Tag Archives: Women in tech

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Unicorns: Perhaps Not As Rare As We Thought

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So what’s a Unicorn? Here’s the study’s definition: “Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build big, impactful companies valued at a billion dollars or more. We called these companies ‘unicorns’ because what they had achieved seemed very difficult, rare, and relatively unstudied.”

The latest study, the second by the venerable tech startup news site, has some surprises, as well as corroborates what has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley.

There’s a lot of data to chew on in the study and you can read the full post here. But parsing through it, there is a lot to learn, whether you’re a start-up, an investor, or just curious about markets.

Here are some of the interesting takeaways that I gleaned.

First, the surprising:

 

Unicorns are not as rare as we thought

The latest study revels that there are more Unicorns than one might think. There were 84 companies profiled in this year’s study—more than a 100% increase from last year. Granted, a lot of the companies were “paper” Unicorns (companies valued on paper that have not had liquidity events.) But the total value of the companies was $327 Billion and 2.4x the last analysis (“excluding Facebook, which was almost half the value of our last list.”)

 

Old is the “New” New

As the study maintains, for every wunderkind out there, a seasoned leader or founder (and, perhaps more importantly, a co-founder) may be your best shot at becoming, or finding, a Unicorn.

The study found that companies with educated, tech-experienced, older co-founding teams with a history together have built the most successes in this rarified club. And the co-founding aspect was interesting as well. As the study noted, 86% of the companies had co-founders, or a “super-majority” according to its lingo.

While some of this may be counter-intuitive to the traditional Silicon Valley narrative, it makes sense to me on several levels. An experienced leader can gauge a market, and having a co-founder gives you a chance to bounce ideas off one another, whether it’s reigning in your partner or just having “green-light” time. (I’ve had co-founders in all three of my entrepreneurial ventures.)

 

In the not so surprising camp:

 

IoT is gaining impact

This year, the Unicorn study recognized the Consumer Electronics/Internet of Things as its own category. According to the study, five companies, which make up 6% of the list, have raised a combined $266 million on average and are valued at 18x the private capital raised. While it is the smallest of the categories (after E-Commerce, SaaS, Enterprise and “Audience” or ad-driven businesses– ranked by order of value from first to last), to me, this is just another sign that the Internet of Things is ripe for takeoff.

 

Diversity: Still too Little

This last survey statistic from the study that I’ll share is in diversity, where the numbers fall into the not-so-surprising camp.

While the study determined that 50% of founders or co-founders of Unicorns came from outside the U.S. (from India to Canada) it shows diversity among Unicorns diversity is trending up, but is still low. TechCrunch reports this year the list welcomed two companies with female leaders, compared to no female CEOs on its last list. As well 10% of the co-founders on this year’s list were female, double last year’s survey. Like its average startups counterparts in the valley, 70% of the companies surveyed had no gender diversity at the board level… Please note: the study was unable to track racial or ethnic diversity.

So in terms of diversity, this “rarest of the rare” breed of venture backed tech companies are doing about the same as run of the mill startups and tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Ultimately, when I look at this study, however, I am an encouraged to see that attributes like experience, collaboration, and inclusion, as well as innovation, are being called out as measures of success. These are all values worthy of attention, whether you aspire to be a Unicorn or not.

 

Title image courtesy of TechCrunch

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Technovation 2015: Security by the Numbers

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Being a finalist at Technovation 2015 means competing against over 400 apps from 64 different countries. The challenge? To build an app in just a few months that would help solve real-world problems such as sports concussions or childhood obesity.

I had the pleasure of leading the “Security By the Numbers” workshop at Technovation 2015 #wpitch2015. This workshop is designed to help the young finalists visualize themselves as entrepreneurs and transition their prototypes into market-ready apps.

So what defines a market-ready app? Increasingly, the answer is security. From the continuous stream of high-profile data breaches to the rising prevalence of malicious apps on Android, the lack of app security has proven to be a gold mine for cybercrime. In fact, a recent study by IBM found that the cost of data breach could be as high as $300 per single lost record and $154 per record on average.

As with all good design, app security is not a simple afterthought. That’s because security to the app is like a shell to a turtle, it’s a skeletal structure that needs to be designed for.

