Girls In Tech

This year:

• AOL Ventures has committed to funding the winning concept out of Startup Weekend!
• NoizIvy will hand out free hosting, consultations and a slew of other prizes.
• Hive at 55 will give away 3 months of free coworking space to one team and discounts to all other teams
• Speakers include:
  • David Lifson of Postling.com (& Etsy & Amazon)
  • Mark Lizoain of Urtak.com
  • more TBA

What do Attendees get from a Startup Weekend?

We’re glad you asked:

Startup Weekend provides an unprecedented level of networking, team building, learning, and life changes for its attendees and their communities. Five or six meals – and drinks are provided. There’s a reason most attendees come back for every event; it’s just plain fun and provides amazing opportunities you can’t get anywhere else.

Sometimes a company emerges, sometimes one doesn’t, but every time people leave with more experience, insight, knowledge, friends and resources than they came with.

We hope to see you there – especially if you have a great idea for a startup.

Though it may seem to be a particularly rough time to start a business, many experts say a recession is the best time to get going on that entrepreneurial venture.

So I love the idea of Silicon Alley Insider’s Startup 2010 Competition (in conjunction with New York University’s Stern School of Business and sponsored by General Catalyst Partners).

It’s a one-day business plan cage match in which 10 top entrepreneurial, digital startups compete for a whole heckuva lot buzz – and $100,000. The prize includes a $25,000 cash investment from General Catalyst and the remainder in goods and services that include six months of New York City office space, legal services, web hosting and the opportunity to launch at DEMO, among others.

This year’s focus is on the meeting point between location-based digital services and the mobile market. Yes, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare will be there. In and around the 10 pitches and the judges’ questions will be breakout sessions on making money with mobile, mobile apps and VC firms talking about how they choose what they’re investing in.

Last year’s winner was legal startup ArticleOne Partners, which crowdsources patent validity – in other words, it uses the collective knowledge of the the intellectual property community to help determine if a patent application is actually for something new or based on someone else’s work.

The competition is May 20 at the Stern School, 44 W. Fourth St., and students there can attend for free. Tickets are $295. Even for those not competing for the prize, it seems it would be a good opportunity for entrepreneurs to rub elbows with their friends, competitors and potential investors.

Startup Weekend is a grass roots organization of 15,000+ entrepreneurs/developers that rapidly develop new startups in 54 hours. Startup Weekend is a tech focused event currently operating in 60 cities spanning 18 countries and growing. During the event 75-200 attendees form 8-12 new ventures from mobile apps to web services to cupcake shops and anything between.

This is the second time that Startup Weekend is being held in Portland,Oregon. Girls In tech/Portland is a proud media supporter and sponsor. The event is open to anyone interested in the local entrepreneurial community, and it puts them in a setting where anything is possible. In the past 2 years, 280+ startups have started, 9,000+ entrepreneurs have been inspired. Teams have even started to generate revenue during the 54hr event, and others have even gone on to direct angel and VC investment. None of these stats take into account the amazing networking, ongoing professional relationships, and amazing experience that happen at every event.

Join us at Portland Startup Weekend: March 5-7, 2010 GIT members receive $10 off and use; discount code “girlsintech” register at http://portland.startupweekend.org/

Speakers & Mentors that will be there to help teams during the weekend:
Matt Compton (venture partner at Madrona and ex vp at Yahoo), Rob Wiltbank (venture partner at Montlake Capital and professor at Willamette U), Eric Doebele (Founder/CEO Reliable.remodeler.com), Nitin Khanna (Founder/CEO of MergerTech), Doug Fieldhouse (CEO of Vesta) and of course the guys from Mugasha Akshay and Justin will be there.

Learn more about Girls in Tech PDX or email ivo@girlsintech.net /tweet @mssonicflare

Last week I attended the launch party for See Jane Fly, the ultimate online travel planning guide for today’s on-the-go woman.  With the launch of  See Jane Fly, founder Erica Dublin is addressing an opportunity in the marketplace for a travel website that provides fast, customized, in-the-know destination guides with just a few clicks of the mouse.  I think of See Jane Fly as a customizable mix of Daily Candy + Weekend Sherpa + CitySearch for the discerning female traveler.

The user experience is simple — after selecting a destination, you are prompted to answer a few questions about your trip.  What type of trip is it – business, pleasure, solo, girl’s weekend?  What’s your budget range, and what type of food, accommodations, workout style, nightlife, and activities are you into?  Presto!  The site creates a tailored 2-3 page list of recommendations that you can print out for your trip.

When I sat down with Erica, she shared with me the key lessons she learned from the experience of launching her first startup.

1.     Stick to what you know best; delegate what you don’t know to others.
2.     Start talking about your idea and people will help you.
3.     Don’t worry about funding. Start building, be resourceful, scrap and bootleg it.
4.     Make your startup an area or topic that you are personally passionate about.

See Jane Fly is launching six additional destinations in the next two months and will work with local writers in each city.  Experience the See Jane Fly personalized travel guide experience for yourself here.

