July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yup, you still live in a world where singer Alicia Keys works for BlackBerry.

On stage at today’s BlackBerry Live conference, Keys, the company’s Global Creative Director, announced the BlackBerry Scholars Program, a four-year scholarship that’ll be available to outstanding female students around the world. Applicants will also need to be focusing on specific science and technology curriculums to receive the scholarship.

“It’s clear we need to elevate more women to leadership roles,” Keys said.

She pointed out some startling disparities between men and women in the technology industry: Even though more women earn college degrees than men, only 5 percent of women lead startups, 56 percent leave the technology industry after entering it, and women make up only 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. While the BlackBerry scholarship won’t immediately fix these systemic problems, it’s an effort to level the playing field a bit.

“This is more than just a scholarship, this is the beginning of a powerful network of women,” Keys said.

Photo: BlackBerry livestream

That’s one of the questions that Sarah Hanson, a 19-year-old developer and entrepreneur, asked herself. Especially since she knows exactly what she wants to do with her life already.

Last year, Hanson helped her grandmother find a assisted living home. It was time-consuming, tedious, and a horrible experience — exactly the kind of problem that an aspiring entrepreneur loves to find.

Because, of course, solving problems is the core of any business.

UPDATE: Sarah Hanson may not exist, may be a hoax

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson

So she funded a startup to make finding care homes for the elderly easier and better. She built a functioning first version of the product, and she’s looking for funding in an innovative source: her own future income. This past week she successfully raised $125,000 in seed money by auctioning off 10 percent of her future income for 10 years.

Hanson talks about her experience, why she auctioned off her future income, and how she plans to build the business:

VentureBeat: You sold 10 percent of your future earnings for 10 years. Does that make you feel free? Or burdened?

Sarah Hanson: I’ll say this. Is this the most ideal path? No but it’s a path that gives me freedom of time, and that’s the most valuable asset I have.

VentureBeat: What made you decide to do this?

Hanson: The idea of sitting in classes, taking tests, writing papers, et cetera, for the next three years, learning a lot of things that won’t be applicable to my career, seems pointless to me. A lot of people go to college to figure out what they want to do. I know. I started playing around with code when I was 12. So for me, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time and money that it would take to get a degree.

Everything I need to learn to be the best I can be is available online at no cost. Some people need the structure of a class to learn. I learn best through doing, through creating which I can do for free.

When you want something you get creative. I want to fully devoted to Senior Living Map to see what I can make up it.

This money is my runway. It gives me a 1-2 year window of time to put all my effort behind growing Senior Living Map into hopefully something that can provide income for me for the indefinite future.

It’s an opportunity to never be an employee, never work a job I hate, never have a boss. It’s an opportunity to invest all my time in something I love, creating something hopefully other people love.

All reasons that will keep me highly motivated.

VentureBeat: Who bought your 10 percent of your future income?

Hanson: I’ve exchanged a couple emails with the winning bidder. She’s asked that I keep her name confidential.

She lives in San Francisco. I’ll be flying down there next week to meet with her.

She’s a pretty accomplished person in the tech world. I’m not sure if there’s any point in mentioning that. I’m sorry; I can’t get more specific. The last thing I want to do is piss her off

VentureBeat: You only got three bids, but it turned out to be enough. How many requests or inquiries did you make?

Hanson: I emailed 1,000 investors I found on angel.co to make them aware of the auction. It was quite a tedious process, but I figured I’ve got one shot at this, I’ve got to try my best to get myself the best shot of getting bids.

VentureBeat: You’re planning to start a company, Senior Living Map. Is this an underserved market?

Hanson: It’s started; the site exists at www.seniorlivingmap.org.

Is it an underserved market? Based on my experience of going through the process of finding a senior living home for my grandmother, I would definitely say yes.

My definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity … a line that I have to give credit to Aaron Levie for. …

Currently, the dominant model for finding a senior home for your parent, relative, or other loved one is to use a “Care Adviser,” who would take into account the type of home and care you are seeking and then provide some recommended options at no cost to you.

Sounds great, right?

But how does the Care Adviser make money if they are not charging you for their services? Well, when you choose one of the locations they recommend, that facility will pay them a “placement fee,” which is often thousands of dollars.

Hmmm … is it just me or does that seem like a conflict of interest? Are people really getting recommendations for the best matches, or rather the homes that the Care Adviser stands to profit from the most?

There may be a home that is a perfect match for your parent or relative; however, if your Care Adviser doesn’t have a contract with them, there’s no motivation for them to even mention it to you.

That’s why I created Senior Living Map. I wanted to create a resource that lists all senior and assisted living facilities available so that people can be equipped with information to determine what senior homes are the best match.

I view Care Advisers like travel agents. Before Expedia,  you had to book travel through a travel agent. They controlled all the information. Travel sites like Expedia came along and gave all the power to people and made travel agents irrelevant. They provided people will all the information they needed to make travel decisions on their own.

That’s what I want to do with senior housing. I want to provide a super-simple resource for people that provides them with a robust amount of information so that they can make a decision on their own without the need to go through a third party.

It’s really shocking to me that no site exists that does that but I’m excited that I have the chance to be that site. It’s probably because senior homes aren’t a very sexy or glamorous thing so it doesn’t get much attention

VentureBeat: What’s your monetization plan for the site?

Hanson: That’s something that’s to be determined. There aren’t any ads or anything on the site currently to generate money.

I feel like the site will evolve over the next year, and I feel like if I make a decision on how the site will make money today it will steer me away from creating the best user experience because it may conflict with how the site will generate money.

It’s like companies that are being disrupted by the Internet. They are so use to making money a certain way that they have a hard time going away from what made them as powerful as they are.

The problem with that is you’re fighting against an inevitable force that will slowly take the company to its grave.

My number one focus is on creating the best experience possible for users. Once I feel like I’ve reached that point, I’ll figure out a way to layer some business model over that experience that makes the most sense.

VentureBeat: Does the 10 percent of future earnings include anything you make from Senior Living Map?

Hanson: Yeah. The 10 percent includes any income I receive from any source for the next 10 years.

VentureBeat: Are you a developer or programmer?

I coded the site myself. I’m an army of one.

VentureBeat: What kind of features do you want to add to the Senior Living Map? Reviews? Testimonials? Inside camera shots?

Hanson: The site is pretty bare-bones right now. Long term, I’d like to make it much more robust with all the things you mentioned and more. Also, additional filters so that just like booking a hotel or flight on a travel site, you can narrow down your options to something very specific. Like a home that only accepts women or a home that speaks a certain language.

It’s quite an undertaking to collect all that data but that’s the long term goal of the site.

VentureBeat: Why’d you choose 32auctions to run the sale?

Hanson: 32auctions doesn’t have any closing fees like eBay and other auctions site do.

VentureBeat: And how is your grandmother doing in her home?

Hanson: She’s doing good It was a bit of a process, but we ended up finding a great place for her where she seems to be happy.

She says they take good care of her

Image credit: ShutterStock/Sold at auction

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Serious gamers did not shy away from confronting serious issues at third day of the Game Developers Conference — including gambling.

A panel on the hotly debated issue of gambling in games was packed. The big questions for the experts: Is gambling the next big growth opportunity? And if so, how should it be regulated?

Panelists: Roxanne Christ, Latham & Watkins; Wim Stocks, Virgin Gaming; Paul Thelen, Big Fish; and Michael Pachter, Equity Research.

“I think there will be a lot of learning this year,” said Big Fish Games CEO Paul Thelen.

Thelen is keeping a close eye on states like California with laws on the books to regulate online gambling. It’s a revenue opportunity for Big Fish, the  largest producer of casual games.

In future, Thelen revealed that he plans to partner with casinos to tap into the “massive addressable market” for bringing money into skill-based gaming tournaments.