Turtle

 

This workshop used an AVG app with over a million users to illustrate three key principles of app security:

  1. Prevention – What are some common mistakes and vulnerabilities?
  2. Detection – What are the tools and resources for detecting malicious activity?
  3. Continuous Monitoring – How do you implement a robust monitoring infrastructure?

This was particularly beneficial for the students because it provided them a glimpse into the technical infrastructure and monitoring that can support a large scale mobile application.

My favorite feedback from the workshop was “Technovation was an enlightening experience and helped me see this as a career, this workshop helped me understand what it would take to take my ideas to market.”

It was an inspiration to be surrounded by so many bright, driven and accomplished young women. I’m excited to see a future with a more diverse and inclusive tech industry!

AVG Technologies @AVGFree is a gold sponsor of Technovation thanks to the efforts of Anar Simpson @AnarSimpson, Todd Simpson @ToddSimpson and Judith Bitterli @JudithBitterli.

 

Mariya Snow @mariyasnow is a Senior Engineer at AVG Technologies.

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Tech’s Not So Free Lunch

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On the macro level, for example, and in the “plus” column, is the transparency practice of many leading tech firms, revealing the diversity of their workforces. And on a more micro level, the big security industry RSA Conference this year essentially banned “booth babes” by stressing strict dress attire for its exhibitors.

Bravo!

Now we come to a step back. A new report by Forbes is that the hottest lunch spot for many SF male techies is, rather unbelievably, a strip club…

The lunch spot of the moment is apparently the Gold Club in San Francisco’s SoMa district, which is conveniently located within walking distance of top tech companies such as Yelp and Salesforce. (You can read the article about this here.

Supposedly the attraction is a cheap lunch: for a $5 cover charge, you get a free lunch buffet and …enjoy dancers. (Ironically, Silicon Valley tech companies have long been the providers of free and subsidized lunches for employees –all to attract the best talent, keep them on campus and at their desks…)

Is the new lunch fad simply a good deal on a buffet? Innocent fun? A way to escape the drudgery of staring at a screen all day?

To me, it’s inappropriate and more troublesome than that. It’s one more manifestation of the techbro culture that permeates our industry.

Worse, it seems to have gotten the wink and nod from many tech firms. For example, according to the Forbes article, one well-known tech firm’s hiring managers would take prospective hires to the Gold Club—which was referred to by the secret code name of “Conference Room G.”

But I don’t want to make light of this. Regardless of your take on strip clubs (whether they objectify or empower women), for the tech industry, which has always been exclusionary (both of women and minorities), it’s simply one more example of the way it can be careless and tone-deaf.

Another take-away from this is that corporate culture doesn’t just come from the top. These techbros are influencing their workplace just as much – arguably more so– as their managers are. Imagine being a woman or gay male programmer and hearing guys in the break room talking about their great lunch… How excluded would you feel?

On another cautionary note, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen, whether an unsuspecting worker is taken to a club by colleagues and feels uncomfortable, or overhearing the guys talk about their fun in the workplace…

On that note, we were reminded just this past week of the most famous sex discrimination lawsuit to date in the tech industry: the case of Ellen Pao against Kleiner Perkins. In March, the highly reported case ended with Ms. Pao losing her lawsuit, but tarnishing the reputation of her former employer, a gold standard Silicon Valley VC firm.

Fast forward and Ms. Pao was recently forced out of her interim CEO position at the Internet community site Reddit. (The New York Times headline read: “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism is Out at Reddit.”)

Ms. Pao wrote an Op-Ed column about her ordeal at Reddit, which appeared this past weekend. In it she chronicled the work she and the company did to try to prevent and ban harassment on the Reddit site and the resulting “attempts to demean, shame and scare” her into silence that ultimately led to her resignation.

As Ms. Pao has noted, I couldn’t agree more: “It’s left to all of us to figure it out, to call out abuse when we see it.”

Sex discrimination and harassment –and resulting lawsuits— have been happening in other industries for years. No, the tech industry didn’t invent sexism or the wheel. But as they say… we’ve driven the car into the ditch all the same. These are glaring examples of the distance we have to travel.

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How can we encourage girls to pursue a career in tech?

