of upcoming boozing-and-schmoozing events (and trust me, there's a ton of them this week!)

Mashable Social Good Summit 2011

What's that? You want me to find u an event where u can go hang with billionaire Ted Turner, supermodel Christy Turlington, actresses Mandy Moore and Geena Davis, tennis star Serena Williams, cyclist Lance Armstrong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu? You got it, pal. :)
Monday, 9 a.m. @ 92 Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue

NY Angels Venture Creation Workshop Series: The Online & Mobile Advertising Eco-System, Who is Making Money and How
Wanna learn how to really make money in mobile? Well of course u do! Giving u all the inside dope will be Jeffrey Silverman (NY Angels), Scott Hoffman (Cliqology), Geoff Judge (Partner, iNovia Capital), Nick MacShane (Founder, Progress Partners), Brian Kaminsky (Group Publisher, Huffington Post / AOL), Art Muldoon (Co-Founder, Accordant Media), Albert Azout (CEO, Sociocast), Moritz Loew (MSNBC Interactive), Scott Meyer (CEO, Evidon) and Jon Greenwood (GM, Media Innovation Group).
Monday, 7:30 a.m. @ Microsoft Offices, 1290 Avenue of the Americas 6th Floor

Crain's Most Powerful Women NYC
Yes, Ariana Huffington is in the list. No, she's not number 1. No, I don't know why. Yes, I know she's awesome. Yes, I'm pretty influential. No, I'm not going to call Crain's and ask them to change the list.
Monday, 12 p.m. @ 583 Park Avenue

NJ Tech Meetup 16
If ever there was a reason to cross over the Hudson into that far-off distant exotic land called Jersey, this is it! Featured speaker is Dean Levitt (Chief of culture, MadMimi.com), startups include Artsicle, Peerbelt & Talisman Guidance and special guest is Screenplay Interactive.
Monday, 6:30 p.m. @ Howe Center, Stevens Institute of Technology Bissinger Room, Hoboken, NJ

The Future Of Web Advertising: 4 Startups That Could Change The Marketing Landscape for Online Retailers in a Big Way
Panelists include Lori Hoberman (Chadbourne & Parke), Peg Jackson (Gridley & Co), Erik Nordlander (Google Ventures) and Jeanne Sullivan (Starvest Partners). Featuring startups Album+, Appside, Cognection, Immersive Side and Lemon. Wait-just-a-minute, whats a "Lemon" you say? Why its a "Location Enhanced Mobile Opt-in Network", of course. :)
Tuesday, 5:30 p.m. @ Chadbourne & Parke LLP, 30 Rockefeller Plaza

Skillshare Presents Creative Arts: a party, art show & lesson!
Are you an "intellectually-curious, crafty, artsy doer"? Fo' sure? Alrighty then, you'll like this one. Learn about how u can learn about printing 3D models, cooking colorful food, producing documentaries and more!
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard Street

NYC Tech Connect: Technology You Can Touch
Ok, I'll be honest. I have no idea what this event is about. BUT it does sound intriguing.
Wednesday, 5:30 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 4th Floor

Start Something: Why Every Creative Needs To Be An Entrepreneur
Ready to make the leap into startup world but need that one last final push? Thats where this event comes in. Providing inspiration will be Lauren Leto (Founder, Bntr and TextsFromLastNight), Laurel Touby (Founder, Mediabistro), Audacia Ray (Founder, The Red Umbrella Project) and Leigh Ann Tucker (Co-Founder, The Way We See the World).
Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. @ The New School, 65 West 11th Street

Tech Cocktail NYC Mixer Sponsored by After10 and X.commerce
International tech traveler, Frank Gruber, is back with another edition of TechCocktail. The event will be all about ... wait for it ... tech and cocktails of course!
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

Network and drink with Time, CNN and Turner executives
Where you enjoy complimentary hors d'oeuvres and sip cocktails as you watch big companies woo startups. (Or is it the other way around?)
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Time Life building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas 8th floor

VC Finance Update: Growth and Opportunity in the New York Tech Market
Looking for an event where u can ~~corner~~ connect with VCs and tell them all about ur hot lil' startup? You just found it. In the hot seat will be Thatcher Bell (Principal, DFJ Gotham Ventures), Habib Kairouz (Managing Partner, Rho Capital Partners), Warren Lee (General Partner, Canaan Partners), Alan Patricof (Founder & Managing Director, Greycroft) and Benjamin Wolin (CEO & Co-Founder, Everyday Health). Moderated by Greg David (CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Crains NY).
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Citibank Center, 601 Lexington Avenue

NY Video September 2011 Meetup
Get your online video on with Douglas Atkin and Jordan Bienenstock (Yackit), Rob Barnett (My Damn Channel), Iliana Grossman and Mark LaRosa (Gust) and Ernest Feiteira (SeeTheJob).
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 6th Floor

NY Tech Karaoke
You know what's even more fun than hanging out and drinking with ur fellow tech peeps? Why, singing offkey with them of course!
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ Karaoke Cave, 9 East 13th Street

Bain Capital Ventures Cocktail Hour
Another day. Another awesome networking-schmoozing-drinking-cocktail event. Life is hard, no?
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