The company has already joined up with Betable, a U.K.-based company that lets players add real money to games. Big Fish is avoiding lawsuits by taking advantage of new technology that verifies the identities of each player.

Still, it’s a highly contentious topic, and most of the panelists said they prefer to err on the side of caution. For instance, Virgin Games’ Wim Stocks remarked that his company is reluctant to offer any kind of prize or reward to players under 18.

In the face of regulation, Latham and Watkins lawyer Roxanne E. Christ predicts an explosion of mergers and acquisitions and deals. In particular, casinos will be looking to acquire and partner with social gaming startups.

“Casino’s know how to do business in a regulated environment,” she said. “But gaming companies are bringing great content.”

Another big issue on the panelists’ minds is user privacy. Should companies make money by selling personal data about players? Christ said the Federal Trade Commission is increasingly concerning itself with data security and online games. But we’re nowhere near solving this problem.

The first game companies to introduce gambling will be “pioneers,” according to Thelen. For now, the risk is extremely high.

However, he speculated that the market opportunity will be worth close to $20 billion in the next few years in the United States alone. ”Imagine you’re in Wisconsin and there are barriers to gambling — just open your iPhone or Android and jump online,” he said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Yes, this is about the Adria Richards/SendGrid/PlayHaven/PyCon thing. And this is about the inevitable clash between a boy’s club locker room culture and women in technology. But much, much, much more than that, it’s about the reaction.

Update: Adria Richards’ statement

Or should I say the reactions. By everyone involved.

I have been in email communication with both the fired Adria Richards and the fired PlayHaven developer for the past two days. They are reasonable, normal, approachable people. And right now they’re both scared and bewildered at all that has happened.

But this morning Adria broke my heart, and the hearts of all those who give a damn about women in technology.

Last night, at about 2 a.m., after a series of emails with her, I said this:

Tell me at least that u will not be the next Kathy Sierra.

Kathy Sierra is a smart, passionate, funny woman in technology who essentially said her goodbyes to the online world after receiving multiple rape and death threats for, essentially, being a woman in technology. Hacker Andrew Auernheimer, who was just sentenced to 41 months in jail for an unrelated (and controversial) crime, was one of those who harassed her. Sierra’s last blog post, from her awesome “Creating Passionate Users” blog, was in 2007.

The worst thing that could happen here in this new situation — along with a developer losing his job and his ability to provide for his children — is that as a result of this incident, we’d lose another smart, passionate, funny, and awesome woman in technology. But that might happen.

Her answer, at 6:05 AM this morning?

I’m staying safe.

And that broke my heart. And that made me get up and write this on my day off. And I hope it breaks yours.

Look, whatever “side” of this you’re on, here’s what happened:

1. Some guys made some guy jokes about guy stuff
2. A woman got offended and did something that was probably an over-reaction
3. Some conference organizers over-reacted
4. A company (PlayHaven) over-reacted
5. The internet (all of us, but especially Anonymous) over-reacted
6. Another company (SendGrid) over-reacted

I’ve been cursed and pilloried and told to go kill myself by people on both sides of the issue just for writing about these events. People from both sides see what they want to see and, like trained attack dogs, go in for the kill with little consideration, no mercy, no nuance, no shades of grey. They are so blinded by their self-righteousness that they’re perfectly OK with perpetrating more metaphorical violence in the service of their almighty god-blessed cause.

It’s been unbelievably worse for Adria.

She’s been extensively hated on. Threatened with rape. Threatened with decapitation — I saw the tweet with a picture of a stripped dead woman, bloody on a bed, head unattached to the torso, myself. (It’s now deleted and the Twitter account has been suspended.)

And yeah, it’s been horrible for the PlayHaven developer who lost his job. Who had his character and reputation assaulted in public. Who now has to find a new job in tech to support his kids. What’s worse, is that he’s not in Silicon Valley, where coders are in crazy urgent over-demand and a job is a cheap commodity to be tossed aside and picked up again whenever you wish. It won’t be easy for him.

So now here we are.

A developer has lost his job for no really good reason (as Richards has also said). The Internet exploded, with a significant chunk of it spewing hate and vitriol, including rape and death threats. A developer evangelist has lost her job too, for no really good reason. And women and men in technology have even more baggage and mistrust to process .

All because a developer and a developer evangelist made a couple of mistakes.

Where’s the forgiveness? Where’s the acceptance? Where’s the ability to not fly off the handle and go apeshit at zero to sixty when we see something we don’t like or we have a problem? Why do we feel we can call people whores, or idiots, or scumbags, or worse, just because there’s a computer and some wires between us and them?

Do we now live in a culture where there are no second chances, where there’s no ability to call a Mulligan, get a do-over, or just have a bad day?

Who can live that like? Who’s the perfect one among us who doesn’t screw up?

I’ve been slandered by both sides for my perceived bias on this, and I agree that no person and no journalist is completely unbiased. I’ve tried to draw a balanced line here, but I figure that if I’m going to be damned, I might as well be damned for what I actually believe.

So here it is:

I think this would never have hit the fan if the PlayHaven developer had just told one or two jokes, then let other people actually listen to the presentation. I think this would never have hit the fan if Adria had just turned in her seat and said, “Hey guys, do you mind?” I think this would never have hit the fan if the conference organizers had just gone up to the developer and said, “Hey, can you tone it down, please?” I think this would never have hit the fan if PlayHaven had not taken this slim pretext to fire a developer for a couple of dongle jokes.

But everyone over-reacted.

Everyone escalated, instead of taking a half a moment to think, relax, chill, give the benefit of the doubt, be a little easy-going, and realize that everyone is bloody well human and we all make mistakes.

Once the PlayHaven developer was fired, that was the tipping point. Then the Internet erupted, as male developers saw one of their own attacked for something that just about every man can envision himself doing. Then hackers targeted SendGrid with a DDOS attack.

Then SendGrid took the next step in escalation. And cowardice. They cut and run, and left their employee hanging in the wind. And made a bad situation even worse.

But SendGrid had another option.

Its leaders could have taken a leadership role. Maybe create a forum to talk about this issue. Bring Richards and the PlayHaven developer together for a public conversation. Ask Richards to extend an olive branch, which she already basically has done, by saying she didn’t intend for him to lose his job and that she feels bad that he did. Offer the dude a job. Ask Richards and him to come to a public understanding. Wrap it up in a bow and turn poisonous lemons into lemonade: a chance for us to advance the conversation between women and men in technology without the yelling, without the threats, without the hate.

And I think they would have come out like heroes.

What does this mean for women in the future who try to take a stand (whether right or not)? What do you do now if you are a woman in technology and you feel harassed or abused and want to shine a light on it, but now see this prominent woman totally abandoned by her company?

I’ll tell you what you do, unless you’re a saint or a hero. You shut up. You put your head down. You grin and bear it, because it’s a man’s world. And you leave, eventually, for a better place.

And we’re all poorer as a result.

Adria Richards’ Twitter account has 32,383 tweets and 12,204 followers. Most days, she would post multiple times, adding her voice to the wider conversation that is technology.

Since March 20, she has not published a single tweet. There have been no new posts on her blog.

She’s been silenced.

Congratulations, Internet.

photo credit: Chuckumentary via photopin cc

Update: SendGrid is now under DDOS attack

BREAKING: SendGrid has now fired Adria Richards

Update Mar 27: Adria Richards’ statement

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two allegedly began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The other developer, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was fired by PlayHaven for the incident (PlayHaven confirmed this today). He posted about what happened from his perspective on Hacker News and denied that any sexual comments were made about forking:

While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery, the highest form being implementation, and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo.” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.

He added that, in his opinion, this was not a fair fight. And that as a result of Richards’ tweet, he — a father of three — was fired from his job:

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.

Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl, saying she took the comments for as long as she could, but when she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a stand for her and all the women who have not considered technology as a career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

As the conversation violated PyCon’s rules of conduct, and as she was personally offended, she decided to make the developers’ behavior public. As a result of her tweets, PyCon staff talked to her, identified the men, and escorted them out of the room. Within days, apparently, one of the developers lost his job — although there is now a Care2 online petition asking PlayHaven to give “the mistreated employee their job back.”

The upshot?

A storm of opinion and controversy has erupted on Richards’ blog and Twitter accounts about whether her actions were appropriate or not, and much of it has turned misogynistic and nasty. Developers and others, both male and female, have expressed differing opinions, with some supporting Richards and others condemning her for being too harsh. One has even posted a 10-minute video on Tumblr attacking her. A Pastebin record of the incident from the developers’ perspective is currently a top-four link on Hacker News.

One woman developer, @snipeyhead, went so far as to say that Richards’ actions actually make things worse for women:

@sandys1 Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech

— snipe ツ (@snipeyhead) March 21, 2013

While standing by her actions, Richards has tweeted that she did not think the developer should lose his job. It’s fairly clear that getting him fired was not her intention. And it’s also pretty obvious that the PyCon code of conduct, which presumably all attendees had the opportunity at least glance at and agree to, prohibits conversations like the one the developers were engaged in:

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.

Still, it’s a tough situation for the developer in question — and perhaps for other developers who must now be concerned about their language and conduct not only in the office but away from the job. Perhaps that’s a good thing, to a certain extent, but it’s also a chilling effect and a limitation on the idea freedom of speech (even though the 1st Amendment only protects against government censorship).

Which freedom, by the way, Richards has used to publicly made sexual references in a joking manner herself, just a few days prior to this incident:

@skwashd you should put something in your pants next time…like a bunch of socks inside one…large…sock.TSA agent faint

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 14, 2013

I’ve tried to reach out to Richards via Twitter but have not heard back. Likely, she’s not checking her Twitter messages, as many of them appear to be insulting … or even criminal, with one going so far as to threaten rape and another so vile that I cannot embed it here that essentially threatens both rape and murder. (I’ve flagged that tweet for Twitter to consider and hopefully remove, by the way, and you might wish to do the same.) A Ruby on Rails developer forwarded it to me, who added a very sad note:

I can’t imagine my daughter wanting to get into an industry that has these sorts of things happen. So evil.

VentureBeat will continue to try to get a comment from Richards.

SendGrid, too, has been drawn into the conversation, with some male developers I’ve spoken to (who do not want to be named) saying that they’re less likely to use SendGrid as a result. Richards tweeted that SendGrid did support her, however.

There’s no neat knot to tie up on this one. Essentially, too many men and women in America — and in technology — have different ideas about what is appropriate and what is not. There’s no question that women face huge challenges in technology, and there’s also no question that the Twitter and blog comment response from the wider community has gone way over the top.

Frankly, it would be great to bring Richards and the now-unemployed developer together to discuss what has happened and how we can move forward from here. If you’re him, please contact me about this issue.

photo credit: Liam Wilde via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I tweeted to female entrepreneurs and developers to ask whether they enjoy the “women in tech” conversation or avoid it, and why. I hit a nerve and received dozens of responses, which we compiled using Storify. Check it out at the bottom.  

Silicon Valley’s tech industry still has a gender problem.

The woman-in-tech topic has been debated ad nauseam for years. You might be bored sick of it, but the numbers refuse to budge.

“We don’t want to be seen as crazy bitches moaning about the same issue,” explained Jenn Wei, a twentysomething investor at Blumberg Capital, when asked about the lack of women in venture capital.

Women represent less than 10 percent of venture capitalists, and they have been leaving the industry at twice the rate of men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Wei is well aware of the gender imbalance and has written about it, but said she is fearful about “overplaying the victim card.”

For this reason, women in the male-dominated tech industry have historically shunned the topic, particularly in conversations with the press.

Former Epiphany chief executive Karen Richardson was one of the few women executives in tech in the 1990s and 2000s, and she spent most of her career deflecting questions about gender. It was considered “whiny and snively” to draw attention to it, she said.

But the tide is changing. With the emergence of all-female workshops, meetups, and social groups like Women 2.0 and Women Who Code, many female entrepreneurs that were shy are now forcing the issue. And better yet, they are banding together with men — and each other — to actively make improvements.

“For the first time in over 30 years, the gender conversation can be a productive dialogue,” Richardson said.

We can all stand to benefit from a more balanced workforce. A recent report from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology observed that gender and ethnic diversity in a workplace strengthens decision-making, and diverse teams tend to be more innovative. Women-led startups are proving to be more capital-efficient, and venture-backed 
companies run by a woman have 12 percent higher revenues than others, according to research by Illuminate Ventures.

Many women say it’s a great time to be in tech, although they believe there is a long journey ahead and much progress still needs to be made. The primary problems they currently face, and their suggested solutions are the following:

‘It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect…’

Knotch’s team (L-R): CEO Anda Gansca, Designer Rebecca Chaika, CTO Stephanie Volftsun.

Stephanie Volftsun is the technical lead at all-female tech startup, which is a surprise to most people that she meets.

Female chief technical officers and senior engineers are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Why? Women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science at colleges and universities is decreasing, according to the National Science Foundation.

Volfstun is the daughter of Russian immigrants — both engineers — and has been coding for most of her life. At 23, she is a “full stack” engineer, meaning that she can build mobile stack, web stack, or native applications for her startup, Knotch.

Volftsun would earn a six-figure salary at any tech company, but she is reluctant to work at a male-dominated tech startup again.

“At college, I didn’t feel the pressure of being the only girl in my computer science classes because everyone starts out on a blank slate and you have your grades to build you up,” Volftsun said.

As a professional (she landed her first job as a back-end engineer at financial technology startup Addepar), she found it more difficult to prove herself to her fellow developers. “It was harder for me to gain the same level of respect my male peers had,” she said.

This perspective is shared by hundreds of women in the tech industry, according to a report by the Level Playing Field Institute. Its 2011 study found that IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, prompting those employees to seek out other industries.

The problem isn’t just too few female engineering grads — it’s that junior-level programmers are leaving the industry in their droves.

The NSF conducted deeper research that revealed that workplace culture is a big problem. In a survey of almost 4,000 female engineers, a third of respondents said they left the industry due to a bad boss or negative working environment.

One quote from the NSF report is particularly troubling, especially as it reflects the experience of many women: “At my last engineering job, women were fed up with the culture: arrogant, inflexible, completely money-driven, sometimes unethical, intolerant of differences in values and priorities. I felt alienated in spite of spending my whole career trying to act like a man.”

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This is a guest post by growth equity investor Sonya Brown 

As more women move into the C-suite, they are shaking up the order of things. New research shows that startups with female executives are more likely to succeed.

But according to Dow Jones, the median proportion of female executives at successful companies is still only 7.1 percent.

This is likely to change in the coming years — Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg and Meg Whitman are all examples of powerful women who currently lead significant consumer and enterprise companies. The advantages of female leadership at tech companies are numerous — among them, relationship-building and networking.

I believe relationships are the lifeblood of business success — relationships with customers, partners, team members, family members and more. In my experience, women tend to build and maintain more relationships than men and are more likely to integrate their personal relationships with professional relationships.

This is reflected in the rise of social networking, as evidenced by Facebook statistics. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reports that women drive 62 percent of Facebook messages, update and comment activity, and 71 percent of daily fan activity.  Women also have more Facebook friends than men and spend more time on the site.

Building strong personal and professional networks has always been a top priority of mine. It served me well when I had to search for outstanding people to fill leadership roles.

My most successful recruits were not identified by traditional executive search firms or a formal recruiting processes, but rather by tapping into my own network. This process is growing in popularity amongst women executives seeking individuals with strong networking skills, as well as general business acumen.

It’s all about fitting into the corporate culture, and sometimes chatting online or interviewing a potential recruit over a cup of coffee at Starbucks will reveal a lot more about a person.