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My career in the technology sector is a fortunate accident but it remains far too rare an outcome for women entering today’s workforce. This week I addressed an audience at the Child Internet Safety Summit in London to offer a woman’s perspective on what it means to be in technology, why it’s so important for young women to consider a career in the technology sector and what they can do to prepare themselves to be a part of the industry.

Of the many data points that serve to paint the picture of women in technology, I think that Maria Klawe, president at Harvey Mudd in Claremont California provides the clearest description of the problem.

“We’ve done lots of research on why young women don’t choose tech careers and number one is they think it’s not interesting. Number two, they think they wouldn’t be good at it. Number three, they think they will be working with a number of people that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable or happy working alongside.”

 

Not Interesting?

Ouch. It’s hard to understand this perspective from inside tech. From my vantage point, this is the industry most directly affecting people’s lives today and being a part of that is genuinely exciting. Somehow, at home, in schools and even in movies and television, we’re somehow failing to capture the imagination of young women. What I can other women in tech can do is be evangelists and invest some of our time talking with women and sharing our perspectives whether we are coders, marketers or engineers.

 

Not Good At It?

Young women don’t come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t be good at a particular thing without some pretty strong communication from their community. Whether at home or at school, our families and institutions need to consciously change the dialog and tone. The evidence is clear that women are just as capable as men in business, technology, medicine and virtually every other field. We need to stop suggesting otherwise and present the skills that lead to tech openly and without bias.

 

Not Comfortable?

I cannot honestly think of a workplace in which everyone liked each other or got along all the time. Working with a variety of personalities is essential to success regardless of sector so it makes me wonder what message we are sending to young women that gives them this perception of people working in technology. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to help teach all children how to work together, to compromise and to be a part of a truly diverse workforce.

Much of the media’s focus on women-in-tech has focused on coding, and the good news is that there are many companies and organizations working to make sure young women know that this field is open to them and that there’s much that they have to offer and can accomplish. We’re far from there but we’ve started.

More importantly though, we need a more comprehensive change perceptions and from the beginning communicate to girls and young women that entire world of careers is open to them and welcomes them. To that end we should all do the following:

  1. Become advocates and mentors and provide encouragement, affirmation and confidence. Women in particular need to be role models and mentors in their community.
  1. Young women need to seek out sponsors, someone who will truly take an active role in supporting their career aspirations.
  1. Men need to be allies and supportive.“A true male ally is a man who is willing to defend women when there are no women in the room.”

 

Ultimately, the most impactful thing we can do in our industry is to tell a good story that demonstrates technology is compelling and accessible to everyone.

We don’t need to change who people are or turn women into men. We simply need to make sure that we all women have the opportunity to choose to be a part of whatever industry we want.

Debbie Sterling, Founder and CEO of Goldieblox said it well, “There’s nothing wrong with being a princess, we just think girls can build their own castles too.”

Video

Boardroom or Baby: The choices of women in tech

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Women in Tech: Changing the Conversation via the Bottom Line

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Though industry numbers don’t yet reflect it, I have to say now is a very exciting time for women in tech. Why? Because for the first time in my career, there is an active conversation taking place about achieving gender and overall diversity in our industry.

This was illustrated yet again this past week by the “Women in Tech Executive Roundtable 2015” hosted by Silicon Valley’s venerable Churchill Club.

I was honored to be one of the speakers, joining a panel of five amazing and inspirational women for the breakfast event in Palo Alto, which brought us together with an active audience of the Valley’s women in tech  – and even a few men, who were brave enough to join us. (And I don’t use the word “brave” in a negative way – but in the best possible meaning – as in it was encouraging to see them showing up and participating in a discussion on women’s issues.)

Churchill Club Logo

 

You can find the Churchill Club video on their YouTube Channel here.

The bottom line, as my co-panelist Julie Hanna, the executive chair of Kiva and newly named Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurism, so eloquently describes it: the discourse on gender equality is not just a women’s issue, it needs to be a question for humanity.

As fellow panelist Amity Millhiser, Managing Partner at PwC, noted: “Think about our daughters and how do we want them to think about diversity?” I will paraphrase her here: but in addition to it being a justice issue, gender equality is a “success” issue.

