horsepigcow

Just recently, I was tasked with finding women to attend a prestigious event that would put them on a deep social level with venture capitalists, angels and fellow startup entrepreneurs. As I pay close attention to the presence of other women in my field (startup founders), I felt this would be a simple task. It is not.

The issue is as follows: the core limitation of the invitation is that the startup founder cannot also be working as a consultant. That person has to be ‘all in’ (as I discussed in my TEDx talk recently, doing your startup alongside consulting/working means you aren’t all in). Because of the lack of funding/underfunding for women-led startups, many female startup founders have had to resort to doing some bitwork on the side. I know from personal experience (not yet getting any funding save bits and pieces of F&F money), I’ve been tempted to do some consulting in order to pay my bills. I’ve only refrained because of time issues. I’m still broke.

The second part of the issue is: though this event is reasonable as compared to events like TED, Davos and The Summit Series, it still costs more than $1,000, which, for anyone who is bootstrapped, is not only tough to swing, but pretty much impossible.

And the ultimate issue is: this becomes a chicken or the egg scenario where an unfunded entrepreneur needs to create those social bonds with people in positions of power and wealth in order to get funded, but because she doesn’t have the funding, she cannot actually attend.

I did something pretty cool a couple of weeks ago. I went running with Rob Hayes, a partner at First Round Capital. We met for about an hour, then we put on our sneakers and went for a 45 minute run. I already knew that First Round had a conflict and couldn’t fund us, but it didn’t hurt to bond anyway. Rob thought it was an interesting way to get his attention and commented, “I think people should conduct all pitches this way.” We ended up talking about everything but my startup and, at the end, he made oodles of valuable introductions for me. It’s a meeting I’ll never forget and probably one he won’t either.

This is sort of akin to the idea that the deals take place on the golf course. It’s true. Social connections and feelings of camaraderie will give anyone the leg up to getting funding and making deals. This is why the ‘old boys networks’ are so powerful. Those relationships are the key to making things happen. And herein lies the rub.

People love to hate on Affirmative Action: the policies that are meant to give equal opportunity to minorities by setting a minimum hiring threshold for women, people of color and otherwise non-Caucasian able-bodied males. I won’t go into a debate about this as there are, of course, issues with the implementation of such policies, but I will say that a ‘leg up’ is something that comes quite naturally to certain groups: ones that can afford to socialize with those with money and the power to help.

No, I don’t want to be funded because I have boobs. But sometimes I feel like I’m NOT being funded because I have boobs. As I’ve been at this for a while now (things haven’t changed since I gave that TEDx talk), I’ve observed patterns emerging in the barriers to raising money:

• I’ve heard repeatedly, “This is not a market that I’m familiar with and I’m not comfortable investing where I don’t understand the market,” in response to the fact that Buyosphere’s main audience is women who make the majority of the household purchases.
• The second most heard excuse, “We have a conflict,” which roughly translates to “I don’t understand the market and the future of this market and get that there are multiple ways to approach the democratization of commerce, and haven’t figured out that I need to diversify my portfolio in this area.”
• The third reason for passing, “We have too many deals going on right now,” which is true. There is a frenzy of investing happening at the moment. Apparently in men (according to the WSJ as well as talking to other women like me who are struggling). I’d kill to be a teensy part of that frenzy. We’re looking for a much smaller number than is being thrown around in these deals.

I have a private Google Group for female entrepreneurs where we discuss these issues. There are about 100 members. We try to keep it strategic so as not to get bogged down in the frustration, but it’s not easy when we hear news day after day of this company raising multiple millions off of a pitch deck and that company raising millions within weeks of coming up with an idea with no clear revenue model after most of us have launched, have users, have a revenue model and long-term visions that appeal to THE BIGGEST MARKET online: women.