My tips for aspiring female executives

Having a thriving career while maintaining a healthy family life is a balancing act for everyone, and for women in particular. I agree with Hillary Clinton — the first step is having a partner and support system that really understand and assist you in every way.

I call our family support system “Team Brown,” based on how we are able to come together in a unified, cooperative manner.

I also strongly encourage women to strive for a healthy work and personal life integration. The “Team Brown” approach makes it possible for us to blend our work, family and social life.  Here are a few of the things I do to have it all work seamlessly:

• Always on — Like many executives, my job is 24/7 and I am always “plugged in.” I embrace this mesh of work and personal time versus setting strict barriers to separate the two.  One of the things that works well for me is to meld professional and personal activities. For example, I recently interviewed a woman in Napa Valley for a C-level position on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Team Brown decided to make a day of it. While I interviewed, my family spent the afternoon at a local park. Later in the day, my husband and I fit in a wine tour.
• Choose your industry carefully — Before going in head first, take some time and do thorough research; know what you are getting yourself into regarding the demands of time, energy and travel.  To ensure success, make sure you are comfortable with the expectations of the industry before you step in.
• The right partner is crucial — Having an understanding partner is critical to attaining work/life balance.  Team Brown really does take a team, but my husband stands out as my biggest advocate and strongest supporter. It’s my top priority to play that role for him as well.
• The 7-minute commute – Minimizing commuting time throughout my career has enabled me to maximize available moments with my family whether it is a school play or just dinner time.

Sonya Brown is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners focusing on growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors, including information services, software, business services, financial services and consumer. 

She has been in the investment business for more than a decade, working with some amazing female executives , including the CEOs and Founders of Bailey 44, ModCloth, Physicians Formula, Airborne Health, Sparta Systems, The Rainmaker Group and Alarm Capital Alliance.  Sonya is also the proud mother of four children.

Top image via Shutterstock

This guest post is written by Vivek Wadhwa, VP of innovation and research at Singularity University.

You often hear Silicon Valley moguls say, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” They believe we’ve run out of ideas and that innovation is dead; that mobile and social-media technologies are our last hurrah. Not surprisingly, those are the kinds of startups they mostly fund.

It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that venture capitalists make investment decisions based on their gut feelings and instincts — what they call “pattern matching.” And who matches the pattern of a successful social-media CEO? Mark Zuckerberg, of course — the young, male college dropout. That’s great for the boys wanting to cut school, but it means other groups are left out — in particular women, Hispanics, and blacks. Attend any major tech event in the Valley, and you’ll notice their dearth.

I have been working with Singularity University as its VP of innovation and research, to encourage women to think big and help change the world. We want to do what we can to level the playing field and so are holding the door open for women applicants to our forthcoming graduate studies program, which teaches exponential technologies.

I have written extensively about the challenges that women in tech face: how they are commonly discouraged during childhood from becoming engineers and scientists; the struggles they face in male-dominated tech companies; and the way they are stereotyped and mistreated by some investors when they look for startup funding. This is despite the fact that male and female entrepreneurs show virtually no difference in motivation, education, and capability. Indeed, Kauffman Foundation’s analysis showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men, and Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men.

But here is the good news. The pessimists who claim innovation is dead and mankind is doomed are dead wrong (pun intended). And the bursting of the social-media bubble has shown they are making the wrong investment decisions. As I explained in a previous post, this is the most innovative decade in human history. The future is not going to be one of dire shortages and stagnation; it is more likely to be one in which we debate how we can distribute the abundance and prosperity we’ve created.

Several technologies are advancing at exponential rates and converging, in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials. These advances are making it possible for small startups to solve humanity’s grand challengesn— including energy, education, water, food, and health.

I discussed some of these advances in my recent TEDx Bay Area Ignite talk.

In these rapidly evolving fields, the young male college dropouts who excel at social-media app-building have no advantage. Those with experience and education — particularly in fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — have the edge because they can work across disciplines and see the big picture.

Women are primed to lead in this new era. Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men. Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women’s participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women has grown almost tenfold.

It is not just the women who can lead; it is also entrepreneurs all over the world. There are few experts in these emerging fields, and the cost of developing technologies and starting companies has dropped dramatically over the past few years. Anyone, anywhere, can build the billion-dollar businesses in the new trillion-dollar industries that will emerge.

At the upcoming Women 2.0 “the next billion” conference, I will be presenting the results of our new research on women in tech. My team at Stanford and Lesa Mitchell of Kauffman Foundation surveyed 500 women entrepreneurs to learn what motivates them and why they took the leap into entrepreneurship. This will also provide insights into a book I am writing on how to encourage more women to become entrepreneurs, to think big, and to help solve humanity’s grand challenges. It is they who are going to save the world, after all.

[Photo credit: Semisatch/Shutterstock]

With all the reports of a dearth of women in business, it’s easy to forget that there are female chief executives running behemoths like Pepsi and HP.

A New York-based analytics startup, PeekYou, has compiled a list of the most influential female chief executives.

The executives on the list span a variety of industries, from enterprise technology to retail. Given the amount of media attention paid to technology companies of late, it’s no surprise that Silicon Valley-based CEOs dominate the list.

At the top of the list is HP CEO Meg Whitman. Tasked with retooling HP, Whitman has garnered a great deal of media interest, fending off competition from Marissa Mayer, who recently assumes the top job at Yahoo.

The list reminds me of a conversation that unfolded at Box‘s recent conference, Boxworks. A panel of female executives, including Epiphany’s former CEO Karen Richardson and Drugstore.com’s former CEO Dawn G. Lepore, made the salient point that women are often brought on in times of transition.

That’s certainly true in HP’s and Yahoo’s case: All eyes are on Mayer and Whitman. Can they re-energize flat-lining companies with a visionary corporate strategy?

No pressure.

Every executive on the list was given a PeekScore ranking between one and ten. As the company explains, the higher the score, the “more important” they are on the web. To calculate the ranking, the company takes into account known presence and activity on the Internet, including: blogging, participation in social networks, friends, followers, readers, the amount of content created, and prominence in the news. It’s not disimilar from a service like Klout, which analyze web streams to calculate a person’s social media influence.

“The sequence of the list seems pretty consistent with the notoriety and public awareness of each of these esteemed women,” Michael Hussey, PeekYou’s CEO, told me. “The list beyond those two (Whitman and Mayer) was rather a tight race but the scores certainly appear accurate.”

Note: with the servers hit during Hurricane Sandy, the site has not yet been restored to full functionality.

Attendees of VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat conference, November 28-29, will meet senior execs from both HP and Pepsi, both companies mentioned in PeekYou’s list. Rafal Los, Senior Security Strategist at HP, and Frank Edwards, Director of IT Strategy, PepsiCo are among the list of speakers. Learn more about CloudBeat here.

Check out the list of top female tech CEOs below — let us know what you think!

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DEMO 2012 in Silicon Valley was sensational. Launch day for a new company unspools like a 24-hour rollercoaster ride; our own team returned to Washington, DC, sleep deprived, technology addicted, and ready to try out a dozen new web and social innovations shared by our co-presenters from other startups.

Yet as I stood outside the packed ballroom at the Santa Clara Hyatt grabbing the mini-sliders and puff pastries, the girl in me emerged. I couldn’t help but scan the crowd looking for other female co-founders and C-level execs.

Frankly, there weren’t too many. So I grabbed one of the few women I saw right away — Catherine Spence of HireQ — to help me hunt down more women for some pre-conference female bonding.

Coming out of an education non-profit, I am keenly aware that we need great models of female CEOs and leaders to inspire the next generation of girls to choose entrepreneurship and STEM related opportunities.

For instance, Inc. Magazine recently reported women make up half of the workforce but only one in four workers in the technology industry and 15 percent of senior management.

And according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women comprise only 11 percent of tech workers in Fortune 500 Companies.

