July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by executive Denise Colella

AMC’s Mad Men paints a picture of a male-dominated world, in which women either stayed home with the kids or enlisted as secretaries while their husbands took on huge clients on Madison Avenue.

While this stereotype has largely changed and women now account for 46.9 percent of the U.S. workforce, women in senior management positions in the growing ad-tech industry are still severely under-represented, seeming to better reflect Don Draper’s era than the twenty first century.

Although a very male-dominated industry, it’s hugely dynamic, constantly evolving, employing many smart individuals, and none of us could imagine working in any other sector. However, it can be challenging, especially for females. So, based on my years of experience in the ad tech world, I’ve compiled our top tips for women who want to break through the allegorical glass ceiling and succeed as an executive without sacrificing family or sanity. Good luck!

Embrace what sets you apart from your male co-workers.

Women tend to diminish their abilities or doubt their qualifications far more than men do. It’s fair to say that all of us have worried about being ‘one of the guys’ in order to fit in with our colleagues and customers and felt we had to mirror our male colleagues. However we’ve realized this is not necessary and no one had asked us to be one of them. Women are different than men. We speak differently, we act differently, we are innately compassionate, great listeners and excel at problem solving. Be yourself and play to both your personal and gender-specific strengths.

Be vocal and make sure your boss knows your aspirations.

Be sure to establish open communication with your boss – and maybe even your boss’ boss – especially in regards to your career trajectory. Men are more aggressive about letting everyone know what they’ve achieved and where they want to go, whereas women tend to be more passive or equate their success to good luck rather than their own skills. Put yourself on the radar of the people who not only need to know you have goals for yourself, but can help you achieve them.

Invest in building your own brand

Identify the personal qualities you bring to your business that are distinct from your colleagues and make sure this is recognized. Visibility is important – don’t be shy in highlighting your successes to ensure you receive the credit for them. Use all opportunities to share your thoughts about your company and the industry, be that via networking, writing articles or publishing blog posts, to bring you greater exposure and position yourself as a source of expertise. Also take advantage of any speaking opportunity that might arise: although conference agendas are dominated by men, organizers are crying out for good female speakers to address this imbalance.

Talking is good: find a mentor you relate to.

Your mentor should be someone who you feel can offer both the emotional and technical perspectives you need to grow your career. They need to have experienced the work and family challenges you’re facing and make you realize that you actually aren’t crazy when attending a ballet recital or ducking out of the office early to go to a pediatrician appointment the week before a big pitch. Talking is positive, so never see mentoring as a form of weakness: men do it all the time but just in a different environment.

Working long hours does not mean working effectively.

Who says that the person in the office for 12 hours a day is more effective than someone who works seven hours? It’s simply not true. Rather than leaving your calendar entirely open, book time for key activities such as research, brainstorming, keeping up to date with the industry, etc. See if you can even book days to leave early to spend time with your family. As a result, you will probably find that you are more efficient without spending more time in the office because you’re shifting focus from everything to just the most important things.

Base hiring on improving your team’s bench strengths, not who may be next on maternity leave.

When in a position to hire, women will often focus on the person and their qualifications rather than predict what their family might look like in a few years. All of us have been in a position multiple times to hire female candidates despite our male counterparts questioning whether the prospective employee may go on maternity leave in the future. This should not be a determining factor and women themselves should not stop forwarding their careers because they are planning a family. If someone is right for the job, that’s all that matters.

Don’t pay attention to what everyone else is doing.

Success in ad tech doesn’t mandate that women prioritize work over family – but that impression is often what drives many women away. While women like Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, may have cut back their maternity leave, this is their personal choice and others may choose a different career and parenting approach that works for them. No one should have to put their life on hold. Find a way to make it work for YOU.

Make a plan to balance your personal and work lives.

If you find that you love your career in ad tech and also have a family – or plan to start one – don’t immediately assume you can’t do both. Make a plan with your spouse to balance work and family, rather than simply reacting to demands on your time. That way, you both will know what’s happening, there won’t be any surprises and you can support each other in both career and personal aspirations.

Learn as much as you can from as many people as you can.

To succeed and lead within an ad tech company, you are expected to know the product and its underlying infrastructure. For many women, this is the hardest part of their job. Don’t be afraid to sit in a room with an expert (either an engineer or a product person who knows their stuff or a veteran who has been in the industry for decades) and get answers to your questions. The deeper your knowledge of the industry and your product, the more success you will have in your career, and the more valuable you will become to your company – be you male or female.

Remember to take care of yourself.

While you need to take care of your work responsibilities, you also have to take care of your family and yourself! Find time to exercise, even if it is at 5 a.m., and, as hard as it sounds, try to eat healthy – even on the road. If you are not happy and healthy, the rest will never work.

