She started her career as a management consultant, but Aubrie Pagano says she always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. And she was particularly energized by fashion.

So Pagano spent her free hours assisting local Boston designer Emily Muller in launching her collection, in exchange for the opportunity to get some firsthand experience in the independent fashion design space. There she discovered that designers face a particular challenge—one that would eventually inspire Pagano to create the e-commerce startup Zoora.

“Its hard for independent designers to scale because there’s a discovery issue,” says Pagano. “[Muller] has a great website buts nobody goes to it.”

And as a shopper, Pagano says she’s felt like she’s had to settle for a piece of clothing that just isn’t quite right. Women like her are the perfect customer base for independent designers, she says.

“Something that a lot of people don’t know about independent designers is that they’re really flexible,” Pagano says.

Just last Monday, Pagano opened the Zoora website to the public, to offer women clothing that they can customize to best fit their measurements and taste. Her hope is that the women who feel underserved by traditional retail will bring independent designers the traffic—and business—they so desperately need.

Zoora joins a booming cluster of Boston companies in the space of mass customization, where e-commerce platforms allow shoppers to select and tailor products to better fit their preferences. As my colleague Greg has pointed out previously, these companies offer shoppers personalized jewelry (Gemvara), bags (F. Rock), girls clothing (FashionPlaytes), men’s dress shirts (Boston’s Blank Label and Proper Cloth in New York), and even bras (Zyrra).

Pagano started working on Zoora (a name inspired by “misura,” the Italian word for measurement) last spring, and made hiring a head buyer her first move. Since then, the company has enlisted about a dozen designers (including Muller) to sell garments on the site with options for customization. Another designer is Althea Harper, a former contestant on the Lifetime show Project Runway. (Worth noting, New York fashion tech startup Send the Trend has Project Runway veteran and winner Christian Siriano on staff.)

The customizations to Zoora garments fall into two baskets, says Pagano: “made-to-measure adjustments” and “ready-to-wear tweaks.” With the first category, customers input their specific measurements, which designers take into account to create a garment that’s a perfect fit. With “ready-to-wear tweaks,” meanwhile, garments come in standard sizes, but offer different options for elements like fabric, necklines, sleeves, and hem length.

The Zoora team now consists of … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

I set off for five straight days at the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference last Monday, but on the way drove the carpool to my daughter’s high school that morning in a last ditch attempt to act like a responsible and caring parent. My poor daughter gets completely abandoned during JP Morgan week every year and, as she so aptly put it, it is a mixed blessing. When I arrived home finally Friday afternoon she said to me that she likes that I am not there to tell her what to do, but not that I am not there to act as her personal assistant and laugh at her jokes. I must admit, she is pretty funny. Especially that part about the personal assistant.

Anyway, during my last parental act of last week, my daughter’s friend, who also happens to be a JP Morgan orphan (her dad is also a healthcare venture capitalist), asked me from the back seat, “So, are there many women at this conference?”

It was interesting to get that question from a 15 year old, as it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I worried about at her age, probably to my detriment. In response I told her that I estimated that about 10 percent of the people who attend the JP Morgan conference and the associated three-ring circus of meetings and parties are women, about the same percentage of women that are represented in the venture capital profession generally. She was not impressed, nor should she be. In a field where women hold many senior positions in actual US healthcare corporations, they are drowned out at this conference by the advancing horde of finance guys in red ties and the CEOs that love them.

The JP Morgan conference and the fanfare that surrounds it bring thousands of people to San Francisco each year. They fill every hotel lobby, taxi cab, bathroom stall and barstool within a 10 block radius of Union Square. Many people don’t even go into the JP Morgan conference venue itself, using the occasion of the event to set up one-on-one meetings with everyone they ever met or wanted to meet in the healthcare industry. I attended so many 30-60 minute meetings in so many different hotels that I suspect people are wondering about my true profession. If you were recruiting for “The Bachelor” TV show, you could simply stand among the hundreds of men sitting in the sun with their ties loosened in Union Square Plaza and it would take you 10 seconds to find your candidate.

Given the ample supply of men and the fact that the conference is conveniently situated at the exact center of the 10 best shoe departments in the city, you would think more women would be in attendance, particularly given the after-Christmas sales. However, like so many professional situations in which I find myself, not so much. Nevertheless, there were a few standout moments that gave one hope, particularly if one were of the lipstick-wearing persuasion.