So who were some of the rock star women of DEMO 2012? How can we all cheer them on as they build great companies that will build more jobs for our country? In their own words, here is what several had to say on how they got into technology and their advice for the next generation.

How did you get into technology?

Catherine Spence, co-founder of HireQ: I am a bit of an accidental entrepreneur.

While some people know they want to start a business (or many businesses), I was driven by my passion for this idea: everyone should love their job, and companies should love their employees.

My background is not in technology, but it’s clear to me that technology has the potential to solve some of the challenges that face job seekers and companies in finding each other. Using technology in sleepy industries like recruiting is way to create big change.

Rebecca Bahr, co-founder of Flinja: I got into technology from high school when my physics teacher would introduce us to various technologies and just make everything sound really cool from the invention of post it notes to solar systems.

Melissa Tyree, co-founder and CIO of Itography: Both my father and grandfather were programmers, so I took all of the computer science classes that I could in high school.

I ended up studying civil engineering at Texas A&M but followed my tech roots and was a systems analyst at Deloitte right after college. It seems that whatever industry I work in, tech always draws me back in.

Anna Anisin, CEO of 4sync: I think of myself as a geek in heels. I was that girl wearing pink lipstick and playing around with all the latest gadgets.

I finally took a leap of faith and launched my first startup in my early twenties and have been an active member in SF’s tech community ever since.

Courtney Titus, co-founder and CMO of GivingTrax: It all started in 2002 with my first marketing internship for KACE in Silicon Valley.

What career advice would you give young girls?

Tyree: Don’t be afraid to fail. Do things that scare and challenge you and you will never be bored. I encourage my daughters to try many different things. You never know what might inspire you!

Titus:Intern, if you’re in college. Find great mentors. Try and try again; don’t give up.

I’m currently part of the startup leadership program down in San Diego, and it’s been a great experience. I would definitely recommend it to other aspiring women in tech.

Anisin: No matter what career you pick, it’s very important to work hard and never stop believing in yourself.

It is also very helpful to find one or two solid mentors, who can guide you and also brainstorm with you. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the support from my mentors.

Bahr: My advice to all girls thinking of going into technology is to never lose hope and never get intimidated by others. Technology can be fun, creative and challenging, but its not an easy journey so don’t give up.

Spence: As women, we hear a lot about the challenges that we face balancing work and family as we move through our careers. These challenges are real, and there are no right answers.

What works for you might not work for your best girlfriend. But these challenges do not need to be constraints. We are empowered by choices, to construct our lives and our careers based on our values, hopes, and dreams.

I am reminded of a quote by Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

My advice to girls is to accept the challenge of dreaming big and making choices.

Photo credits: Demo Fall 2012

Julie Kantor blogs weekly for Huffington Post and In the Capital on issues around social recruiting, job search, entrepreneurship, women in the workforce and more. She is the co-founder of Barrel of Jobs, a startup that made its debut at DEMO Fall 2012.

Whether we like it or not, Silicon Valley has entered into its golden years. Reality TV executives are flocking from Hollywood to the technology capital, and are spotlighting the young, wealthy and most telegenic entrepreneurs.

For women tech leaders, there is a grittier and far less glamorous reality to life in Silicon Valley. It’s far more relatable than 20-somethings galavanting in a San Francisco mansion. These high-powered women are struggling to juggle work life and a family, to gain respect from their male colleagues, and to pull the long hours required to build a successful startup.

Expect some frank honesty in Silicon Valley’s equivalent of ABC’s “The View“, launching this Monday. Bloomberg TV’s new television series known as “Women To Watch“, showcases the women that are closing the gender gap.

The first one-hour report will air this Monday at 9pm PT, and is hosted by star correspondent Willow Bay. The guests, Jessica Herrin, CEO of Stella & Dot, Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook, Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Managing Partner of Accel Partners and Selina Tobaccowala, SVP of Product and Engineering at Survey Monkey, will discuss topics like the Kleiner Perkins sex discrimination lawsuit, and why more women aren’t entering the tech field.

Bloomberg provided us with an advance on the show; I can tell you that it’s highly refreshing. These ladies are high-powered but are willing to fess’ up to some of the everyday challenges and offer useful tips.”There are some days I’m the most awesome CTO but not the best mom,” admits Padmasree Warrior, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Cisco.

“I’ve never felt any overt discrimination. It’s quite different than when I was a female engineer at GM and people asked me if I was bringing the mail,” Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, Accel Partners revealed when asked about the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit.

To learn more about life for female execs at Silicon Valley’s tech startups, check out this roundtable discussion with the ladies of Box. 

Here’s a preview of the show featuring Facebook’s Carolyn Everson. Enjoy!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For an enterprise company, Box has a surprisingly young and diverse workforce. It may have something to do with the young, quotable CEO Aaron Levie (a “phenom,” in the words of one exec) — or maybe it’s the lure of the slide that connects the main office to the lobby.

According to Box, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based enterprise startup, 30 percent of its employees are female, and the upper echelons of the organization reflect this gender ratio. This is all too rare in Silicon Valley, where few women are scoring the top jobs at startups. According to the annual study of California Women Business Leaders, tech companies have some of the lowest percentages of women directors and execs.

In an interview with the startup’s top female leaders, I’m reminded of that slogan, “Behind every great man, there’s a great woman.” In Levie’s case, it’s a coterie of women who encourage his long-term pursuits and rein him in during the occasional flight of fancy. Karen Appleton, the vice president of business development, reminds me of a younger, sassier Sheryl Sandberg. In our discussion, the single mother revealed why she made the “financially irresponsible” decision to join an early-stage startup — and, moreover, one that is the brainchild of a twentysomething college dropout. Appleton ran Box’s operations in the early days, scoring the first deals with giants like Dell. Box has also held on tight to top-flight engineer Kimber Lockhart, who came onboard through an acquisition of her company, Increo.

From left to right: Box executives Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, general manager of enterprise; Jen Grant, VP of marketing; Kimber Lockhart, director of engineering; and Karen Appleton, VP business development.

We gathered one Wednesday afternoon for a frank discussion at Box’s Palo Alto HQ about the company’s growth, taking leadership positions in a male-dominated industry, and, of course, the enterprise startups that are spurring the innovation of the next decade.

VentureBeat: Karen, you were one of the first employees at Box, then Box.net, when it was still a small, garage startup.

Karen Appleton: It was February 2007, and I was on a flight to Paris. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal and looked it up online. I thought it was supercool. That’s how I got connected with Aaron.

I was the first female employee and the first nontechnical hire. I have seen almost everything.

Karen Appleton, the VP of business development, was Box’s eighth employee.

VentureBeat: What’s your favorite story from the company’s early days?

Appleton: Dylan [Smith], Jeff [Queisser], Aaron, Florian [Jourda] … some of them lived in in a garage, sleeping on mats on the floor. It felt like a college boys’ dorm. There were cases where I would invite over big-name companies, like Seagate and Dell, and there would be balled-up laundry on the floor. I was a single mom. Really, I had no business considering taking the job at Box, but I took a chance.

VentureBeat: Especially when you were up against giants like Microsoft SharePoint.

Appleton:  When Aaron and I raised the Series B round of funding, the market conditions were not great. I remember when our blog post came out, “Enterprise Software is Sexy Again” [a TechCrunch guest article that Levie wrote], we had this “David and Goliath” mindset. We would take to anyone who would listen about business software. “B2C” [business-to-consumer] was so cool, “B2B” was just, well, meh. We wanted to say that business-to-business is actually blowing up. There is so much innovation here!

VentureBeat: Today, Box is working with some big-name customers like McAfee, LinkedIn, Volkswagen, and The Gap. How did you land your first big fish? And how have you adapted for the enterprise?

Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck: Procter & Gamble was our first marquee customer. They started working with us five years ago, and they were just using us in one small division. Last year, they bought a total of about 20,000 total licenses, with plans to expand more globally downstream.