SMASH Summit 2011
AARRR! You know that sound? It means that super-duper angel, 500 hats-wearing pirate Dave McClure is back in town and this time he comes bearing gifts. A smashing summit, that is. With a terrific speaker lineup including Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Billy Chasen (Turntable.fm), Shiva Rajaraman (Youtube), Steve Cheney (GroupMe), Bre Pettis (MakerBot), Danielle Morrill (Twilio), Chris Maliwat (Gilt Groupe), Dan Porter (OMGPOP), Eric Litman (Medialets) and more. But the person I'm really looking forward to having a "chat" with is LaunchRock's Jameson Detweiler, the guy to blame for all those zillion startup landing pages. ;)
Friday, 9 a.m. @ Microsoft Offices, 1290 6th Avenue Sixth Floor

ER Accelerator Demo Day
Following in the trailblazing footsteps of TechStars and DreamIt comes ER Accelerator's Demo Day. Come hang with ERA honcho Murat Aktihanoglu, directors Charlie Kemper & Jonathan Axelrod and a whole bunch of awesome mentors and startups. Demoing will be BuzzTable, Centzy, LetGive, nabfly, numberFire, Parking Panda, PricingEngine, PublicStuff, Sitesimon and WebThriftStore. Event is by invitation only.
Friday, 9 a.m. @ Undisclosed Location

Getting Covered by the Online Tech Press: How to Get Noticed and Keep Getting Noticed
Ok, so here's the dealio. When blogger extra-ordinaire, Google+ aficianado and tech celeb Robert 'Scobleizer' Scoble (or as I like to call him "The Yoda of Tech Blogging") tells you how to get coverage in the press, you log out of that turntable.fm room, put down ur iPhone 5 prototype and listen. You'll thank me later.
Friday, 5 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

More on the horizon...
YCombinator NYC Meetup on Sep 26 @ Undisclosed Location
Demos and Drinks sponsored by Dealery! on Sep 27 @ Gallery Bar
Digital DUMBO's Fashion Night Out: Official T-Shirt Release Party w Brooklyn Industries & Radballs on Sep 29 @ Dumbo Loft
NYVCA Ingenuity on Oct 5 @ 82 Mercer

Until next week. Stay ~~thirsty~~ social, my friends!

Sheryl Sandberg Breaks Through Silicon Valley’s Boys Club. Sort of.

Nitasha Tiku — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:33:32 -0400

Ms. Sandberg if ya nasty.

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Ken Auletta tackles Silicon Valley's stubborn gender divide through the prism of one of its most high-profile outliers: Sheryl Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg, Facebook's COO, has been a popular profile subject of late as Facebook braces for its IPO, beefs up its lobbying efforts in Washington, and contemplates venturing into China. Of course, Ms. Sandberg's stints near the top of Google's troika and in the Treasury Department also put her at the nexus of the business and politics and the old guard's battle for relevance against socially-minded upstarts.

Mr. Auletta traces Ms. Sandberg's ascendance from Larry Summers chief of staff to making Google's AdWords profitable to making Facebook, which was hemorraging cash when she joined in 2008, profitable. There is some skepticism given as to whether the model for female assertiveness put forth in Ms. Sandberg's popular TED Talk on the lack of women leaders is replicable. Critics argue that without a powerful sponsor like Mr. Summers willing to go to bat for you or the luxury of childcare when needed, the business world is still not meritocracy where fearlessness is rewarded.

Regardless, the portrait of an exceptional organizer, communicator, and leader emerges. And yet, despite all those shards of glass ceiling at her feet, one role has still eluded Ms. Sandberg.

When I asked Mark Zuckerberg why his five-member board has no women, his voice, which is normally loud, lowered to a whisper: “We have a very small board.” He went on, “I’m going to find people who are helpful, and I don’t particularly care what gender they are or what company they are. I’m not filling the board with check boxes.” (He recently added a sixth member: another man.)

The dissonance between how vital Ms. Sandberg is to the company's growth—the title of Businessweek's profile was "Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg"—and her absence from its board is something Auletta returns to again and again through some 8,000-odds words. By now Zuck is familiar with the cycle of correcting a misstep after a spate of bad press. Hopefully he'll do the same thing here.

Doing It for Themselves: 25 Women Driving New York’s Tech Scene

The Editors — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 03:50:09 -0400

Computer scientist Barbie at The Makery.
Photo: Becky Carella

Women in the start-up world are outnumbered by men—we know this—and most of them tend to be later-stage employees in support roles, like marketing, public relations and office management.

But we've noticed a trend in the New York tech scene: a strong surge of women in tech who are, well, just doing it. They're starting companies without worrying about how male-dominated the VC-funded web start-up space is. They live and breathe the scene the way their male counterparts do, and many are just as rash, obnoxious and aggressive.

Some of them are working to bring more women into tech, but mostly they choose to ignore the industry's male-dominated tradition altogether, shrugging off the threat of sexism. Many seem not to notice when they're pitching to a room full of men; some notice, and don't care, or notice and care, but do it anyway.

