Published on: June 19, 2013 – 1:00 pm
Who says business has to be unpleasant? Courtesy costs nothing and ultimately benefits everyone, so why not make a little effort and discover how great the rewards can be.
By Alexandra Ross (Senior Counsel, Paragon Legal)
I just wrapped up an exceedingly pleasant business negotiation. Why did this experience stand out amongst the seemingly endless, often difficult and typically contentious negotiations of my career? In trying to pinpoint the reason why this particular deal went so smoothly, I realized that the opposing legal counsel and business representatives were so…. courteous.
Something as simple as having a civil and positive interpersonal interaction enabled us to focus on the issues and achieve an optimal result for our respective clients. Read More »
Published on: June 19, 2013 – 10:00 am
WordPress maker Automattic takes a simple route to ensuring it has a women-friendly workplace; it just strives to build an awesome company culture for everyone.
By Janet Choi (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0)
“Choose your own adventure” is the first section on the jobs page of Automattic, the makers of WordPress. Its roughly 170 employees, who are completely distributed all over the world, power over 66 millions websites.
Yet Automattic stands out not just for its all-remote team but for the thought put into creating an environment where talented people thrive. The company’s approach of flexibility and communication form the vital building blocks of their collaborative, quirky culture. Read More »
Published on: June 18, 2013 – 9:00 am
For New York-based startup Bib + Tuck, taking a brand to the next level may mean losing a customer or two in the process. And that’s okay.
By Lorraine Sanders (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0)
Being all things to all people may be an excellent strategy for Amazon, but it’s fast becoming popular consensus that any retailer hoping to grow using a strictly traditional ecommerce model is, more or less, doomed to fail. Instead, startups with their sights set on growth are becoming increasingly comfortable diving deep into niche territory, a place where brand identity and customer loyalty have the potential to be stronger.
“We might, as a brand, alienate some people in the process of building a brand with a point of view,” says Sari Azout, who co-founded Bib + Tuck with her childhood friend Sari Bibliowicz last fall Read More »
Published on: June 18, 2013 – 6:00 am
Looking for a startup idea? Look beyond the needs of well educated urbanites with money to burn to the kind of people with serious problems in need of solving.
By C.Z. Nnaemeka (Writer, MIT Entrepreneurship Review)
The startup scene today, and by ‘scene’ I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush over a large swath of people – observers, critics, investors, entrepreneurs, ‘want’repreneurs, academics, techies, and the like – seems to be riven into two camps.
On one side stand those who believe that entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems – capital B, capital P: clean energy, poverty, famine, climate change, you name it. I needn’t replay their song here; they’ve argued their cases far more eloquently elsewhere. In short, they contend that too many brains and dollars have been shoveled into resolving what I call ‘anti-problems’ – interests usually centered about food or fashion or ‘social’or gaming. Read More »
Published on: June 17, 2013 – 2:00 pm
You can start up in any area that you love and that are confident will make you a profit, but it can be hard to know exactly which industries offer the best opportunities for female founders. The good news? We’ve found nine to get you started.
By Holly Mangan (Managing Editor, Money Crashers)
Nearly eight million businesses in the U.S.are owned by women, and woman-owned businesses are expected to account for one-third of all new jobs created by the year 2018. Additionally, there are a good number of female CEOs and influential business women leading large corporations.
In spite of the encouraging numbers, women do face many obstacles that men simply do not encounter. For example, even though the growth-rate of women-owned businesses continues to exceed the growth rate of all other businesses, total revenues only represent 4% of those generated in the private sector. Read More »
Published on: June 17, 2013 – 11:00 am
If you’re interested in empowering and nurturing your female employees, think long and hard before you set up an internal women’s network, warns one female CEO — they often backfire.
By Jessica Stillman (Editor, Women 2.0)
Here on Women 2.0, posts outlining what bigger tech companies are doing to attract, empower and inspire female staff get a great reception. And why wouldn’t they? Everyone here is in favor of increasing women’s ambitions, career satisfaction and levels of professional success.
But just because you’re for all these good things, doesn’t mean you should be for any old women’s network your company sets up, warns Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, author and CEO of gender consulting firm 20-first, on the HBR Blog Network recently. Read More »
Published on: June 17, 2013 – 6:00 am
Lauren Bacon talks to Kate Sutherland about the “inner work” founders can do to better integrate their emotions into their decision making.
By Lauren Bacon (Author, The Boss of You)
How do you make your best decisions?
For many years, I bought into the cultural myth (thanks, Plato) that rational, analytical decision-making was good, and intuitive, emotional decision-making (AKA following your gut) was bad. I diligently drew up lists of pros and cons, and tried to weigh them from as dispassionate a perspective as I could muster.
Then, sometime in my early adulthood, I learned about how that whole rational decision-making idea has been roundly debunked by neuroscientists, and in fact we need our emotions to make decisions well. Read More »
Published on: June 14, 2013 – 9:00 am
Do you have some coding skills but still feel like a fake? You’re not alone, writes Angelina Fabbro, and the best thing you can do is talk about your feelings.
By Angelina Fabbro (Programmer, realityhacking.ne)
If you write code, if you participate in the act of programming, then you are a programmer. We can add a clause to this that suggests regularity — someone who programs often is a programmer. That’s all it takes to be a programmer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started and worked your way through the fundamentals like control structures and taming functions. It doesn’t matter if for some reason you don’t feel like a programmer. It doesn’t matter if someone pays you or not, unless you really find it important to be a professional programmer. If you program and you do it over and over, you become a programmer. Read More »
Published on: June 14, 2013 – 6:00 am
It’s all very well thinking about where you want your startup to go but you’ve also got to take the time to look back and reflect on what you’ve achieved so far. Here one co-founder shares the lessons she’s learned 12 months into her venture.
By Alison Johnston (CEO & Co-founder, InstaEDU)
At the end of May 2012, InstaEDU, the company I co-founded, introduced our beta product publicly and announced that we’d raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Twelve months later, it’s helpful for me to to look back and consider where we’ve come from and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Some of the lessons are specific to InstaEDU, but much of what I’ve learned is applicable to anyone launching a new company in today’s crowded market. Read More »
Published on: June 13, 2013 – 12:19 pm
Last night Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania participated in BA’s UnGrounded flight, a transatlantic hackathon en route from San Francisco to London. This morning she reports in on the experience, shares some pics and explains what her team came up with.
By Jessica Stillman (Editor, Women 2.0)
As we reported earlier today, our CEO is having a wild week. Shaherose spent last night abroad BA’s UnGrounded. a hackathon on a flight from San Francisco to London, culminating in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to present the group’s findings at the G8 Summit.
Sleepless but stoked to have participated, she reported in from Healthrow this morning, sending pics and explaining what her team — including heavy hitters like Peter Ragone, Andreessen Horowitz partner Todd Lutwalk, Sejal Hethi and LearnUp co-founder Alexis Ringwald –have accomplished so far. Read More »