VentureBeat: Kimber, you started a company before you joined Box. Have you felt the urge to do another?

Kimber Lockhart: When I joined, I was the seventh or eighth engineer at Box. My company, Increo, was acquired by Box in late 2009 after we took funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. I found more full stack engineers, a rare breed of programmer capable of doing server side and web work, and now run a team. It says a lot from a talent perspective: I’m a female CEO, engineer, out of Stanford, raised money, got acquired, came to Box … and stayed. Box is a true meritocracy. You can be blonde, female, black — we don’t care.

VentureBeat: Is Levie one of the reasons that Box has been able to attract young talent?

Jen Grant: We can hire fresh-out-of-school grads. Coupled with the experience of those of us who are a little older and have been around the block, it’s that wonderful combination of crazy big thinking and baggage!

Appleton: Aaron has good big-picture instincts. It’s been a really great direction for us to move the company in. He’s not as much wrong as much as he needs to be tempered sometimes.

Lockhart: From an engineering perspective, we have debates on an ongoing basis. How can we be stable and secure like an enterprise needs? Aaron is a phenom, an unusual animal.

Grant: There were many times in the history of Box where we could have settled. We could have been an FTP replacement. We could have gone to the niche of legal or construction; we see a huge market there. Aaron always said, “No, we are the world’s content. I want to replace SharePoint.”

VentureBeat: How would you sum up the culture at Box?

Tidmarsh Bouck: We are a little bit sassy, incredibly smart, a little wacky. We make sure the culture scales,and the people we hire augment the culture. It comes down through every manager in the organization. Every engineer is evaluated on a cultural scale, and we have said no to technically brilliant people that don’t fit.

Spotlighting women in tech has become such a pervasive theme in the media, but we rarely hear about female business leaders in emerging nations.

In an effort to ignite female entrepreneurship on a global level, Google has announced a partnership with Women 2.0, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to supporting female founders.

The organization’s first joint initiative will be to bring Women 2.0’s signature networking event to cities around the world. ‘Founder Friday,’ a meetup for female entrepreneurs that involves a keynote address, will begin in Detroit, Michigan, and Mexico City, followed by Sao Paulo, Brazil, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Moscow, Russia.

In San Francisco, where Women 2.0 hosts regular events, a typical ‘Founder Friday’ is attended by 350 people. Shaherose Charania, CEO and co-founder of the organization, said events like these are inspiring women to form communities and start companies. “Female founders are a driving force for the creation and usage of technologies that generate jobs,” she explained.

Mary Grove, Head of Entrepreneurship Outreach at Google said in a statement, “We’re looking forward to hosting these important gatherings in Google offices around the world and working together to help female entrepreneurs turn their ideas into innovative, sustainable businesses.”

This is part of a bigger push to support entrepreneurship on a global level, according to Google. Today, the company announced the launch of Google For Entrepreneurs, a set of programs to support startups around the world. The focus will be to partner with local communities and organizations, like Women 2.0. It’s a great recruitment tool, sure, but the company will also provide tools and resources to startups to help them grow. The search giant has also partnered with Startup Weekend and iHub in Kenya.

To read more about inspirational female leaders, meet the women of Forbes’ Midas list here. 

Top image via Shutterstock 

It’s a fortunate man who can blow through $35 million one week, only to be offered $12 million the next.

For serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, this story sums up the ethos of Silicon Valley. The day he experienced the most monumental failure of his career, upon the demise of Rocket Science Games back in 1997, Blank bumped into an old friend at a Palo Alto coffee shop.

“His first words to me were, ‘Steve, when do you start your next company?’” Chuckling, he added, “Where else do you hear that?”

Instead of going into hiding to nurse his bruised ego, Blank did what he usually does. He started another company. Epiphany, an enterprise software tool for marketers. He took Epiphany to an initial public offering in the height of the dotcom boom, then netted $329 million for the company in 2005, when it was acquired.

“Here in Silicon Valley, a failed entrepreneur is called experienced,” said Blank.

In all, Blank has founded eight companies. He told me he would have kept going if it weren’t for his wife and kids: “You get plenty of chances in your career, but only one with your family.” Through multiple business cycles, he has watched the technology industry thrive, perish, and thrive again.

I caught up with Blank, now retired, for a 30-minute chat the day after Marissa Mayer was named CEO, to talk about the real Silicon Valley, warts and all.

Launching the Lean Launchpad Movement

The story of Blank’s comeback is also one of his favorites to share with students. These days, he teaches a class at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia on how to build companies with a small budget, and quick and dirty engineering skills. This kind of thinking, which he describes as his “contribution of the last five years”, was coined “Lean startup” by his most promising student from Berkeley, Eric Ries.

Read more about the top classes for entrepreneurship in the U.S. 

Blank has always believed that there is something fundamentally different about the culture of a startup. Most people still believe they are just smaller versions of corporations. That’s not the right way to think about startups.

“Large, established companies execute business models, startups search for them,” he explained. Blank told me this search is where the real fun begins.

Steve Blank with graduates of Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program

Credited as one of the founders of the “lean” startup movement, Blank’s star has risen. He has traveled the world to espouse his method for discovering and marketing to customers in a startup’s early stage.

Shortly after wrapping up our interview, I was cautiously approached by a bright-eyed engineer in a startup T-shirt. “Was that Steve Blank?” he asked. In Silicon Valley, my coffee companion — a white-haired man in horn rimmed glasses and jeans – is treated with the reverence that teenage boys ordinarily reserve for Jessica Alba.

For budding entrepreneurs, the barriers to entry are toppling down and that’s inspiring. Technology is enabling the lean-startup process by driving down the cost and talent required to develop new products.

Silicon Valley: no longer an old boys club

Silicon Valley has transformed itself during Blank’s career as an entrepreneur. In a region that prides itself on constant innovation, it’s not often enough that we take the time to reflect. According to Blank, the “old boys club of venture capital” has evolved to become a meritocracy. No investor worth their salt would turn down a meeting with a promising entrepreneur, regardless or their age, gender, or race.

“There were no sit-ins or strikes,” said Blank. “Society became equal because we realized we could make more money by investing in the brightest.”

Still, Blank said Silicon Valley is not gender-blind yet. Grimacing, he said the venture capital community has recently become embarrassed by its treatment of women, although he did not mention the recent Ellen Pao – Kleiner Perkins case.

According to Blank, his female role models, “Marissa, Meg, and Carly,” are changing the rules of the game. “I’ve always liked smart women, they have to be twice as smart as the men in the room,” he said. With a twinkle in his eye, he added, “luckily, I have two daughters.”

The rise of ed-tech

As an investor and board member, Blank has dipped his finger in the proverbial honey pot. Currently, he sits on the board of IMVU, an online entertainment site. He gets most animated, however, on the topic of education technology.

“We have been hacking at this online education problem for over 50 years,” he said.

Blank explained that we are seeing the intersection of three trends that will make this click: the emergence of online classes on sites like Udacity (in which he’s an investor) and Khan Academy, the surge in venture capital investment in this space, and finally, the adoption of tablet computers that provide a mobile platform for learning.

This brings him back to a favorite topic, the ubiquity of the tools for entrepreneurship. Blank told me has traveled the world and been stunned by the passion for starting companies. He joked that in his twenties, the majority funneled their energies into rioting against the establishment. “On a college campus, the word business could have got you hung a decade ago,” he said.

To support the global movement for online education, Blank plans to make his Lean Launchpad curriculum, which teaches agile engineering and rapid customer acquisition, available online by the end of the year.

“There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who know what we know in Silicon Valley in cities all over the world like Santiago, Helsinki and St. Petersburg,” he said. “This is the real big idea: the democratization of entrepreneurship.”

Leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers got hit with a sexual harassment and gender discrimination suit earlier this month, rocking a firm that has been known for bringing women into the venture capital industry.

