Women 2.0 Launch Business Plan Competition
Invariably, someone at each DEMO conference comments on the number (and usually the lack of numbers) of women on stage. It’s true that as a population at DEMO, or any technology entrepreneur-laden event, female founders are in the minority. I meet hundreds of entrepreneurs each year, and it is the very rare meeting that includes a woman who is not in the capacity of PR or marketing consultant.
Since the first of the year, for example, I can call to mind exactly two women among the legion of male entrepreneurs to come through my office. The numbers naturally lead you to wonder why more women aren’t starting businesses. Then again, maybe that’s not exactly the right question.
Women start businesses, lots and lots of businesses, just, apparently, not technology businesses. Or at least not venture-based technology businesses, typically the profile of a company that presents itself for selection at DEMO conferences.
Since I began paying attention to the statistics more than a decade ago, the numbers on a percentage basis have changed very little. Fewer than 10 percent of venture-based technology companies have a woman on the founding team. This startling statistic has led some to assert that venture is a male-dominated business dismissive, if not outright hostile, toward women.
I won’t defend the venture business; I’ve heard enough anecdotes to give at least some credence to that perspective. But I think there is, at root, something different happening. Women build different kinds of businesses from men. They have different aspirations and quite often they fund them differently - usually through organic growth rather than venture capital infusion. There are exceptions of course. Diane Green at VMWare, Kim Polese at SpikeSource, and more recently Gina Bianchini at Ning provide a few examples.
But women-founded startups are often, in my experience, a different breed and a different funding need. In fact, many young women benefit more from mentor capital than venture capital, at least in the earliest days of their young companies’ lives. So an event like Women 2.0’s Business Plan Competition is extremely useful, giving young women entrepreneurs a chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of investors and industry experts (among them, me)
Conceived as the “napkin challenge,” teams with at least 50% female ownership are invited to submit business ideas on a 7×7 inch paper napkin, accompanied by a standard business plan document. A panel of judges vets the plans and invites women with the top ideas to present at the May 10, 2008 conference. Rather than a promise of funding or a monetary prize, winning teams will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with experienced mentors and investors, including veteran technology writer and start-up investor Esther Dyson, arguably among the best advisors a young company could hope for.
This isn’t the sort of thing I normally write about in this column, but I do want to encourage young women to entrepreneurship of any type. Information about the competition is available at http://www.women2.org/?page_id=44#submission_process. The submission deadline is April 1.
And maybe, just maybe, a tide of smart ideas from smart women founders will find momentum and that perennial question about women at DEMO won’t need to be asked in the future.