In my last post, I talked about how the idea for HowLegit? came about. While I was very excited and could see it all in my head, I knew I would soon have to tackle the onerous task of translating into a physical site on the web. This meant taking a number of steps that I could never even have dreamed of understanding. So, first order of business: Eradicate all intimidation. Step Two: Call in on old friend, common sense.

The first thing that needed to be done was validating the idea, and making sure there was no one else out there already doing this, better. This process, better known as “market research” resulted in a 25-page slide deck that became my “Business and Marketing Proposal” for HowLegit?. It included all the pertinent information about the environmental context into which this site would be launched and the internal steps we would need to take to make it successful. The business plan starts off with a very simple explanation of the value proposition of the site. It is easy to get lost in big, fluffly words (like “value proposition”) when writing a value proposition,  but the gist of it is: why will users use your site? If you can articulate this, and stay true to it during the course of your development, there is a good chance you will be able to avoid issues like “scope creep” in the future.

Other key elements of the plan are the audience (demographics such as age and gender, where will you find them, what do they like) and the competition. Using tools like Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends for websites, you can get a very thorough overview of your competitive landscape: who the biggest players are and how big your market is (unique visitors, pageviews). You may go back and refine your value proposition after you have studied the market to ensure that you are indeed providing some unique value.

The less fun bit of the Business Plan is the business part for us non-finance types. Who is funding all this creativity, and on what terms? If it is a team, is everyone working on equity or is there going to be some paid resources (and who is paying for them?). Legalzoom is a reliable way to incorporate a new company online. Their fees are reasonable (about $500), and you have access to all your documentation online. A person lawyer may cost you up to $5000, so weigh your pros and cons and decide if it worth it for you.

A tip on resourcing: If there is more than one of you involved, make sure to agree on the equity split, compensation and roles up front. There is always room for modification later on, but you don’t want to be negotiating a $10 million sale of your highly successful website, and finding your team in disarray over who is entitled to what share.

Kaamna Dhawan had a colorful career in corporate America before realizing that the intersection of technology and human interaction is where her passions lie. And no one makes human interaction as fascinating as celebrities do! As the founder and CEO of HowLegit.com, she brings in experience from running 4 successful social networks and a continuing restlessness for learning and entrepreneurship. Kaamna is now six months pregnant, and just moved across the world to Sydney, Australia, proving that technology has truly removed all barriers against productivity and connectivity. She misses the Bay Area and her interactions with Girls in Tech and secretly stalks the organization through the website and Facebook!

Next Week: Outsourcing: Lessons Learned

After working on social networks for a successful startup that recently got acquired, I decided that it was time to strike out on my own, but with no real engineering knowledge (I am a Psychology major and Human Resources Master), was unsure how to take the first step to getting there. I got my break when I joined a group of illustrious men, founders of Skewz.com, who needed my social networking skills to complement their engineering and marketing expertise. Skewz is about democratizing the media and more specifically, about revealing the political bias in the media. No better time than an election year, I say! I made it a point to sit next to our lead engineer at every meeting, and as we got chugging along in our late night pow-wow sessions, my vocabulary became populated with words previously known as “tech talk” or “geek stuff”. While I was undergoing this character change, it also occurred to me that the idea of media democratization could and should be applied to several fields – but the inspiration was yet to come.

One day, my husband came home from the supermarket, energized by his weekly consumption of celebrity trash at the checkout line, and revealed that Lynne Spears, Britney’s mum, was in the thick of a roaring affair with Kevin Federline, Britney’s ex and father of her children. As if we didn’t have enough to talk about (we had just found out I was pregnant and we had signed up for a 2 year assignment to Australia), we ended up debating the legitimacy of his claim for 45 minutes, and then as all Silicon Valley loyalists do, we jumped on the internet hoping for a final verdict. Google revealed nothing, People.com was mute on the subject, and Perez Hilton was obsessing over Lindsay instead. Then it dawned on me: “How do I find out if a curious bit of celebrity news is legit? By starting my own site, of course!”. Thus was born HowLegit.com on the foundation of a very simple idea (and slightly caustic marital dispute): users should be able to read and submit celebrity news articles and vote on which ones they think are true (“Totally Legit”), and which are false(“Full of Sh*t”). The wisdom of the crowds has a chance to prevail over the sensationalism of journalists, yet again. Three months later, the site is up. Check out www.howlegit.com and tune in here for next steps on how it came to be.

Kaamna Dhawan had a colorful career in corporate America before realizing that the intersection of technology and human interaction is where her passions lie. And no one makes human interaction as fascinating as celebrities do! As the founder and CEO of HowLegit.com, she brings in experience from running 4 successful social networks and a continuing restlessness for learning and entrepreneurship. Kaamna is now six months pregnant, and just moved across the world to Sydney, Australia, proving that technology has truly removed all barriers against productivity and connectivity. She misses the Bay Area and her interactions with Girls in Tech and secretly stalks the organization through the website and Facebook!