These women are the future angel investors, powerhouse VCs, public company CEOs and start-up mafiosa. For now they're working 100-hour weeks and organizing events via Meetup.com, but--every day--they're hustling. Here's a predictive power list of 25 women to watch in New York.

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke, Olivia Fialkow and Emily Foxhall contributed reporting.
“Love to meet more local startups and entrepreneurs.”

Melody Koh is an associate venture capitalist at Time Warner Investments, which invests between $2 and $10 million in three to five deals per year in digital media, advertising and gaming. She came to the start-up world from the banking industry, speaks Mandarin fluently, and hits up dozens of tech meetups around the city. In her spare time she works with the New York chapter of Wokai, a peer-to-peer micro-financing program in mainland China.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/melody-koh.jpg?w=205" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/melody-koh.jpg?w=350" width="102" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/melody-koh.jpg?w=102" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Melody Koh" /> Eunice Chou began her working life on, you guessed it, Wall Street, doing stints at JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch. From there she moved into gaming, helping to launch the independent studio Archcraft, where she spent four years; then it was over to the corporate side, working on in game advertising at Massive, which was acquired by Microsoft.

In January of 2010 she launched Flavorize, which bills itself as the Pandora of food. Before launching the service, Ms. Chou was an avid food blogger, posting reviews and rhapsodic essays about her meals in New York, Greece and Taiwan. “There is a super supportive community of female founders here, to the point where you get pulled in pretty quickly, whether you want to or not. Luckily we discuss normal start-up obstacles, not just commiserate about being women in tech,” she said.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/eunice-chou.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/eunice-chou.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="114" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/eunice-chou.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Eunice Chou" /> The first thing that distinguishes Koya is that she works in life sciences, a field of technology far less common in New York than more consumer facing web applications. As the co-founder of SwitchBiotics, Ms. Koya is working to discover novel antibodies to combat life threatening bacterial infections. She is currently based out of General Assembly.

When she’s not busy trying to save the world, Ms. Koya works as a program leader at the Startup Leadership Program, an initiative to groom the next generation of CEOs. Recently she helped run a mock pitch session to help young entrepreneurs learn to score their VC funding. “The mission was to get an insider glimpse into mind of an investor, but also to give start-ups an inside view into why VC funds make the decisions they make,” Ms. Koya told Betabeat.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kanchan-koya.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kanchan-koya.jpg?w=480" width="150" height="100" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kanchan-koya.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Kanchan Koya" /> “There’s always a way.”

Designer, hacker, live-tweeter and co-founder of stealth start-up Bloomsie–”stay in touch with the people who matter”–which is based out of WeWorkLabs, Mariya Yao also runs her own mobile design and development company, Xanadu Mobile. She also co-founded Founders Block, a blog where entrepreneurs share stories of start-up struggle. “I spend 50 percent of my day designing, 20 percent building, and 10 percent schmoozing. The rest of the time, I’m stalking you on Twitter,” she says on her about.me page.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/mariya-yao.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/mariya-yao.jpg?w=440" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/mariya-yao.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Mariya Yao" /> “At first I got into security because hackers are really cool , and I wanted to be white-hat.”

If the start-up world doesn’t work out for Elena Silenok, she can always try a career as a secret agent. Born to a family of engineers in Kaliningrad, Russia, Ms. Silenok earned honors for mathematics and sharp shooting. Fluent in French, Russian and English, her current interests include augmented reality and mixed martial arts. Her resume in tech includes a masters degree in computer science and extends from high-frequency trading algorithms to intensive analysis of network security.

But when she moved from the west coast to New York, she saw a big opportunity in fashion. Her start-up, Clothia, is currently in private beta, but hopes to revolutionize the way people shop for clothing online. Clothia relies on a standard webcam to allow users to try on a virtual garment, getting a sense for the way the style and fit suit their body. With a wave of their hand they can resize a garment or share the look out to their social network. In a virtual closet users can mix and match outfits or trade with friends. “Right now their is a gold rush into fashion technology,” she said. “We’re selling the picks which people can use to better mine that gold.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/elena-silenok.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/elena-silenok.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/elena-silenok.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Elena Silenok" /> Gauri Manglik also thought she was headed for Wall Street, spending seven months as a tech analyst for the financial services giant Blackrock before hopping over to try her hand as an entrepreneur. It’s been a wild ride since then. Ms. Manglik became the co-founder and CEO of SpotOn, a location-based mobile recommendation app, in February of 2010 and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last month. The high profile debut led to a flood of sign-ups and the young company is now focused on polishing their product and keeping up with demand.

Ms. Manglik and her team work out of the Local Response HQ in Chelsea, which means their investors from ENIAC ventures are just shouting distance across the office. “I was a computer science major at NYU, so I’m used to being the only girl in the room,” she said. Ms. Manglik, 22, was also one of the youngest founders on stage at Disrupt. “I feel like the things that set me apart, being a woman, are kind of an advantage,” she said. Her goal now is to expand SpotOn’s reach beyond Manhattan and make it simple to move from using the mobile app to executing an “offline adventure.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/guari-manglik-e1307375787631.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/guari-manglik-e1307375787631.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/guari-manglik-e1307375787631.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Photo: Erick Schonfeld" /> “We believe that there is only one way to repair the wide gender gap in development: getting women to ship software.”