I was invited to attend a Pfizer breakfast and what stood out from it was the number of women who held virtually all of the senior Pfizer positions. Almost all of the 100+ attendees were men, but the speakers and leaders, representing Pfizer’s venture capital, innovation and other key corporate functions, were mostly women. You gotta love a room filled with men in rapt attention as the ladies told them how it was going to be.

I also attended a great women’s VC dinner along with about 28 or so others. What was particularly notable about the dinner was that I knew so few of the people there. I thought I knew most of the women in my profession, but apparently not. It was great to meet so many new and accomplished people and I can tell you that the banter was notably different from the other dinners I attended. The funniest part was the creative self-deprecating humor that people used when we went around the room each introducing ourselves. That is not often the way that men make their first impression on a room, at least not intentionally. It is a marked difference between men and women, I believe, in that men are more comfortable publicly touting their accomplishments by and large, while women too often … Next Page »

Comments (12) | Reprints | Share:          

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a world thick with healthcare conferences, MedtechVision, held September 15-16 at the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, CA, stood out, both for its quality of content and for its participants.

“I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that it was theoretically a ‘women’s conference’ before I walked into the room. I’d just promised the organizer, a friend, that I would come,” said Vance Vanier, CEO of Navigenics. “But walking into the room full of women had quite an impact; I realized how much I stood out and it was worth noting. It made me realize what women experience when they go to events like this.”

Vanier was commenting on his experience as a male attendee at the conference, which was intended to provide a platform for the many women executives in the medical technology field to wield the microphone. Some 200 women and 3 intrepid men spent two days in a room hearing from some of the most influential and experienced provider, corporate, government and investment executives representing medical technology organizations nationwide.  If you are a man and reading this article, don’t run away yet. What was most notable about the conference overall was that it wasn’t for women and about women—rather it was intended to give a platform to executives who just happened to be women and who are rarely given a place at the microphone to talk about general medical technology issues that apply to the entire field. No “bikini medicine” here; this was a conference about health and business in a world where bringing new medical technology to market is getting ever more challenging.

Organized by Covidien, Abbott Vascular, and a number of other organizations with leadership roles in the field of medical technology, the conference gave healthcare executives a chance to come together to learn and problem-solve within this highly stressed and rapidly changing field. The presentations and panels covered emerging regulation and reimbursement issues as well as the challenges of nurturing medical technology companies in a rapidly changing healthcare industry. Not only was it unusual to see a conference like this where all of the experts were women, but it was also unusual to see a medical technology conference where the issues of cost and the need for evidence-based medicine were so closely coupled in the context of innovation.

Presenters and panel members, including executive representation from public and private companies, the FDA, numerous hospital systems, insurance carriers, and private equity firms, were all female, but it was their mountain of experience and knowledge that stood out, not their hairstyles. Keynote speakers included Ginger Graham, former CEO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals and former group chairman, Office of the President, Guidant Corp.; Bray Patrick-Lake, president & CEO of the PFO Research Foundation; and, Ellen Zane, president & CEO of Tufts Medical Center. Zane’s message to the audience was right on point: Providers must reduce needless variations in care, insurers must reform their administrative practices, employers must stop offering the world to employees while complaining about costs, governments must pay adequately for needed care, and consumers must take responsibility for their own behavior when it comes to their health. Without great advances toward these goals, Zane noted, the healthcare system cannot evolve beyond its troubled state.

Particularly interesting were the pairings on panels that juxtaposed people on all sides of key issues. The reimbursement panel, featured medtech executives from Sonitus and Covidien, as well as the chief medical officer of CMS Region IX, Dr. Betsy Thompson, and Robin Cisneros, national director of medtech assessment for the Permanent Federation.  A key takeaway from this panel was the rising tension between payers’ desire to reimburse only for new products that demonstrably improve health outcomes and manufacturers’ desire to … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Quick: Name the Bay Area startup accelerator where 60 percent of the companies go on to get acquired or win funding within 12 months of graduating, and where the 220 companies that have participated since 2003 have raised, in total, nearly a billion dollars in venture funding.

