From the article:
When Marissa Mayer was growing up in the 1980s, she knew only one female computer scientist. Now Ms. Mayer is a vice president at Google Inc.—and a role model for many women entrepreneurs. She also is helping create a new generation of female founders by investing her own money in women-led companies such as discount home-decor site One Kings Lane and online invitation company Minted LLC.
"Encouragement can't be underestimated," 36-year-old Ms. Mayer said. "Now we have Google, Facebook, Twitter and others touching the lives of girls in middle school, and you have people saying, 'Well, gosh, how do you build that?'"
A growing number of U.S. female executives, mentoring groups and women investors are helping to crack the glass ceiling in start-ups. The percentage of women among start-up capital seekers grew to about 20% last year, up from 12.6% in 2000, according to the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research. Of those women, the number who received funding grew to 13% in 2010, up from 9.5% in 2008.
"It's not that women before were not networking, but now it is a much clearer path," said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at Accel Partners, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that was an early investor in Facebook and has financed women-led companies such as online handicraft marketplace Etsy, beauty-products company BirchBox Inc. and personal-finance website LearnVest.com.
The growth of fields such as fashion and e-commerce—where women have held top roles—have opened more doors. "A male [venture capitalist] will think: she's a woman, she understands the buyer better than I do," said Dave McClure, founder of seed venture fund 500 Startups. Of the 140 companies Mr. McClure has invested in, he estimates that 25% were founded or co-founded by women, and 12% are run by women.
Despite this progress, women are far from being on equal footing with men, a notable disparity in an industry that prides itself as a meritocracy. Women represent just over 15% of angel investors, and only 5% to 7% of partners at high-tech venture capital investor firms in the U.S., according to a recent study by Illuminate Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.
In an attempt to close the gap, a number of mentoring and investing organizations have popped up or grown significantly over the past few years, such as Women 2.0, Golden Seeds and Pipeline Fund.
In August 2009, designer Alexa Andrzejewski, who focuses on product strategy, research and design, attended a Women 2.0 workshop aimed at helping women to launch a start-up. She initially wanted to create a cookbook, but came out of the eight-week mentoring program thinking it would be better to build an app for Apple Inc.'s iPhone that served as a field guide for food. At the workshop's finale pitch event, she landed $5,000.
The feedback and money she gained from other women founders gave her confidence to start her own company. In January 2010, Ms. Andrzejewski co-founded Foodspotting, an online service that lets people snap photos of their favorite food dishes and share their location with fellow foodies. That May, she quit her consulting job, and two months later the company received $750,000 in funding from a group of angel investors and well-known early stage investors such as Felicis Ventures, High Line Venture Partners and 500 Startups.
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July 29, 2009 posted by Linda Basch