Sara Chipps is a freelance web developer, frequent New Work City dweller and organizer of many meetups; Vanessa Hurst is the lead analytics and database engineer for Paperless Post and organizer of Developers for Good. Together they founded Girl Develop IT, discount programming classes aimed at women that has already taught more about 20 courses on HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Ruby on Rails and other languages to more than 300 students (including some dudes) since it launched in July, and inspired chapters in Ohio and Australia.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sara-chipps-and-vanessa-hurst.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sara-chipps-and-vanessa-hurst.jpg?w=500" width="150" height="107" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/sara-chipps-and-vanessa-hurst.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Sara Chipps and Vanessa Hurst" /> If the amount of available tech talent is ever going to catch up with demand, women have to become a far more robust portion of the coding community. To further that goal, Ms. Goldstein teaches at Girl Develop IT, where she strives to create a approachable, low-cost programming class where “women can feel free to ask dumb questions.” A proud member of NYC Resistor, Ms. Goldstein is also the founder and CEO of aut faciam, Latin for, “I shall make one.” It’s an independent iPhone/iPad development company based in Brooklyn with an emphasis on building apps that mimic users natural habits and mesh easily with their lives.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/alexis-goldstein-e1328299290413.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/alexis-goldstein-e1328299290413.jpg?w=600" width="150" height="112" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/alexis-goldstein-e1328299290413.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Alexis Goldstein" /> “I try to get known people to talk about things that are not known about them. I want our audience to learn about new and interesting people and for them to hear from familiar people, telling stories that have not been told yet.”"

On Tikva Morowati’s blog, she has a list of life goals, half of which are crossed off: “design products at the intersection of technology, art and design;” pay off her student loans; meet her dad’s family and become “great friends with her mom.”

Still waiting to be crossed off: write a book, get married and have kids, “have enough money and investments that I don’t have to worry about my finances,” host an interview show, visit Africa and live in a foreign land for an extended period of time.

Ms. Morowati seems posed to accomplish those goals. She is in charge of product engagement and marketing at Singly and the founder and director of IgniteNYC.

Ms. Morowati created a weekly speaker series while getting her master’s degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. After she graduated, she decided she wanted to continue that in the real world, and started coordinating the New York chapter of Ignite, the fast-paced infotainment popular with techies in which speakers are allowed five minutes and 20 slides.

Ms. Morowati has a background in storytelling. As an undergraduate, she studied filmmaking at NYU and worked on experimental documentaries. “I got good at extracting stories,” she said. She uses these storytelling skills when selecting Ignite speakers.

When curating Ignite sets, a challenge that Ms. Morowati faces is trying to get 50 percent women speakers.

“It’s actually pretty difficult to get this percentage,” said Ms. Morowati. “We can get over 120 applications from just 14 spots, and rarely do we get more than 4 or 5 submissions from women.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/tikva-e1307376141214.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/tikva-e1307376141214.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="124" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/tikva-e1307376141214.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Tikva Morowati" /> The only rising star on our list who routinely performs as part of an improv comedy troupe, this Harvard MBA also worked in the corporate world at the massive marketing agency Digitas right out of school. Working with start-ups there convinced Ms. Evans pretty quickly that trying her luck as an entrepreneur was the way to go. Brainstorming ideas and being able to pivot quickly with a team came naturally to Evans from all her training in improv comedy, she says.
She began working on GoTryItOn, a crowd-sourced fashion opinion site very similar to Fashism, which started running it initially as an email list with ten friends. As she refined the concept during nights and weekends, she brought on a CTO and art director and eventually raised a seed round and launched the product at South By Southwest. The app allows users to upload photos and get a reaction from the masses, putting it in direct competition with Fashism.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-evans.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-evans.jpg?w=440" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-evans.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Marissa Evans" /> Alexis Tryon majored in art history, but found herself working on Wall Street after college. One perk of being an employee at American Express was she could afford to start collecting art. Her experiences with shopping at fancy Soho galleries, however, was so frustrating that the seed for her start-up, Artsicle, was planted.

The idea is to create an approachable way for novice art lovers to get their hands on original pieces. Not only does Artsicle skip the aloof, insular gallery scene, it also lets its customers rent the pieces out to decide if they like them before settling on the final purchase.
The site focuses on emerging young artists who have yet to make their name. “If one of our artists gains recognition and is able to join the roster of a high-quality gallery, I would be thrilled–even if that means no longer selling with us,” Tryon told the BBC.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexis-tryon.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexis-tryon.jpg?w=440" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexis-tryon.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Alexis Tryon" /> Cheryl Yeoh was a senior associate at the Big Four accounting firm KPMG when she got the start-up bug–bad. She started thinking of ideas for food, travel and fashion until she hit on the idea for CityPockets, an organizer and marketplace for daily deal coupons. She pitched the idea to a technical co-founder who went home and started wireframing; shortly thereafter she quit her job, sublet her apartment and moved into a friend’s living room.

