loladesoto

(we won't forget you)

sales is not just about getting a deal done: each customer represents potential upsell and references. you lose those possibilities when you lie because the lie will generally be uncovered.

this is why good sales orgs emphasize integrity in the hiring process. unethical salespeople damage customer relationships, the company reputation and the bottom line.

you will be asked to explain your lack of degree, however. so your best strategy is so lead a life so successful, that your story overcomes any bias you may encounter. :>

this was shocking so i went to the source: http://www.siliconvalleycf.org/sites/default/files/publicati...

This percentage is down from a striking 97% in 2010, meaning that men with graduate or professional degrees in Silicon Valley were earning nearly twice that of their female peers.

progress, although we are far from the finish line.

part of the war waged when running a startup is rejection: repeated, horrifying, relentless. there is no peace and the arrows fly. you can't always control your immediate response but you can train yourself to be braced for it, inured to it when it comes. eventually, with a lot of hard mental conditioning, you can find and appreciate the benefits of being rejected (fortitude, resilience, grim determination).

getting into YC is one of many paths to winning that war when you're ready. just turns out to be the most effective i can think of.

regardless, that's precisely why you need a cofounder who balances you. whether it's a different perspective, questioning some of your choices, or holding you accountable (and holding you up): you need it. you'll make an order of magnitude more poor choices on your own.

i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a chorus of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.

i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>

fortunately, i am a warrior and don't really know any other way. otherwise, i'd have given up long ago.

that's where a person's character resides. and people who manage to be honest, and generous and courageous in those moments, are the ones to surround yourself with. experience character-building through HALT, in spite of it, and you're on your way to being a better man or woman, i suspect.

2. part of being a good entrepreneur is managing your own psychology. women—and i anticipate raising ire when i say this—have much to learn in this regard. not simply because we are relatively new to worlds men have long-accessed and enjoyed (with the corresponding body of wisdom and experience that accompanies such things, including the management of one's own psychology, which is nothing more than self-mastery), but also because we sometimes lose focus along the way. we stop building and start arguing. this is a natural process and i believe an important one for us to collectively go through: the debating, the feeling-out of collective boundaries and external asks. but we are not organized, we sometimes get emotional to the point where we become unintelligible, uncommunicative or irrational, and lose credibility along the way. if you are to wage a war then you must find a way to unite around a common purpose, set your sights on victory and then take intelligent action, individual or otherwise. (coincidentally, we also need role models who are both vocal AND able to organize women.) alas, in our early stages we seem to spend a lot of time arguing. so: less bicker, more build. whether your own projects or community, every hour matters.

3. on YC-ness: how many female founders have worked very closely alongside a VC-funded YC-alum (who happens to be a white male)? i am a minority female founder who has experienced this, and was astounded. temporarily laying aside the argument of how to actually get in if you do fit that stereotype: the intrinsically, deeply supportive nature of this network is such that many of you, if exposed to it, would be tempted to apply. many of you would apply. it wasn't the contacts, or the advice, or the credibility it conferred (those things helped with everything from recruiting to raising $, of course—not to mention the comparative ease of getting meetings): what impressed me was this battle-hardened community offering the gift of time and emotional support to one another...generosity on a scale one rarely sees in any business context (qualities which i believe will only improve in the years to come, particularly as YC evolves to include more women). my conclusion? apply to YC. and i would suggest, if a group of mostly-white male geeks does not interest you, and i understand if that is the case, then apply to a female-oriented accelerator or better yet: assemble a group of kickass female founders, mentors and investors and start your own. (remember, the genesis of a good product is building something you need.)

4. food for thought: if there were a female version of YC, would you apply? would i? i am not sure i would. i do not live in a vacuum; the world i seek to conquer is a male-dominated world (at present); and part of self-mastery includes mastering one's environment, not creating a bubble within it. but it is an interesting thought-experiment and useful to ponder.

