Women Tech Entrepreneurs a Minority
• In 2009, 40% of private companies in U.S. were majority-owned by women
But…
• Estimates of the percentage of start-ups majority-owned by women hover around 8%.
Women Tech Entrepreneurs a Minority,but Successful
• Women have co-founded high-tech companies with less funding and fewer failures than average.
• Firms with at least some female senior managers outperform those without women leaders.
• At smaller, newer venture capital firms in IT, the percentage of women in managing-director and general-partner positions is higher than among the 50 most active firms overall.
Women Entrepreneurs May Have Different Financial Bases than Men
Two different findings:
• Finding #1: High-tech firms’ assets, revenues, and profits differ by gender of founder.
• Finding #2: Successful men and women IT entrepreneurs had similar funding sources, except: women’s business partners were a main source more often than were men’s.
• Fund, or undertake, research into female tech entrepreneurship.
• Draw attention to successful womenIT entrepreneurs
• Get tips on tech entrepreneurshipwww.ncwit.org/heroes
Not Too Late to Start
• Elaine Wherry had a full-ride music scholarship for college.
• Freshmen year, she took her first computer science course out of frustration at being unable to program a graphic calculator to play tic-tac-toe.
• 4 years later, she had a CS degree and landed a great IT job.
• She quit her job to launch meebo.com before she had a functional product, an audience, or funding.
Late-blooming techie women can launch a successful start-up.
Browser-based instant messaging wasn’t possibleuntil Elaine co-founded meebo.com in 2005.
How Did She Do It?
• Step 1. Found good team members.
• Step 2. Built the product, then gathered feedback.
• Step 3. Focused on the business plan.
• Step 4. Established excellent hiring practices.
“It’s more important just to get the product out … and get that feedback so you understand how it’s going to be used.”
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