CityPockets isn’t her first company; when she was eight years old and living in Malaysia, she sold about 100 sets of a children’s game called 5 Stones until her teacher shut her down. Her second venture was a company called APEX that she incorporated when she was 16, which made and sold do-it-yourself science kits, customized canvas bags, and “created a popular secret gift messaging system that eventually went viral across schools,” she told We Are NY Tech. “We made our investors a 13x return, which I hope to somehow replicate with my adult ventures,” she said.

CityPockets just raised a seed round of funding from angel investors, moved into a new office, and is hiring. When asked what she would do if CityPockets fails, she said: “Failure is not an option so I’m not even thinking about a back-up plan right now.”

But will you ever start another company, Betabeat asked?

“Yes, there’s no question about it. I’ve always started something in every phase of my life so this isn’t the first and won’t be the last,” she said.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cheryl-yeoh.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cheryl-yeoh.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cheryl-yeoh.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Cheryl Yeoh" /> “I think you can expect in these few years to have technology move more towards you.”

Alexa Hirschfeld bounced almost immediately out of undergraduate studies at Harvard and into the start-up world. (She worked briefly for Katie Couric at CBS News, but she quit to co-found the design-driven Evite competitor Paperless Post with her brother James in 2007 because it seemed more interesting.) She and her brother have raised at least $6 million for a fast-growing business that generates enough revenue that it became profitable last year. Strikingly, the pair was confident enough to ask users to pay for virtual currency to spend on customizable digital stationary from the first; there’s no advertising on the site.

New Yorkers in the tech scene have probably seen Ms. Hirschfeld–who is eloquent, sharp and incredibly laid-back–speak at local tech meetups or at Columbia, or they might have read about her in the New York Times, Forbes (“Women to Watch), or CNN Money (“Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs”), or Fast Company (“Most Influential Women in Technology”).

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexa-hirschfeld.jpg?w=263" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexa-hirschfeld.jpg?w=422" width="131" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/alexa-hirschfeld.jpg?w=131" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Alexa Hirschfeld" /> “Sometimes the best learning is just rolling up your sleeves and diving in.

Venrock vice president Marissa Campise paid her way through Yale University while supporting her son as a single mother; she graduated in 2006 and started as a collateral analyst at big four accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.

Her quick climb up the ladder of the New York venture world began when she met StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon over Twitter. The two became friendly, and shortly thereafter Mr. Lindzon recruited her to work at his firm, where she learned the world of very early stage investing.

Ms. Campise’s next stop was working with Alan Patricof at Greycroft Partners, where she was able to immerse herself in later, series A financing. “She comes across as a very calm, quiet, monochromatic individual, and then all of a sudden she speaks with laser-like focus, totally focused on the issue with total animation, and about as high a degree of energy as I can think,” declared Mr. Patricof, after Ms. Campise won The Huffington Post’s Energy Makeover competition.

In April, Greycroft put out a press release announcing that Campise had been promoted from senior associate to principal. But just two weeks later she left to become a vice president at Venrock, apparently wooed by a very aggressive offer.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-campise.jpg?w=265" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-campise.jpg?w=359" width="132" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/marissa-campise.jpg?w=132" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Marissa Campise" /> “Socializing is good for business.”

Julie Ruvolo is an entrepreneur, anthropologist, columnist and professional socializer who started her career in digital advertising and business development and has written for VentureBeat and AdAge, been written about in The Atlantic, and spoken at South By Southwest, SummitSeries and DEMO.

But Ms. Ruvolo is best-known in the New York start-up scene as a co-founder of Solvate, the marketplace for freelancers and small businesses, where she served for two years as COO and co-raised its $2.3 million Series A from RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham before moving on to head up digital strategy at the Museum of Sex, where she manages audience development and is currently consulting on an interactive exhibition on non-medical interpretations of genetic information. She recently launched a monthly column, “Digital Anthropology,” for Forbes, and co-hosts Innovator Date Night with Venrock partner David Pakman. But she’s plotting a start-up comeback later this year–in Brazil, where she did her undergraduate thesis, and where opportunity abounds for an entrepreneurial Portugese speaker with a well-established network in New York.

“The economy is booming, the private equity scene is booming, investors like Redpoint and angels like Dave McClure are seriously getting involved in Brazil, and I’m excited to get down there and see what I find,” she told Betabeat. “Brazil is emerging as an epic tech market on the horizon…I’m interested in a bridging role between New York City and Brazil… There is serious cross-cultural entrepreneurial work to be done.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/julie-ruvolo.jpg?w=240" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/julie-ruvolo.jpg?w=429" width="120" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/julie-ruvolo.jpg?w=120" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Julie Ruvolo" /> “The Hatchery was founded after meeting a lot of companies on a regular basis and seeing the deficiences in their companies. I just really wanted to show them the real-life experience of pitching in front of investors… It’s to get people to help each other.”

Yao-Hui Huang started her career in pharmaceutical sciences and the healthcare industry, where she worked at Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth, and Merck; she transitioned into the technology sector after the dot-com crash when she founded interactive agency Gigapixel Creative.