And it’s not that anyone is overtly sexist or trying to block us from advancing. It’s not malicious at all. It’s just that those with the money don’t understand our markets. I can share the charts and statistics and big, fantastic numbers showing the growth and the potential, but it doesn’t really register. They don’t understand the phenomenon behind Haul Vlogging and Makeup Tutorial obsessions (yes, that does say over 27 Million views). They certainly don’t understand Swishing. And yes, there are women in VC roles, but not very many. They are also highly in demand and we cannot paint them all with a ‘you’re a woman, so you’ll get it’ brush. Quite often they’ve survived tech finance because they can think like a dude.

Running with Rob didn’t cost me anything, so I was quite proud of my creativity in that one. But there are oodles of events that are going on that are enabling the bonds between the money people and budding entrepreneurs that DO cost money. And the fact that I’m having a helluva time finding women who can afford to attend just one event (one that is pretty damned cool if you ask me) is a bit troublesome. And Women 2.0 and Women in Tech events are awesome, but don’t quite bring the same advantage as mixed prestigious events. Perhaps an effort to get more women to these events (scholarships? comped first time passes? just freakin funding us and making the effort to learn more about our market?) would help increase the rate of women attending and break the cycle of the same types of people getting funded and encourage more activity from female entrepreneurs.

Like I said, I don’t want to be funded because I have boobs, but I also don’t want to run into barriers because I have boobs. Speaking of which, I have to figure out some new ways to bond with the movers and shakers. Anyone into mani/pedis?

“I’ll tell you everything, and you tell me everything, and maybe we can get through all the piss and shit and lies that kill other people.”

~ Claudia Wilson Gator in Magnolia (1999)

This is one of my favourite movie quotes of all time. I remember watching this scene over and over again. Claudia was a complete mess. Actually, all of the characters in this movie were. But she was the most honest character about her messiness. She was willing to splatter her messiness all over the place just to get to a real conversation that may lead to a real connection.

Just over a week ago, I posted my own splattered messiness all over the internet in the form of a TEDx talk. When I gave that talk in February, it took everything I had to hold it together on the stage. When I wrote the script for that talk, I was bawling like a baby. It wasn’t manufactured or hyperbolized. In fact, I edited the final talk quite a bit to remove the bits that were sure to make me lose my shit on the stage.

I was scared to give it. I’m still scared every time I send it to someone. I’m not talking about my success or all of the awesome things I’ve accomplished in that talk. I’m talking about struggling, failing, not knowing where I’m going, being delusional, stumbling, breaking down and generally being a mess. Sure, I give a little upbeat Apple Ad bit at the end of the talk so I can end it on a hopeful note. It’s the same upbeat talk I give myself at the end of every single day.

But like Claudia, I just want to get to a real conversation that could, hopefully, lead to some very real connections at the end of the day.

And connect I have. I’ve received close to one hundred emails from people – mostly strangers – who thank me for giving that talk. They thank me because they are either experiencing the same struggles or they have experienced those struggles in the past. And in most of their recollections, nobody else came forward and told them they were in good company.

Instead what DO we hear? We hear about multi-million dollar valuations, twenty-something overnight billionaires, napkin sketches that get millions in funding, gabillions of downloads overnight and that crazy idea that went from zero to turning down a multi-billion dollar acquisition within a year. That’s a whole lot of millions, gabillions and billions to take in when you are sweating over whether you are going to make your payroll at the end of the month. It’s enough to make you think you just may be chasing a pipe dream after all.

Here is my counter-intuitive thought: the constant proliferation of success stories is actually discouraging to the right kinds of entrepreneurs that could be fixing a good amount of the world’s problems.

The majority of the email I’ve received is from women. Yes, it’s probably because I *am* a woman and they could identify, but it’s also more likely that they think if they talk about their struggles, they will show that they are weak and can’t hold up to the brazen entrepreneurship of the winning men. The truth is that everybody crumbles. Even men. Those stories just don’t make the covers of Fast Company. They silently slip away. Or they are told POST-success: “I had many failures until I achieved this success.”