If you answered Y Combinator, you’re wrong. In fact, the group I’m talking about couldn’t be more different from the Silicon Valley venture incubator, which is pretty much a den of 22-year-old guys who dropped out of Stanford with dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The real answer is Astia, and it’s probably the world’s most successful organization promoting women-led technology startups. I’ve been waiting for months for a chance to write about this non-profit. Not so much because of what it’s doing to combat the startup world’s structural and cultural biases against women—although that’s incredibly important—but because of its phenomenal success rate. Any organization that’s churning out this many high-growth companies is doing something right, and deserves the attention of entrepreneurs and investors everywhere. Just glance over this partial list of Astia’s alumnae:

BioVantage Resources, Golden, CO—Sue Kunz, CEO. Algae-based bioremediation for municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastewater. Winner of 2010 Cleantech Open Sustainability Award.

Blurb Books, San Francisco—Eileen Gittins, founder, president, and CEO. Photo book publishing service. Turned profitable after just three years in business; earned $45 million in revenues in 2009.

DNA Direct, San Francisco—Ryan Phelan, founder and president. Acquired in February 2010 by Medco Health Solutions.

Formotus, Bellevue, WA—Adriana Neagu, co-founder and CEO. Mobile business forms for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile devices. Winner of numerous achievement and innovator-of-the-year awards.

LearnVest, New York—Alexa von Tobel, founder and CEO. Personal financial management tools and education for women. Raised $4.5 million from Accel Partners in April 2010.

Napo Pharmaceuticals, San Francisco—Lisa Conte, CEO and founder. Developing drugs for chronic diarrhea and Type II diabetes. Raised $24 million in a 2006 IPO on the London Stock Exchange.

Ocimum Biosolutions, Hyderabad, India—Anu Acharya, founder and CEO. Genomic diagnostics outsourcing. Ranked by Deloitte as the fourth-fastest-growing technology company in India.

Scout Labs, San Francisco—Jennifer Zeszut, CEO. Social media monitoring technology. Acquired by Lithium Technologies in May 2010.

There’s a lot of firepower in this lineup (and even more if you check out the full list of past Astia clients). There’s also a lot of variety: you don’t see too many cleantech, pharmaceuticals, or publishing companies coming out of Y Combinator.

In two recent meetings with Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek, I’ve learned a lot about how the organization works and how it’s different from most of the other accelerators around the United States. If you asked me to boil down Astia’s secret to one word, I guess it would be “community.” The Astia experience doesn’t end after the program’s two-month period of intense mentorship. Astia admits new companies not just based on their potential to get funded and grow exponentially, but on … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Out of the mouths babes. Maybe because it’s a company town and everyone in Silicon Valley has a family connection to entrepreneurship. Or maybe I just encountered the most entrepreneurial 12-year-olds ever assembled under one roof. Or maybe we’re now teaching entrepreneurial thinking in middle schools. Either way I had an astounding evening as one of the judges at the Girls’ Middle School 7th grade Entrepreneurial Night.

12 Year Olds Writing Business Plans
In this school every seventh-grade girl becomes part of a team of four or five that create and run their own business. The students write business plans, request start-up capital from investors, receive funding for their companies, make product samples, manufacture inventory, and sell their products to real-world customers. This class is experiential learning at its best.

It was amazing to read their plans talking about income, revenue, cost of goods, fixed and variable costs, profit and liquidity. (Heck, I don’t think I understood cost of goods until I was 30.) As they built their business, having to work with a team meant the girls learned firsthand the importance of creativity, teamwork, communication, consensus-building, personal responsibility, and compromise. (Next time I have to adjudicate between founders in a real startup I can now say, ‘I’ve seen 12 year olds get along better than you.’)

One highlight of the girls’ Entrepreneurial Program is the annual “Entrepreneurial Night” that showcases the newly created businesses for both the school and the wider Silicon Valley community. All of the teams had a booth where they sold their products as if in a trade show. Then after a break, each of the 12 teams of 7th graders got up in front of audience of several hundred (and the judges) and presented their Powerpoint summaries of their business and progress to date. (I couldn’t write or deliver a pitch that good until my third startup.)

Wow.

(Watching these girls gave me even more confidence about predictions of the future of entrepreneurship in the post When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.)