But Dr. Yao is best-known for her tough love approach as the co-founder and ruthless master of ceremonies at The Hatchery, a four-year old organization that hosts workshops and connects entrepreneurs with investors through events like The Gauntlet, a themed, invitation-only pitch event; Are You Serious, a monthly event where six companies pitch a panel of investors, who are directed to give very frank critical feedback; and the Hatch Match, a yearly event where companies pitch investors one-on-one for five minutes.

Dr. Yao also works around the world through non-profit work and is organizing a Hatchery event in Indonesia this summer; she’s also organized events in London and Beijing (she speaks Chinese fluently). She’s a frequent lecturer within the Asian community and hosts the invitation-only Wonder Women dinner series.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/yao-hui-huang.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/yao-hui-huang.jpg?w=500" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/yao-hui-huang.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Photo: flickr.com/photos/islandgal" /> “Brilliant ladies” -Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi

The best start-ups come from entrepreneurs try to solve a problem they have themselves, the adage goes. Photojournalist and reality TV show editor Brooke Moreland decided to create Fashism after she walked out of a dressing room to get her husband’s opinion and was greeted by an empty couch. “There must be a way to get an unbiased opinion using that internet everyone is talking about,” she says on the company’s web site. She called a developer friend, who liked the idea and started working on the site.

Ms. Moreland bootstrapped a prototype while working full-time at her day job for a year, cashing in favors all the way. One day she got a call from Ashley Granata, digital fashionista whose pedigree includes bloomingdales.com and style.com, a friend of a friend who was excited by the idea and wanted to help; Ms. Moreland hired her as chief marketing officer and quit her own job the next week. The day she quit, she got a call from the New York Times wanting to do a story; soon, investors started calling.

In November Fashism announced it had raised $1 million in a first round of funding from investors including Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and moved into New York’s highest-profile coworking space, General Assembly, shortly after. The co-founders names’ came up over and over again when Betabeat was scouting around for up-and-coming women in New York’s start-up scene.

“Now I have a lot more confidence than I did when I first started out. I’d never started a company before. I’d never gone out on my own. I’d never pitched an investor,” Ms. Moreland told Business Insider. “I was missing a little bit of that cocky attitude. ‘This is what I’m doing, listen to me.’ If I could go back, I would have quit my job sooner, [raised] more money, and just done it all instead of taking my time and testing the waters. But you know, it was my first time.” Next time, she’ll know better.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/fashism-e1307375822149.jpg?w=200" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/fashism-e1307375822149.jpg?w=500" width="100" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/fashism-e1307375822149.jpg?w=100" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Ashley Granata and Brooke Moreland" /> Hilary Mason started writing code when she was still in kindergarten on her school’s Apple IIe. As a co-founder of HackNY, the non-profit that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in New York, Ms. Mason is helping other young people get involved in the tech world.

Ms. Mason started HackNY with Chris Wiggins from Columbia University and Evan Korth from NYU. “We were all independently working to strengthen the connections between the academic and startup communities in New York, so we met over burgers and milkshakes and sketched out the structure of an organization that could support and magnify these efforts,” she said.

Ms. Mason is also the chief scientist at bit.ly. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features; she recently started the data science blog Dataists (dataists.com) and is a member of hacker collective NYC Resistor.

“There are several things you can give to invest in a young company–time, social capital, and money,” said Ms. Mason. “I really enjoy sharing what I know with people who are taking on ambitious challenges, and I’m happy to connect them to others with similar interests.”

In the future, Ms. Mason wants to continue her work with HackNY but can imagine it taking different shapes.

“HackNY is a non-profit that is structured to solve a very specific problem,” Ms. Mason said. “I love finding the right set of people, structures, and resources to solve problems, so yes, it’s quite likely that I’ll start things in the future! However, don’t expect them to have the same form or goals.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/hilary-mason.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/hilary-mason.jpg?w=541" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/hilary-mason.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Hilary Mason" /> Roboticist Heather Knight and Data, her comedian-robot, took to the TED stage last year where for the first time, Data told live jokes and gathered audience feedback while Ms. Knight held the microphone.

Last week, the pair was in Europe and performed at London’s Festival of the Spoken Nerd, New Castle’s Thinking Digital conference and the Amsterdam Comedy Festival, where Data was the only robot on the bill.

Knight is currently conducting her doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and running Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art.

“As creative company the numbers that we care about are performances on stage, collaborations with other technologists and artists, and number of people that have started creating themselves because of our influence,” said Ms. Knight. “Less tangible goals are an exploration of ideas and impacts around technology, everyday Robotics and charismatic machines.”

Ms. Knight is currently preparing getting ready for the first ever Robot Film Festival, which will take place on July 16. So far, the festival has received 35 submissions and will headline with a Spike Jonze robotic love story.

Ms. Knight hopes that the film festival promotes an understanding of robot-human relations and helps counter negative stereotypes about bots.

Ms. Knight is also looking forward to seeing more robots on stage.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/heather-knight.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/heather-knight.jpg?w=500" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/heather-knight.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Heather Knight" /> Phoebe Espiritu is a force behind the scenes in New York’s start-up and design communities. She’s been a judge for Oracle’s ThinkQuestNYC, a panelist at SXSW, and an intern for the only digital marketer who can plausibly be called a guru, Seth Godin, when she co-built ChangeThis, a site for publishing big idea manifestos.