With reporting by Nicolle Pangis and Maureen Little

Denise Colella is the chief revenue officer at Maxifier, a company that provides inventory optimization services to online publishers, ad networks and leading media companies throughout North America and Europe. 

Prior to joining Maxifier, Colella was the CRO at AudienceScience, and a vice president at Yahoo!. 

Follow her on Twitter @decolella

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yoda said, “always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice.” For the Jedi, as for entrepreneurs, mentorship is vital to providing the next generation with the knowledge they need.

However, in this internet era on earth, mentorship no longer needs to be a one-on-one, in-person experience.

#StartupLab is an online program where startup luminaries can share their lessons learns, advice, and wisdom to aspiring young entrepreneurs during interactive live video chats. It is put on by Citi and the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only, nonprofit organization founded to address youth joblessness and underemployment. Members are promising young entrepreneurs that use the platform as a place to interact, network, exchange ideas, ask for help, and discuss relevant issues. I interviewed Scott Gerber, as well as three successful startup founders, to hear their thoughts on business, entrepreneurial values, and bits if wisdom for those who want to follow in their footsteps.

Scott Gerber – Young Entrepreneur Council

Scott Gerber is the force behind the YEC. He ran a highly lucrative business while in college…until it completely collapsed. Not one to be deterred, he persisted down the entrepreneurial path, sleeping on many couches along the way. He ultimately created a name for himself within the tech community as a writer, chronicling life in the trenches as an entrepreneur. In 2008 when unemployment was at its worst, Gerber wanted to do something more to help. He tapped into his network, organized events, and set off a small organic movement that ultimately became a fully-formed organization — the YEC.

Scott Gerber

The YEC connects hundreds of young people with successful entrepreneurs from all industries in an effort to usher in a new wave of business leaders. Its stated mission is to “retool and retrain the current workforce into a more entrepreneurial one by putting the resources aspiring entrepreneurs need to thrive directly in their hands — thereby empowering them to create thousands of new businesses (and jobs).”

Mentorship has long been an important part of a flourishing startup ecosystem, and Gerber said he feels a responsibility to impart this knowledge to young people. Whether due to aspiration or necessity, entrepreneurship is taking off, Gerber said in an interview. Moreover, entrepreneurial education makes you more employable, he said. It helps you understand critical thinking, how to create opportunities for yourself, and is a valuable insight into how fast the world is changing.

Gerber was fortunate to have a group of understanding and influential mentors that helped him get back on his feet. Not everyone has the same ability to find strong role models, and #StartupLab strives to break down the barriers make mentorship as easy and accessible as possible. Every week, a successful entrepreneur takes the digital stage and conducts a live chat on a topic of their choosing. The interactive sessions are delivered for free on Facebook to both individual members and participating organizations that broadcast these chats to their communities. Tens of thousands of people have tuned in to catch the pearls of wisdom dropped by some of the world’s top entrepreneurs.

Adam Goldstein – Hipmunk

Adam Goldstein founded Hipmunk in 2010 after graduating from MIT. As captain of the debate team, he was continuously frustrated by the process of booking team trips. He moved to San Francisco, and along with Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman began cranking away at Hipmunk, a company that seeks to “take the agony out of travel planning.” Hipmunk went through Y Combinator‘s summer 2010 class where the founders had access to some of the best startup mentors out there. While this experience was extremely valuable, Goldstein said the type of information and guidance he received as part of that closed community could easily be extended to others.

Adam Goldstein

“The truth is that it is not so important whether mentorship happens one-on-one, or to many,” he said in an interview. “I learned a lot of valuable stuff from reading articles by smart people, and the distributed model of #StartupLab makes it more accessible. There is no reason why it has to be or should be restricted. The sets of challenges startups face are remarkably consistent and we can help each there avoid the same pitfalls.”

Goldstein said his key bits of advice are to ensure every member of the team is on the same page and holds the same overarching vision of the company, as well as the same degree of commitment. He also emphasized the necessity of persistence, resilience and clear communication.

“If you don’t keep trying, you are never going to make it,” he said. “If it doesn’t work the first time, you are either going to quit or not quit. If you quit, your chances of succeeding are zero. If you don’t quit, it is more than that. Many successful entrepreneurs have had strings of failures before they came to eventual success.”

Jenny Fleiss – Rent the Runway

While there are valuable lessons to be learned from failure, these same lessons can be imparted through other channels. Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman were non-technical, first time entrepreneurs who managed to create the incredibly successful business Rent the Runway. The two women met at Harvard Business School and realized that the problem of a ‘closet full of clothes but nothing to wear’ is held by women all across America, and in this problem, lay tremendous opportunity. They began testing the concept at on consumers, recruiting engineers, and building the product.