Women as Entrepreneurs
Teaching entrepreneurship in middle school is an amazing achievement. But teaching it to young women is even better. Not all these girls will choose to be career professionals in a corporate world. But learning entrepreneurial thinking early can help regardless of your career choice, be it teacher, mother, doctor, lawyer or startup founder. They will forever know that starting a company is not something that only boys do, but was something they mastered in middle school.

The Girls Middle School is not alone in teaching young students entrepreneurship. Organizations like Bizworld and The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship are also spreading the word. If you have any influence on the curriculum of your children’s school, adding an entrepreneurship class will be good for them, good for your community and great for our country.

Lessons Learned

• Middle school is a great time to introduce entrepreneurship into a curriculum
• Students that age can master the basics of a small business
• It’s best taught as a full immersion, “get out of the building, make it, sell it and do it” experience
• The lessons will last a lifetime
• Extra credit if you teach it in a girls-only school

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Lauren Flanagan believes that “making money is beautiful.” This is not to be confused with the “greed is good” adage of the famous fictional Gordon Gekko. No, what Flanagan is referring to is the name of her newly formed Michigan-based early-stage fund, Belle Capital. The fund of up to $25 million is planning a formal launch next month.

Belle, Flanagan says, is an acronym for Bold Enterprises Leveraging Leadership and Experience and she’s launching it with Carolyn Cassin, president and CEO of the Michigan Women’s Foundation, who had recruited Flanagan for the project. While the fund will target technology companies, it has its own sense of mission—that of empowering women entrepreneurs—so there are certain conditions.

First, companies targeted for investment must have at least one female C-level officer or significant owner and board member, and/or be willing to hire top C-level female talent. Belle Capital’s mission is, specifically, to “help women, who control 50 percent of the wealth in the Midwest but do less than 10 percent of early stage investing,” Flanagan says.

Belle, Flanagan says, is currently doing due diligence on two companies for potential investment. Its headquarters is currently in suburban Gross Pointe Farms, but they are looking for an office in Detroit.

Flanagan has founded and led IT companies in the California Bay Area. Cassin recruited Flanagan to co-found Belle because of her experience in early-stage investing, with 30 investments made in the past six years. Flanagan is also co-founder and manager of the Madison, WI-based Phenomenelle Angels Fund, which is nearing the end of its investment period. Phenomenelle has made 15 investments into eight portfolio companies and expects to make two or three more over the next 18 months.

“The two ‘sister funds’ intend to co-invest when and where it makes sense to do so,” Flanagan says.

Flanagan says investments will target Michigan and the Midwest, and will focus on companies in  IT, mobile, Web 2.0, cleantech and advanced manufacturing. Depending on the final size of the fund, Flanagan says, Belle will invest in between 10 and 20 companies.

Flanagan says to stay tuned until next month, when Belle plans “a big splash” to coincide with its initial close and first investments.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Big partnerships are often a key to success for startups. Especially one that plays in a crowded consumer tech sector like Cozi, which makes software for helping busy families manage their daily schedules, chores, and activities.

The Seattle-based company is announcing some new deals today, ones that could have a substantial impact on its business. Cozi has formed strategic partnerships with AOL, Intel, Working Mother, FlyLady, and Punchbowl. Financial details weren’t given, but I got the gist of how the partnerships work from Cozi CEO and co-founder Robbie Cape.

For AOL, Cape says, Cozi has created a family organizer for MyDaily.com, a news and information portal aimed at women. For Intel, Cozi has developed an online calendar and to-do list platform optimized for netbooks. For WorkingMother.com and FlyLady.net—news and mentoring sites for busy moms—the company provides access to co-branded versions of its family calendar and other tools. (That means the Cozi brand appears together with the individual site’s brand.) Lastly, Punchbowl, a Boston-area party-planning startup, has integrated Cozi into its online event-organizing software, and Cozi links to Punchbowl whenever people enter a party or event on their Cozi calendar.

The basic agreement is that these other companies use their big distribution channels to get more customers to use Cozi’s free tools, while Cozi drives advertising sales for those impressions—and shares the revenue from those ads with its partners. It’s a similar arrangement to Cozi’s existing partnerships with companies like Dell, Nestle, Gannett, MeadWestvaco, and Meredith Corporation.

“Cozi continues to establish itself as the way to help families manage the chaos of family life,” Cape says.