Now she manages the group of hackers that provides mercenary support to start-ups in the TechStars incubator; fundraises for scholarships to NYU’s ITP program, which she graduated from in 2004; and organizes initiatives like the Design Trust, a temporary collective of designers who helped out hackers at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon which she is now working to make permanent. “I’ve been really obsessed with getting more designers involved in technology and entrepreneurship in NYC and am looking to forge closer relationships with designers and academia to help address the shortage of T-shaped, analytical designers at start-ups,” she said.

She’s also helping Union Square Ventures-funded start-up Shapeways with product design, and serves as a mentor to start-ups at the recently-launched Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/phoebe-espiritu.jpg?w=225" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/phoebe-espiritu.jpg?w=375" width="112" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/phoebe-espiritu.jpg?w=112" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Ms. Espiritu takes care to keep her photo off the web for personal reasons, so here is a picture she took of some treats." /> Campbell McKellar was a high school cheerleader in the south, where the sport is a big, big deal. She was fairly certain she would be selected head cheerleader senior year–but when the list came out, she wasn’t on it. “I sat down by the lockers and started crying,” she told We Are NY Tech. “Just kidding. I marched myself into our coach’s office and suggested she correct the typo. It took quite a bit of back and forth, but eventually I was back on the team. I wasn’t the captain, but I was back. In that moment I learned a valuable lesson. No doesn’t always mean no.”

Ms. McKellar is the Brooklyn-based founder of Loosecubes, a marketplace for renting extra workspace that received $1.3 million in seed funding from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and some undisclosed angel investors. “As of today, we have 1,242 spaces being shared in 275 cities in 35 countries,” she said. “We’re a completely free platform right now, but I can tell you that as far as I can tell from media mentions, etc., we have twice the number of listings that AirBnB had at this same time in its development. That makes me feel good.”

In the past, Ms. McKellar co-founded party photography service Tiger Photo and the business development non-profit New Sector Alliance; headed up finance and operations at real estate development firm Tribeca Associates; and worked as a real estate investment banker at Goldman Sachs, where she was “responsible for originating and packaging complicated securities (and tanking the global economy). Sorry guys,” according to her LinkedIn profile.

Her dream is to run Loosecubes “from an island somewhere… or maybe in Paris, for the rest of my life.” Eventually she’d love to be an angel investor and advisor to start-ups.

But if Loosecubes fails, she says, the first thing she is going to do is write a novel. “It’s been a hilarious, wild ride. It would probably make for a great romantic comedy, with Prince Charming being a Groupon-esque success.”

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/campbell-mckellar.png?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/campbell-mckellar.png?w=462" width="150" height="125" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/campbell-mckellar.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Campbell McKellar" /> “We dream big for Birchbox.”

Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp didn’t go to Harvard Business School planning to start a business. “No, we can answer that definitively,” Ms. Beauchamp told Betabeat. But they had a good idea, crunched the numbers, wrote a business plan and found out they couldn’t stop. Birchbox, which generates leads for beauty brands via a website that delivers subscribers a customized box of beauty samples every month, launched in the fall with $1.4 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Accel Partners, Lerer Ventures and angel investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Sam Lessin of drop.io. They’re up to 32,000 paid subscribers and 50 brand partners, meaning the company is already generating at least $3.8 million in revenue a year, and growing fast (and inspiring knock-offs).

Birchbox’s deliberative co-founders are building a long-term business, but we’ll be surprised if it’s the last venture we hear of from either of them. “We only have eyes for Birchbox,” Ms. Beauchamp said when Betabeat asked if they thought they’d ever start another company. Angel investing, maybe? “We would love to be in that position some day. Until then, we can offer free and candid information to entrepreneurs who have questions–we don’t have all of the answers, but we can share our perspective and experience,” Ms. Beauchamp said.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/katia-beauchamp-and-hayley-barna-e1307358804851.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/katia-beauchamp-and-hayley-barna-e1307358804851.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/katia-beauchamp-and-hayley-barna-e1307358804851.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp" /> Chrysanthe Tenentes was working out of her Williamsburg apartment and her friend, the publisher of travel website Jauntsetter was working out of her Greenpoint apartment when they decided that a breakfast meetup would be a good way to create a sense of a tech community in North Brooklyn.

“The idea was to get a bunch of creative entrepreneurs together to share what we were working on, and we liked the idea of breakfast rather than another tech drinks setting,” said Ms. Tenentes.

On the last Friday of each month, North Brooklyn Breakfast Club MeetUp congregates at Enid’s on the edge of Greenpoint and Williamsburg to meet tech people, see presenters, and use the restaurant’s wifi.

Ms. Tenentes spends a lot of time working to create a sense of community–she’s Community Manager for Foursquare’s 10 million users. She is also a partner and contributing editor of the blog Brooklyn Based. Before starting North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, Ms. Tenentes started Digital Dumbo, a similar idea in a different neighborhood.

“When we started Digital Dumbo in 2008, it just made sense because of all the startups in a small neighborhood and we wanted likeminded people to meet,” said Ms. Tenentes. “When we started NBBC last winter, we had a bunch of startups and people working on small projects in our own neighborhood.”