The complaint (below), filed May 10 in superior court in San Francisco, reads like a melodrama. Ellen Pao, who is currently an investment partner with the firm, alleges that in 2006, fellow partner Ajit Nazre pressed Pao to have sex with him on a trip to Germany. Nazre, who had been at the company for two years longer than Pao was managing her trip to Germany. After refusing and returning home, Pao alleges that Nazre continued his advances until she acquiesced and began a personal relationship with him later in 2006.

After ending the relationship after three intimate encounters, Pao says Nazre (pictured right) launched a five-year campaign of retaliation against her, the complaint claims. This included convincing a chief executive she was courting for a seat on one of her company’s boards to join one of Nazre’s boards instead. VentureBeat has identified that company as RPX Corporation, a patent litigation management company.

Pao’s complaint also alleges that KPCB partner Randy Komisar gave her a book by Leonard Cohen, “The Book of Longing,” that contained graphic sexual imagery, and invited her to dinner on Saturday night when his wife was away, a combination that Pao felt was “inappropriate in the workplace.”

Her complaint also alleges that the firm as a whole did not respond adequately when she brought the harassment to the attention of senior partners, including John Doerr, Ted Schlein, and Ray Lane.

TechCrunch broke the news earlier today.

Pao’s lawyers declined to comment when contacted by VentureBeat. KPCB provided a statement, which we’re including below.

Needless to say, KPCB is feeling some heat from the issue. Some are saying that the company should have informed the limited partners associated with the venture firm. Melinda S. Riechert, an employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP (which is not involved in the case), thinks this would have been a mistake on Kleiner’s part.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to deal with a case by a current employee, because people have privacy rights. You try to keep these things on a need-to-know basis,” Riechert told VentureBeat. “The more people who know about small suits and claims… the more people who can be accused of retaliating.”

Kleiner is likely to argue that Pao turned to a harassment case after she began to receive poor performance reviews, as a way of deflecting responsibility. Pao’s lawyers, of course, will argue that this gets things backwards, and that the poor reviews were part of the harassment.

Why would Pao stay at a firm for years, given the negative climate? Riechert puts it into perspective:

“She obviously has the right to [keep her job at Kleiner], and I have many cases that I handle that are brought by current employees… It’s difficult, it’s not easy for everybody, but they have the right to stay employed and we make sure that rules and law are followed.”

Kleiner has been otherwise well-known in the venture industry for bringing on female partners. The venture firm has 12 female partners at the firm, of which nine are active investors. A number of these female partners have names well known in Silicon Valley, including Mary Meeker, who has invested in Twitter and Groupon, and Aileen Lee, who recently decided to create her own seed fund. However, its newest fund, KP15, only includes one woman among its 10 managing partners.

Here’s the full text of Pao’s complaint.

Here’s the statement from Kleiner:

In response to a discrimination complaint filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco by Ellen Pao, Christina Lee, a Kleiner Perkins spokesperson, stated the Firm regrets that the situation is being litigated publicly and had hoped the two parties could have reached resolution, particularly given Pao’s 7-year history with the firm. Following a thorough independent investigation of the facts, the firm believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend the matter. The Firm has been a diversity pioneer in its industry and was one of the first venture capital firms to hire women as partners. The number of women partners at the firm is one of the highest within the venture capital arena and the firm has actively supported women in all respects.

Photo of Ellen Pao via KPCB; photo of Ajit Nazre via djevents/Flickr

Yes, we’re whiners, and yes, this is skewed toward the topics that we’re personally worked up about. But if there are things you’d like to see changed in the New Year, either in the tech world as a whole, at a specific company, or even at VentureBeat, please let us know in the comments.

1. No more manquisitions — Also known as “talent acquisitions”, these are deals where a company is purchased just to hire its founders and maybe some other senior team members. In many cases, a substantial number of employees are laid off, the technology is scrapped, and users of the startup product are screwed.

There are times when these deals are an easy way for the founders to make some money and find gainful employment, and sometimes they’re the best option for a struggling startup, and we’re not under any illusion that that’s going to stop. But let’s stop pretending that these deals are a huge victory for anyone except the acquiring company.

Besides, the word “manquisition” is just ugly. And “acq-hire” is even worse.

2. Solve the app discovery problem — This is something that every mobile application-builder we talk to is concerned about. They’ve usually developed some good strategies for getting noticed among the flood of content in Apple’s App Store, the Android Marketplace, and elsewhere, but there’s still no good way for users to explore the “long tail” of apps that lie beyond the top-selling and featured app lists.

I don’t think this is a problem that individual startups can solve. The companies running these marketplaces need to make structural changes that help users find apps, especially the apps that don’t have a big marketing budget — otherwise, the growth of apps will start to seem like a defeat, not a victory.

3. Have a substantive discussion about the absence of women in tech — Yes, this is a topic that prompts a lot of eye-rolling, partly because so much of the debate is shout-y and shallow. Some men get defensive because they feel like they’re being accused of sexism, while some women get defensive because they hear condescension in the topic, as if they can’t succeed in the startup world without handholding.

It’d be nice if we could move the discussion away from kneejerk defensiveness and more towards the big, long-term factors that contribute to women still being underrepresented in the industry, especially in tech-centric and leadership roles (and yes, many of these involve broader issues that no particular company or group of companies can fix).

To be clear, I think sexist assholes should still be called out. But let’s not make them the focus of the conversation.

4. Disclose active user numbers — For most Web startups, the big number to flaunt is the amount of registered users. Now those can make for great stories — 1 million! 2 million! 500 million! But these numbers can distort the discussion, because registered user numbers don’t tell us whether a company has an engaged, loyal audience or if they simply convinced a bunch of people to sign up for the service who never came back. Most startups are only going to share numbers that look good for them, but let’s try to focus on daily or monthly active users whenever possible.

For more on this subject, check out this great rant from TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.

5. End the overuse of embargoes — Okay, this one is really insidery, but it affects the quality of coverage that you see in VentureBeat. PR firms in tech and elsewhere have developed a practice of giving journalists advanced notice on news, as long as we agree to hold off on publishing anything until an appointed time. There are probably instances when this approach makes sense, particularly if companies have a complicated product or announcement that they want to explain to reporters without everyone feeling like there’s a rush to publish. But embargoes often result in canned, same-y stories showing up everywhere, especially since we can’t talk about the stories (say, with competing companies or an analyst of our choosing) until after they’re published.

Many embargoes are sent with so little advanced notice that there’s no time to do a good job anyway. And there are other times when someone breaks the embargo, leading to the same old rush to publish.

To be clear, VentureBeat still plays by the rules, because that’s the only way we can cover some of the big stories. But I hope there’s a shift away from using embargoes as the default way to distribute news. We’re trying to do our part by increasing the number of stories that aren’t prepackaged, embargoed announcements, and hopefully you’ll see more of that coverage in the coming year.

By the way, I hope never to write at such length about embargoes again. Because on top of everything else, embargoes are boring.

[image via Flickr/Allan Chatto]

Augmented Reality: The Next generation because Terminator‘s augmented reality vision was as science fiction as it got when I was growing up in the 80s.

Two startups say they can keep your phone charged wherever you are and Coming soon.. a green laptop which runs on water. Because power is sexy.

Sproxil takes on Africa’s drug counterfeiters and M-health application emerge at mobile world congress. Mobile technology can save lives.

Afraid the clothes you buy online won’t fit? Get help from a robotic mannequin. Finally! Clothes shopping and robots in one package. What more could a tech girl want?

New book says we relate to computers like humans because our social lives with machines is so fascinating.

Women in tech: What to do now because even though I am sick of the whole subject, it’s an important one (and Arrington asked for it).

The SolSource solar oven wins 500K EU in the Green Challenge. The two winning entrepreneurs in the Green Challenge (both in their mid-20s) are among the most impressive I have encountered. And they let me share their champagne.