And, yes, we all pay lip-service to success being in the eye of the beholder. But let’s get real here. There is only one kind of success that counts when it counts – when you are raising money or making the headlines or being invited to headline the big conferences – and it’s the payday.

So what if we could, as Claudia puts it, get through all the piss and shit and lies that kill other people? What if, when we stumbled, we understood that it was just part of the natural process of navigating the unclear path? I tell myself everyday I stumble that “this is just part of the startup story.” Every misstep, every rejection, every time I hit the big frickin wall, I say, “it’s the journey and if it were easy, I wouldn’t be growing and going somewhere I need to be.”

I used to be afraid of talking about my failures. But the more I do, the more people I uncover who want to talk about theirs, too. A couple of years back I was at FOO Camp and I encouraged a group of successful entrepreneurs to hold a session on failing. Let me tell you…the session was a fail in itself. Nobody could even talk about real failure there. It was all about how they hired the wrong person or chose the wrong programming language. There was very little honesty in that room. I decided not to talk at all because my failures seemed so epic compared to theirs. No wonder they were successful and I wasn’t!

I regret that now. I wonder what would have happened if I had piped in and talked about one of my very real failures. Losing a business to bad financial planning and ruining my credit. Losing a best friend over making a really selfish decision that ended up stinging me. THESE are things I learnt from. They were undoable. I pay for those failures to this day.

Years ago, I chose to live my life with the kind of transparency that would create real connections to real people and ever since then my life became fantastically uncommonly amazing. Yes, it leaves me incredibly vulnerable, but it also creates an amazing amount of safety for me. Having real connections with people means that I have an enormous group of people who would take a bullet for me. The only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner.

The lies ARE killing people. They are killing real progress. Real solutions to real world problems. If we took away the inflation of a few and really took a look at the landscape we would see that the majority of us are stumbling towards doing something meaningful.

Speaking of which, a big bonus…Hugh MacLeod‘s amazing cartoon that says it all:

“You’re not crazy. You’re not a failure. You’re just trying to do something that matters.”

Keep doing it. You aren’t alone.

I have been a rabid fan of Marilyn Waring’s work since the mid-90′s when I ‘discovered’ her work in a Women’s Studies class. My professor showed us the NFB film, Who’s Counting?, and, in a second, my life was changed forever. I always had a gut feeling that something was wrong about what we value and what we don’t value in the Western world. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Marilyn’s book (the documentary was based on it) unlocked the examples and language I needed to start down my path. It’s where my thoughts on humanizing tech come from. My thoughts about social capital come from. And now my thoughts on people owning their own data come from.

I conducted an interview over at the NFB blog to help promote Marilyn and her ideas. It’s long, but well worth the read. She is brilliant and changing the world. I have no idea why she isn’t speaking at TED.

Here is an excerpt:

TH: It’s no doubt that you have been a major influence in political thinking, but it’s taken people over 20 years to start to grasp your ideas. You probably hate this question, but I’d love a glimpse into what you think the pressing issues will be 20 years from now?

MW: I am working with a lot of rights-based approaches in my work – lately with the Commonwealth Secretariat – our research on The Economics of Dignity, which looks at the situation of the unpaid carer inside a household with a person living with HIV/Aids, does this.

I’m also lucky in that I supervise a large number of doctoral students who wrestle with many public policy topics. At present a colleague and I are editing Permanent Head Damage and other thesis stories, which has been fun. It’s a collection of 20 essays.

I gain enormously from my association with AWID, the international feminist organization, and this feeds my feminism, and the knowledge that the next generations of women have energy and passion and intellect and resilience, and for those of us my age, it’s been worthwhile.

We are not disconnected with nature

In general I think about things other than the UNSNA. Most questions are more profound than economics. How do we manage and use water? There’s a major challenge around ‘public goods’. We are not disconnected with nature. We are nature. Thinking we are separated is a disorder, and economics is a key tool in this process. All of our lives are subsidized. We take from the earth without paying properly, dependent on extraction. Externalities are vast and interconnected, including major health outcomes such as the rise in asthma and bronchial disorders.