Someday, Ms. Tenentes may want to work on her own start-up. She is working on a new project to connect women in tech, she said, and she has no plans to leave Brooklyn anytime soon.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/chrysantheforsite_large.jpg?w=246" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/chrysantheforsite_large.jpg?w=265" width="123" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/chrysantheforsite_large.jpg?w=123" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Chrysanthe Tenentes" /> Christina Cacioppo had been reading Union Square Ventures blog for a few years when she saw a post that said that they were looking for hire someone younger on the investment side.

“I applied thinking I had no shot at their job. (Who gets their VC job off a blog post?),” she wrote in an email.

Ms. Cacioppo studied economics and industrial engineering at Stanford, which gave her access to the d.school and prepared her for Union square Ventures.

Before heading to USV, Ms. Cacioppo “meandered through the worlds of tech (in Silicon Valley), microfinance (in Bolivia), design (in Germany), journalism (in Uganda), and human rights (in Thailand and Rwanda).”

Right now, Ms. Cacioppo is excited to be in New York and at USV. “As milquetoasty as it sounds–trying to learn as much as I can from the USV team, the entrepreneurs and companies with whom we’re involved, and the broader NYC tech community,” she said.

Another of Ms. Capcioppo’s goals is to be an angel investor.

“There’s something so compelling about working with people who think the world is so broken in some specific way that they’re dedicating years of their lives to starting a company and fixing it,” she said.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/christina-cacioppo1.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/christina-cacioppo1.jpg?w=440" width="150" height="150" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/christina-cacioppo1.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Christina Cacioppo" /> After finishing courses at Harvard Business School two years ago, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss turned to focus on the state of womens’ closets. As the story goes, Ms. Hyman had returned home to find her sister faced with an upcoming wedding and nothing in her closet to wear.

The concept of the ever-replenishing closet was born, and Ms. Hyman and her eponymous co-founder set out to make a wider selection of couture dresses available to women who are on a budget but still looking to dress up for a night out. The online rental service offering choices from a range of designers, which now include Vera Wang, Nicole Miller, Diane von Furstenberg and Escada. The dresses are available for a fraction of the retail price, with most ranging from $50 to $200 per four-day rental. It’s not chump change, but women will happily pay up for high fashion and variety, and they have more than a million active users, according to TechCrunch–we don’t even want to attempt to multiply those numbers.

Let’s just say the revenue looks substantial, and it’s no surprise the co-founders raised more than $30 million fromHighland Capital, Bain Capital and Kleiner Perkins, in order to expand its inventory and distribution.

“Over 90 percent of our renters have reported that they have purchased something from the brand they rented, post rental,” Hyman told Inc.com, suggesting lead generation could be another revenue source in the future. “We are effectively grooming the next generation of women for high fashion.”

Rent the Runway expanded to jewelry and handbags, and the two-year old company is up to 45 employees, mostly women.

" data-medium-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/rent-the-runway-e1307375860939.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/rent-the-runway-e1307375860939.jpg?w=575" width="150" height="99" src="http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/rent-the-runway-e1307375860939.jpg?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail" alt="Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman" />

The Hottest Startups Are Full of Bros

Adrianne Jeffries — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:06:36 -0400

The absence of women in tech is not really news, but since it remains a Situation, it's worth hammering away at.

This morning we wrote about the lack of women at the top positions at Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, arguably the biggest four companies on the social Web.

Now local designer Whitney Hess has put together a counterpart to that list with a roundup of the gender breakdown at some some well-known startups.

Most of the women working at hot startups are in marketing, she noted.

"Not only are women in tech mostly invisible, the vast majority of those who are on display are selling, not making," she wrote.

Foursquare? Six out of 40 employees are women, Hess writes. Their roles include Community Manager, Lead Designer, Marketing Manager, Head of Recruiting and Community Support Coordinator.

Kickstarter? Four out of 14 employees are women, Hess writes, working in Customer Service, Marketing and Community.

Tumblr's lone female employee, according to Hess, is Director of Outreach. (She left out intern Annie Werner. UPDATE: Turner was recently hired as Meetup Coordinator, bringing Tumblr's female employee count up to two.)

New York's BankSimple had nine employees, none of whom are women.

"Thanks for highlighting this," CEO Josh Reich responded in the comments. "As a company, this is something we would like to rectify."

BankSimple isn't excluding women from its team, he said, but it's tough to hire women who are technical. It's much easier to find women to take a marketing or communications position, he suggested.

"I just scanned through all the applicants we have received for advertised 'making' positions. To date, we have yet to receive a single female applicant. We currently have an open position in customer relations. Nearly two-thirds of the applicants to this position are female," he said.

Hess was briefly the only woman running for a spot on the board of the New York Tech Meetup, the largest tech organization in New York City, before she dropped out. When Tech Observer asked why, she declined to comment.

The ratio may be shifting, however. Newly-elected board member Anil Dash has said he wants to make the NYTM more diverse, and some local techies like developer Sara Chipps of Girl Develop It are working to teach women how to code.

Of course, women aren't the only faces missing from the tech industry.

Disclosure.