*btw, not making this about white vs non-white. that alone would be the subject of a 1k post thread.

some of the most brilliant hackers i know are rightfully afraid of going into business with the kind of "brilliant men" described in this article.

just as non-technical founders benefit from learning to code for a myriad of reasons, hackers should do careful due diligence on a potential business partner. ask questions. require them to invest in the relationship. blow away the smoke and mirrors if you see their evidence, until you see that person in a humble light.

most of the time, this kind of salesperson is masking deep personality flaws which you can actually live with in exchange for the benefits, on one condition: the existence of abiding integrity.

so many of these relationships are predatory but they don't have to be if you find ways to get them to show you their character. see how they treat their friends. travel with them. build something together.

something a friend taught me is "H.A.L.T." = hungry, angry, lonely, tired. 1) don't make decisions when you're in any of these states; 2) it applies to choosing a business partner but here, you WANT to see them this way. you can learn a lot about a person when their basic needs are momentarily threatened, including how they treat you and others. so don't be dazzled, find them in a humble light because that's where a person's character is revealed.

the ones you want are comfortable with their humility.

if anyone cares enough to want to speak with a company rep, as the CEO i'm more than happy to be that person. in fact i should be, for as long as i possibly can. you need to know your customers, and how else can you effectively train your sales and support reps?

anecdotally: Adora Cheung learned the cleaning biz as a cleaner. after raising $30M, she posed as a secret cleaner on Thanksgiving as a way of expressing gratitude. literally got her hands dirty. ;>

although there was definitely some value there (templates are incredibly useful) i think a more interesting topic would have been time-management mistakes inexperienced CEOs make. because there are a lot and you don't find out what they are until you get absolutely obsessive about managing your time.

until the [identity/trust/data] model changes, identity services sh/could do a much better job of explaining the benefits (apart from expediency) of using them as an authenticator provider, and find smarter ways to address the conversion hit.

but we all know that won't happen; someone will simply innovate around that broken model instead. one hopes/expects.

female founders have more than our share of Sisyphian tasks; events like this give us the strength to keep going.

i'd pick one thing and do it really well. figure out what that is, and go after that. e.g., Ranku solves the problem of searching for online degree programs by aggregating the info for you. once you're there, they make it easy to find/compare/apply.

i'd also spend some time with product people having them give you feedback on your prototype.

what did you learn from the 3 experiments you ran?

why 297 schools? why not a few more pilot schools?

i'm serious. wow them with ugly. (tm)

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." - Reid Hoffman

with this:

"Make something customers actually want." - pg

i once designed 20 screenshots of an iOS app before spending serious time with potential users. don't do that.

after that mistake, i'm currently demoing the world's ugliest MVP to potential customers. my MVP = a google form and a graph based on the data. i got my first verbal commitment from a customer after demoing this and mocking up the final product on a sheet of paper. (we agreed on price and initial functionality, despite the fact that 0 lines of code had been written.)

simply put: i'm building something his team can use. he gave me valuable feedback, threw in a few future feature requests and gave me a short list of other CEOs he wanted to refer me to. i also asked him to tweet about using my product. he agreed (and did).

just build something that does one thing very well, and get that in front of people. they'll tell you everything you need to know from that point on.

i just try to capture something fleeting. i identify the most salient element and try to communicate that in my drawing. the most useful exercise in that book imo was the technique of trying to draw something once, then turning it upside down and trying again. ("disorienting" the object trains your mind to better identify spatial relationships.)

ego urges you to walk into situations wearing nothing but arrogance. (and why wouldn't you? you've been praised since you were a kid for your precocity. by adults!). and while you may have earned some of that praise, it's like your granny chanting your invincibility into your ear. it's a delusion that prevents you from asking questions (acquiring wisdom) and exploring your outer limits (acquiring experience).

with mentoring, that arrogance could be channelled into something else: humility. because it's really impossible to be alert to truth--academic or otherwise--when you think you know all of the things.

it's just that the educational system doesn't really know what to do with academically-gifted kids who have a bit of rebellion/arrogance in them. and there aren't enough teachers or mentors who recognize this variant even among the gifted.

so they're released into the wild, not having acquired the one thing they needed possibly more than an education: humility.