Jenny Fleiss

During a phone chat, Fleiss said it was difficult to raise money at first because many of the middle-aged, white, male venture capitalists did not understand the idea or the market. That changed after they saw videos of women interacting with the platform. Rent the Runway recently raised $20 million and now, their investors are active partners that help their company grow. She chose to lead a #StartupLab session to give back to the community which helped her build a nascent idea into a flourishing business.

“As a first time entrepreneur, there is a lot of learning you have to go through,” she said. “It is great to have more experienced people on your team and in your network to provide insight. I am a huge advocate of helping young entrepreneurs and building the community by sharing practical information like how to test out a concept and how to iterate. This leads to innovation, positive energy, and creativity. Life as an entrepreneur is empowering and humbling at the same time.”

Jason Nazar – DocStoc

Mentors often provide more than advice. Yoda not only shared wisdom with Luke, but also practical fighting techniques. Words are one thing, but often what aspiring entrepreneurs need are real-world resources. Jason Nazar is the CEO and cofounder of DocStoc, an online library of documents that small businesses can use to start, grow, and manage their operations. According to Nazar, DocStoc has 20 million visitors a month and 30 million registered members. These numbers alone demonstrate the high demand for entrepreneurial resources.

“The big need any time you are running your own business is to find people that have skill sets, connections, or experiences that you don’t have or haven’t had yet,” he said. “If you can get access to those connections and skill sets, to the wisdom of those experiences, it makes your business better. The entrepreneur that does a lot to help out other entrepreneurs and seeks help will be more successful.”

There are basic issues that face every entrepreneur, whether it be in recruiting, fundraising, product development, marketing, or any of the other infinite things to consider while building a business from scratch. High unemployment combined with startup success stories (read: Mark Zuckerberg) means entrepreneurship has become an increasingly desirable career route.

That said, discussions of the “Series A Crunch” emphasize more than ever the importance of competence. Building a business is about more than a great idea. It is about hard work, knowledge, and access to a network of resources. #StartupLab may not help people discover the  next billion dollar idea. But every Thursday, it keeps the ecosystem flowing as successful entrepreneurs use the platform to “pay it forward.”

Mentorship is a critical component for many successful entrepreneurs. No matter how smart you are – and how good your idea is – it’s always easier when you have someone who has been through it before (in some capacity).

I’ve previously written about how to capture the eye of a venture capitalist as a mentor, but sometimes it’s more advantageous to be under the wing of an industry leader. The problem is: Odds are you don’t know any.

I study mentorship in a method and magnitude method that helped me become one of Stanford’s first EIRs (entrepreneur in residence). Here are some morsels on how to secure a mentorship from those heads of industry – even when they don’t know you from Adam.

Move towards something specific – When you make a commitment, the universe moves with you. That might sound a little new-age-y, but I believe moving towards something specific helps a lot in achieving that goal – in this case, getting a mentor.

Put another way: Asking for general help is a turn off to potential mentors, just as generic questions will get you nowhere. Ask for specific help when you have the opportunity.

Target events where your potential mentor is a speaker – Important people want to look busy in public. They may say no to a coffee or a lunch date, but ask to walk them from the car to the conference (or vice versa) and you can have 12 minutes of one-on-one time.

These dozen minutes can be the equivalent value of four years of tuition at some colleges.

Get in late. Get out early. – Industry leaders (along with VCs) are pattern recognizers. The pattern you want to signal is person who executes and moves forward.

The way to achieve that is by getting into the conversation late (in other words, by just jumping in) and getting out early.

Recommend that they speak - Conference producers are looking for feedback from the people that pay to attend stuff. In an email tell the conference producer that you got value out of your parking lot walk with your soon-to-be mentor. Layer in that they should speak for 30 minutes to expand what it is that you learned from that same mentor. Even if you fail, you move forward.

Invite them to things – Important people like to say no to stuff and like to ignore invites.

But when they stop getting invited they go bezerk. Here is some insight… They can never get invited enough.

You should market yourself – You probably know this already. Heck, I hope you do! But not everyone knows how. The best way to do this is by:

• Closing emails with a pitch for mentorship
• Acquiring their cell phone number at live events
• Put their cell in the subject line. Or if you don’t have it — put yours in
• Have detailed subject lines that jive with your specific goal

Role-play interactions with real mentors – Before you call me insane, know that I stole this idea.

You should be able to almost guess what your mentor is going to say. Napolean Hill, in chapter 11 of “Think and Grow Rich,” had an entire board of dead people that comprised of his advisory board. He took actual meeting minutes of imaginary conversations with dead people.

Step one is imagining your interactions with real people. Step two is to confirm your guestimations of their advice via email. If you’re right, you’re on your way to securing a mentor.