There is no denying that women still lag in STEM education, tech jobs, equal pay, and the C-suites and boardrooms. But the numbers also tell another story. As I was reminded earlier last week by a new study on IT industry and gender diversity by The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT):  Companies with women on their executive boards outperformed companies will all-male executive boards. Gender-diverse management teams also showed superior return on equity, debt/equity ratios, price/equity ratios, and average growth.

The NCWIT analysis of 2,360 companies corroborates statistics on women-led company performance findings in a study Babson College Research last year, which I’ve written about previously.

The place where gender bias is most prevalent tends to be at executive and boardroom levels and in the VC funding process — where women have the smallest presence (and somehow seem to be “heard differently” than males – as many of my colleagues on the panel have witnessed).

Another salient point made by our discussion group that I, myself, identify with is how we as women are sometimes part of the problem. For example, the audience asked the panel about “cattiness” in the workplace, and why women can be jealous of other women’s success.

Julie Hanna spoke to the dichotomy and “strangeness” of being an engineering-geek woman, who had predominately worked with men, then going to working with other women and encountering a new kind of fear. “It’s like we have to, on a primal level, learn to recognize one of our own and know we/they mean no harm.”

Dr. Tanja Rueckert, Executive VP & Chief Operating Officer Products & Innovation for SAP further underscored: “Remind yourselves to hire for diversity” and for female VCs to invest in female startups.

I believe, much as one panelist reminded us – as Madeleine Albright famously said:  “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Madeleine Albright

It is also my strong belief, that as women, 1) we all have an inherent responsibility to educate ourselves what diversity means and why diversity is important and 2) vote with our pocket books – only work with and support companies that support diversity.

 

Here are some other key pieces of advice from the panel:

  • Always be yourself
  • Don’t apologize for your success; take credit when credit is due
  • Accept feedback, and don’t take criticism personally
  • Be supportive, not jealous of other women
  • Women need both women and men to sponsor, mentor and support them

 

And by the way, if you are in Silicon Valley and want to stay on top of insights and trends to empower women, and to help create a new conversation in the year ahead, please check out the Churchill Club. It is an extraordinary non-profit organization with a rich history of bringing together the best and brightest in Silicon Valley in conversations that ignite change – and it’s also a mecca for industry networking!

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Labor Day Reflection: The 77% Rule and Women in Tech

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You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.

–Jane Galvin Lewis

 

Yesterday while I was observing Labor Day, the day set aside to celebrate the social and economic advancement of the American worker in the U.S.— it provided some time to reflect and consider the topic of women in the workforce and specifically pay parity.

What if I gave you 77 cents for every dollar you earned? Would you feel fairly compensated? Unfortunately, that’s generally the wages the average working woman makes as opposed to her male counterparts.

The 77 cents for every dollar? That’s a generalization that averages in all jobs across the board.  The good news is that the tech industry is more progressive. Pay parity, according to various surveys, is equal in our industry as long as the job titles are the same.

Of course, the catch is that women aren’t as likely to have the top titles. (For a more in-depth look at this you can go to one survey at Dice.)

Nevertheless, I believe tech is a great place for women and has a rich tradition, from Ada Lovelace to Admiral Grace Hopper. When I began in tech, role models were few.  Today, if you look around today, there are a number of role models for women starting out: Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Susan Wojcicki, to name a few. But the playing field is still far from level.

 

Where and how can we level the playing field?

Maybe online? As reported in a survey by freelance job site Elance, women in technology are finding more opportunities online than on-site. According to their survey of 7,000 global independent professionals, 80% of respondents also said they’re optimistic about the future of high-tech professions for women even though a majority still sees a lag in pay equality and encouragement from parents and/or teachers.

Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance, noted,  “Online work provides an attractive avenue to neutralize gender discrimination around the world and create flexible professional opportunities not available in traditional job markets.”

That’s one solution. I think another has got to be education. Basically, education is a great lever to pay parity.  And, backing programs such as Girls Who Code is a great way to get young women engaged in technology.

Mentoring is also another great avenue. It’s something I’m proud to say I use to measure my success as well.

I hope to share more of my thoughts and experiences at SWXS this coming year as a featured speaker on the topic “Boardroom or Baby.” You can support me and continue to raise awareness for the issue by going here to vote for my presentation.  Voting closes Friday, Sept. 5th – so go check out the SXSW PanelPicker and vote today!