There is a convergence of crises- every living system is in decline – coral reefs, aquifers, rivers, the condition of the soil, air ….a staggering destruction of eco systems and the services they have provided and that economics has ignored. If we didn’t have occasional breakthroughs it could be very depressing.

Go read the rest of it here.

Big ups to Paul Mooney (aka @moon) for recording our panel and then posting the video from our SXSW Interactive session. It’s long, but the discussion was good and led to a longer discussion afterwards.

(with Doc Searls , Christopher Carfi and Adriana Lukas)

One of my mantras in life has always been “Objects in motion tend to stay in motion…objects at rest tend to stay at rest.” I know it’s totally ripped off from Newton’s law of inertia, but it applies nicely to motivation for me. It’s always toughest to get started. Once I get past that hurdle, it gets easier.

March was a month of total inertia for me. Between being on the road for most of it (17 of the 31 days were spent traveling), falling behind on my day to day (email, work, articles, etc) and missing most of my usual workouts and training schedule, I got into a total slump. I got sick…twice. I drank more alcohol than I’ve consumed in years. My work suffered. My mood suffered. My body suffered. I did manage to get in two lovely runs through Golden Gate Park whilst in San Francisco and another two lovely runs along Ladybird Lake whilst in Austin, but not much else. Even the run I planned to do through Central Park in New York fizzled with my overall energy levels. I did 1/2 the runs I did the previous month without any additional gym-time. And I felt it.

So when I got back home on the 1st of April, this object was NOT in motion. In more ways than one.

I’ve talked previously about how much running helps me keep sane during these rollercoaster high stress days of running a startup. I’ve also talked about how I was going to keep disciplined while on the road. I failed miserably at that in March. And I figured out why just recently.

Alcohol.

Other than running and trying to eat fairly well (okay, emphasis on the *trying*), I live a fairly unhealthy lifestyle. I don’t sleep enough. I stay out too late. I burn the candle on both ends. I drink too often. I even occasionally smoke (even though I quit time and time again). I haven’t been great at thinking of the effects this would have on my physical body in the long run. This compounded with the amount of stress that I hold inside on a day to day basis is probably taking eons off of my life. I’m completely useless for the entire day after a party, too, which puts more stress on me than ever.

And when I’m on the road it is worse than when I’m at home. I love the SXSW Festival, but the parties with open bars and unhealthy food (bbq soaked ribs, fried food and sweets) are endless. In fact, the goal is usually to hit about 10 of them a night these days. And when I visit San Francisco and New York, I have so many friends in both places, I tend to overdo the food and drink there, too.

But that’s no excuse. A good friend (and Shwowp’s fabulous marketing director) decided in mid-December of last year that she would stop drinking. She hated the way it made her feel the day after and she decided she could try to live without it. The results? She’s never been happier, healthier and had more fun (that she can recall). I’ve decided to follow her example.

Starting today, I am no longer drinking alcohol. I’ve done it before. Twice. And both times I started up again after a year or so, but this time I’m setting to make it permanent with a caveat: I can have one small glass of champagne for a toast upon celebrating some momentous occasion, and can have one small glass of a really good wine if offered to me. The reasons I went back before is that I missed the ‘treat’ from time to time. I’ll probably even appreciate it more.

I’m really looking forward to the results on my body. I have a feeling my stress levels will go down, I’ll be less prone to illness and my energy levels will go up. I will most likely lose weight, my running will definitely improve and, because smoking seems to be brought on by alcohol consumption, I’ll lose my craving for other bad stuff. Maybe I’ll even lose this awful insomnia that is haunting me these days.

I’ll definitely let you know how it goes and I’d appreciate your support as friends and associates. I won’t be one of ‘those people’ who don’t go out or shun parties and friends who like to have a good time, but it may take me a while to figure out how to have a good time without being tipsy. Wish me luck! For those who know me well, this is a pretty radical move.

Time for this woman to get back in motion!