Archive for the ‘“ninja”’ Category

The Great Astros Escape

The Tech Community’s Diversity Problem

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Take gender diversity, for one thing. By most counts, the average open source project has 49 male participants for every female participant. Women at conferences - rare enough already! - are assumed to be significant others, designers or visitors from planet marketing, with disastrous consequences for all involved.

This is a problem, for lots of reasons. The worst is that it’s self-perpetuating - women will (wisely!) avoid hostile environments, and through some broken-window-like mechanism, environments without women will quickly become environments that are hostile to women. (The same holds for other visible minorities.)

In discussions about "how to fix this", community leaders often appear to be at a loss, unsure how to progress. Their early efforts are often met by criticism on both sides - techies have a strong libertarian streak that tilts at all sorts of windmills, and the women who do "blaze trails" aren’t always much better than the men. (In fields like physics, chemistry and finance - fields dominated by men for ages - which are, these days, however, beating our numbers by a wide margin - the first generation of women to brave the hostilities and pierce the glass ceiling are often later generations’ harshest critics. "What? You want to have a career and a family? I didn’t have that option. Why should you? You’ll need to learn to drink scotch and smoke cigars like I did, or you’re through.")

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5 Types of Internet Users

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Dining Out

Getting some grub…

Golf in Mumbai

Hecklers

My Ninja, Please! 4.28.11 : OMG

Click here to be scared and inspired…

5 Kinds of Bloggers

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Invest in Female Entrepreneurs

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It was a scene straight out of the 1990s: A web start-up, flush with nearly $1 million in new investor cash, threw a party at a downtown bar to toast that success.

But here’s the 2011 twist to the story of DailyWorth, a daily email newsletter of financial tips: the founder, Amanda Steinberg, isn’t a 24-year-old male Stanford dropout. She’s a thirtysomething mom of two who is determined to change the image of what a serious entrepreneur looks like.

"I started this thing with the vision of having millions of subscribers from day one," she says. She spent 10 years in the tech world and saw many "half-baked business models." She knew she could "do a much better job."

That might be true — but Steinberg is one of the rare women who has convinced the so-called angels and venture capital investors who fund start-ups of that fact.

Women own 29 percent of all businesses, according to a recent American Express study. Yet various expert calculations find they receive well under 10 percent of all equity financing. Many female entrepreneurs either use their own funds or take out bank loans to grow. These methods have their merits, but also their limits. According to AmEx, women-owned businesses employ just 6 percent of the country’s workforce and contribute less than 4 percent of overall business revenue.

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