in high school i found safety in geeky societies like Academic Decathlon. i went to a science/engineering university and dropped out to work in tech. and as much as i love my work, i have always been aware (sometimes acutely) of being one of the only women in the room.

i'd be lying if it didn't chap my hide sometimes. i have skills commonly found among the male population (i am an entrepreneur, i know how to code) but it's a lonely existence. i still look like a woman, wear heels and makeup for the fun of it when i want to, and am relatively short! my point is, i stand out from the norm and people are constantly being surprised by me/my abilities. which means i have to do a lot of explaining and seeking out of mentors, rather than spending that time thriving in the simple assumption that i am precisely where i am supposed to be.

men have that. the really self-reflective ones realize that.

the awesome thing is, the women in my family have not only been fighting the good fight in STEM, they are passing the baton. each one of my nieces--all 8 of them--is encouraged to build, tear apart, and reconstruct stuff. these kids have to be torn away from Minecraft, unglued from their laptops and iPads. i teach girls how to code and do graphic design in my free time, and one of my favorite questions is: "When is the Maker Faire? When is the Maker Faire!" with sparkly eyes.

my experience in tech hasn't been like @HedgeMage's. although i didn't start coding until later in my career, i have always been a hacker and the dirty little secret is that girls just aren't encouraged to hack.

some of us are born that way, however. and that's a pretty amazing way to be on the inside, regardless of how we look or are treated on the outside.

i hope they develop a product for founders. we shouldn't have to crawl ALL OF THE SITES just to do market/competitive research. it's time-consuming and inefficient.

AngelList is awesome.

network for intros, preferably warm. failing that, just email the CEO directly. write a kickass email pitching yourself and detailing your skills. tactfully follow-up.

network some more.

founders have (and want to see) passion and hustle. show them you have these qualities and you shouldn't have trouble landing a paid internship if not an entry-level role.

last resort: get a few unpaid internships at startups you love. if one doesn't turn into a full time offer, you'll have some awesome experience you can use to get the attention of other startups.

tl;dr: either go with someone you know and launch something together. if strangers: brainstorm, hack something together in 48 hours and thoroughly go through their background. if they've done a startup before, ask them to walk you through PG's 18 mistakes and identify which they've made (and their plan for doing things differently).

it's actually a two-sided problem. how do technical and non-technical co-founders who are potentially strangers and often have wildly different skill sets evaluate each other?

i asked a few hacker-founder friends for their take. one (well-known) serial CTO said: "I don’t have negotiation skills and I’m afraid of talking to business people. They play this "wordsmithing" game and I can’t keep up. Before I know it, they talk me into accepting less than I deserve and I get screwed.”

turns out, being taken advantage of was a common theme among the technical founders i talked to. most have been burned. in some cases it turned them off forming partnerships altogether.

what about the other side? i was a non-technical founder when i launched my first startup, which failed partly due my inability to judge a good from a bad developer. i eventually realized that being non-technical put me in a foolishly helpless position so i did two things: 1. i taught myself to code (i started with Pygames, moved to Project Euler and wound up working on small Python projects and learning ObjectiveC); 2. i got lucky when i met a developer at a hackathon last year. we became friends and i asked for his help interviewing technical co-founders. he wound up being interested in the problem i was trying to solve and contributed to the project. when i wound down that startup and told him about my next one, he wanted to get involved.

but not before suggesting i quickly hack together an MVP, get some initial user feedback and even land a few potential customers first. :> i'm so glad i did and he was smart to ask for this. he now understands how i approach problems, saw my ability to hack something quick and dirty, and witnessed some serious hustle as i did all of that in 48 hours. the point is we have some shared history now and the net result is trust. we also understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and talk about them openly.

(note: i also did a post-mortem on my previous startup and identified which of PG's 18 mistakes i'd made. it was a great exercise and i recommend it to anyone who has had to wind down a startup before launching their next. do it for yourself but share it with prospective co-founders and team mates.)

one model that i tried with my former CTO, who had a baby while we were working on a product, was to take turns watching the baby while coding.

/disaster

that said, there are roles that require more experience/industry relationships/gravitas as a company matures (e.g., Sandberg as COO) and that often correlates with age.