Can clean energy close India’s energy gap? Newsflash! Green products can have major social benefits and be good business, even when the customers are among the poorest people on the planet.

32 companies charging the supergrid. Power got even sexier.

Return of the celtic tiger: Can renewables refuel the Irish economy? My home country may currently be a byword for economic disaster but it’s not all bad news. Plus I got to compare Ireland to Amy Winehouse.

Abeo thinks BIG for its superlight structures. A big idea from a small company. Could revolutionalize the construction of concrete buildings.

ZenRobotics robot recyclers go for green in the CleanTech Open. More robots, this time replacing manual recycling.

Smart grid in Europe is all about renewables. Energy and food will be crucial resources of the 21st century. Europe leads the way in renewables.

Sorkin wrote a defense of his screenplay’s female characters over the weekend, which was picked up today on entertainment sites like The AV Club. Responding to a review and a subsequent comment on the blog of television writer Ken Levine, Sorkin basically said that if The Social Network feels sexist, it’s because Harvard men are sexist. Especially the founders of Facebook:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

And this very disturbing attitude toward women isn’t just confined to the guys who can’t get dates.

I didn’t invent the “F–k Truck”, it’s real–and the men (boys) at the final clubs think it’s what they deserve for being who they are. (It’s only fair to note that the women–bussed in from other schools for the “hot” parties, wait on line to get on that bus without anyone pointing guns at their heads.)

These women–whether it’s the girls who are happy to take their clothes off and dance for the boys or Eduardo [Saverin]‘s psycho-girlfriend are real. I mean REALLY real.

It’s not clear how broadly Sorkin is damning the “nerds” when he talks about a “very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people” (others have complained about Silicon Valley’s antipathy towards women) but he definitely includes Mark Zuckerberg and the early Facebook team in that circle, at least as they were circa 2004. And, it looks like there’s some fairness to that argument — the scathing blog post that Zuckerberg wrote declaring an ex-girlfriend a “bitch” has been confirmed elsewhere, including David Kirkpatrick’s more favorable book The Facebook Effect, and there’s no denying that the founding team was a boy’s club.

The main riposte to this argument is that The Social Network includes the insane, gold-digging characters but leaves out Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriends, including his long-time relationship with Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg may only have restarted his relationship with Chan after the movie’s timeframe (Kirkpatrick implies that it was sometime in 2006), but the existence of that relationship still undercuts the movie’s portrayal of Zuckerberg as someone driven by the fact that he can’t get girls. (I’d argue that the less the movie focuses on that motivation, the more compelling and complex it seems.)

And Zuckerberg and other early Facebook employees have disputed the movie’s version of the facts. Of course, they own substantial stakes in Facebook, which could in theory give them a motivation other than correcting the record for criticizing the movie.

Trying to summarize the digressive, often awkward conversation would probably result in one of the least focused posts ever. (That’s not a knock on the fact that TechCrunch was essentially shamed into holding the panel — it’s a worthy topic, but hard to tackle on a panel where almost everyone wants to talk about a different issue.)

Luckily, Lacy ended the panel by asking each speaker to leave the audience with one message, and that seems like a good way to summarize the panel’s main ideas.

Michelle Greer, Web marketing consultant with SimpleSpeak Media: “Software development and technology is a noble career for both women and for men.”

Leila Chirayath Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource: “I feel like this discussion is funny for me to be a part of, because I work in poverty mediation, and the plight of women globally is hard for us to imagine.”

Sarah Chipps, founder of Girl Develop IT: “Let’s get some stories out there about people who are doing it, [and] not because they are women.”

Cyan Bannister, founder and editor-in-chief of Zivity: “I think we should focus on being good parents. I think if we expose children, both boys and girls, at an early age … you’re going to start seeing more women in technology.”

Lauren Leto, founder of Bnter: “Next year, I hope TechCrunch Disrupt names this panel something more specific.”

Rachel Sklar, editor-at-large at Mediaite, who prompted the latest debate: “I tend to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. And for the record, I love dudes.”

Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch: She hasn’t talked to AOL chief Tim Armstrong about whether she still has a job post-acquisition, but if not, “Please don’t hire me just because I’m a woman.”

See our video of the session for more.

[photo: Dean Takahashi]

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington recently argued that in Silicon Valley (and by extension, the tech business in general) success is based on merit alone and that nobody is keeping women down. The problem, as far as he is concerned, is simply that women just don’t want to start companies. These are arguments I’ve heard before and that are, at best, naïve. Merit alone is rarely enough to ensure success and women are starting more companies than ever (if not in technology). But instead of getting mired in arguments and counterarguments, I’ll make some suggestions on how to change the situation for the better.

I’ve written before about how to get more women into technology. How do we maximize the female assets already out there?

For Men in Tech

This section is not about how you can help women in tech, but how they can help you. Don’t worry. You will probably enjoy it.

Female employees and cofounders are a competitive advantage

Entrepreneurs will do almost anything to improve their chances of success apart, sometimes, from the obvious. In a world in which women control the majority of consumer spending, having women on the board of your company improves financial performance and the most innovative teams contain even numbers of men and women, why aren’t startup companies showering those rare women in tech with job offers? In addition, if you are hiring women, don’t just hire one, since being the token woman is not much fun. Also don’t make the mistake of thinking that two women will automatically get along. This is like fixing up your only two gay friends on the sole basis that they are both gay. Get as close as is practical to a 50:50 split for maximum benefits.

Get out of your comfort zone

One thing I have noticed as a tech journalist is that the tech press tends to cover 1) stories about products they relate to personally 2) stories everyone else is covering. This is just human nature and since most tech journalists are male, you get a particular slant as a result. A good example is Net-a-Porter in the UK, which recently sold for $533 million. This is an extremely successful and pioneering online company which was largely ignored by the tech press on the basis that, well, it’s about handbags. The point is that there are useful things you miss if you don’t get out of your comfort zone. Being a successful entrepreneur, in particular, is all about learning and seeing beyond the obvious. I have learnt a lot from my male colleagues. Maybe you should look around and see what you can learn from women.

Do something important, or at least useful

This is obviously a sweeping generalization but I think that women tend to want to do something useful and important in their work, rather than just something high status and well paid. This may be part of our in-built and often detrimental over-seriousness. So one of the best ways to motivate women to get involved in, or become customers of, your  business is to do something which really does make a positive impact on the world as opposed to just “innovating” for the sake of it. Female customers tend to be harder to please than men (For example, they take more factors into consideration when making a buying decision), but they are also enthusiastic advocates of products they like. If you can win over female customers you get free marketing thrown in.

For Women in Tech

This is the hard part.  I’m essentially asking women to be exceptional when I haven’t managed to do it myself, and when the effort may still outweigh the rewards. But we all need heroes. Hopefully there are some out there.

You are not an insider. Make the most of it.

Being outside the status quo has its advantages. You are unlikely to start a revolution when the current system suits you quite well. One of my favorite entrepreneurs is Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. She pioneered notions like environmentalism and fair trade in business long before they were fashionable or profitable. These days even the most rapacious corporation has corporate citizenship policies. Roddick wasn’t deliberately trying to transform the business world. She just had to work around it to get things done. It’s only human to want to fit in but in the end you have to stop playing by rules which don’t favour you.

Build a different kind of tech company

Another one of my favourite entrepreneurs is Jason Fried of 37Signals. He and his co-founders upended much of the received wisdom of the tech startup world, e.g. that bigger companies are automatically better, that seeking funding is vital or that employees of startups must work 24/7. Don’t try to copy every other tech startup out there in the quest to be taken seriously. Do something completely different and in line with your values and the life you want, not those of the industry at large.

Use your visibility

One of the few things I agree with Mr. Arrington about is that the women in the tech industry are more visible. This can be both a blessing and a curse but mostly the fact that you stand out is an advantage whether you are trying to promote a company or get a job. Work it.