Indeed, the company has taken an interesting road to the present. Cozi was formed in 2005 by Cape and Jan Miksovsky, both ex-Microsofties. It moved its software from PCs to the Web—and more recently to mobile devices like the iPhone and Android phones—all the while chasing families as its main customers. It has weathered the current recession and now has some 3 million registered members, and 30 employees—up from 23 in March of this year.

Still, the company has a long way to go; it’s not profitable yet, and it has raised … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

How do men and women small business owners approach innovation differently? That’s one of the questions the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is seeking to answer through a six-country study that’s going on as we speak—as one of the organizers of the study, I’m looking for entrepreneurs in the U.S., both male and female, who can take a few minutes to participate in an online survey.

Business creation has long been known as a driver of economic growth, and new firm formation is often seen as an indicator of a healthy and growing economy. New firms challenge the status quo with new ideas or innovative approaches to existing market needs, forcing incumbent firms to either improve their products and processes or be overtaken in the marketplace. In this process of economic natural selection, only the fittest firms remain, and economic growth is stimulated.

Yet, it is increasingly recognized that one size does not fit all in terms of economic policy and enterprise support: targeted and proactive policy and programmatic support is needed to foster small firm formation and innovation in particular. There is also a growing recognition that fostering small firm formation in general does not ensure economic self-determination and opportunity for all. Women and other socially excluded groups are often left behind if an “open for all” approach is taken in business development.

At this crossroads of increasing interest in improving business-enabling environments, fostering entrepreneurship, and ensuring the economic empowerment of women comes a growing focus on fostering economic growth through innovation. We are seeking to better understand the process of innovation from a gender perspective in order to examine what impediments to innovation there may be from a structural or societal perspective—and how these impediments may vary by gender—as well as to craft recommendations for policy and practice in the area of fostering a greater level of innovation by firms, both male- and female-owned.

I’m hoping that as a reader of Xconomy you will be willing to participate in this survey. I’m especially in need of male business owners, but am looking for both men and women business owners to participate. The survey includes 46 questions, and they’re all quite thought-provoking—so by participating, entrepreneurs are doing themselves, as well as UNCTAD, a real service.

I will write a follow-up post here with aggregate results from the survey. All responses are anonymous. Participate here—and please do it soon, as the study is quickly drawing to a close: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/unitedstatessurvey.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

[Corrected, see below] Female technologists and CEOs are still rare in Silicon Valley, but Diane Greene has been both—and she’s been far more successful at it than most males.

Trained at MIT and UC Berkeley, Greene was the co-founder and founding CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based VMware, which introduced a layer of virtualization between hardware and software that allowed computer users to do something new—run multiple operating systems on the same machine in a way that makes the machine run more securely and efficiently.

The idea was based on research done by her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and it turned into a multibillion dollar market for VMware. When the company went public in 2007, it was Silicon Valley’s biggest IPO since Google’s.

Greene left VMware abruptly in 2008 over an apparent disagreement with VMware’s parent company, EMC. She was replaced by Paul Maritz, a former member of Microsoft’s Executive Committee. (Xconomy’s Greg Huang has a piece today about EMC’s merger & acquisition strategy.)

But Greene has continued to invest in companies and to advise entrepreneurs, and she’s now considering starting another company, she said in last night in an interview with Xconomy. Lately she’s been clearing her calendar so she has more time to think.

Greene spoke in San Francisco on November 4 at Women 2.0 PITCH Night—an event for female entrepreneurs to pitch their startups. Her most important achievement at VMware, she told Xconomy, was to create a culture where every employee in the company understood how important their work was and felt compelled to excel—although she wishes she’d introduced employee training earlier.

Here are excerpts from her public conversation on how VMware got started, followed by remarks on what other entrepreneurs could learn from her experience.

Diane Greene: We started the company with some graduate students from Stanford, and right off the bat, one of the grad students was saying, we need a killer app. We need to build a virtualized web server, or get a consulting contract with a server vendor.

But we had this strong vision and knew we had to get to that. It’s a lot of small steps – we couldn’t just jump right to the server. So we explained why we had to start on the desktop.

And then I wanted to get validation from friends I respected. There was a guy I know who has a PhD from Stanford, who had built three companies, and I thought, … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated and corrected, Aug. 26---see below] Just a few years ago, the Michigan Women’s Foundation was truly your mother’s philanthropic foundation—putting on fund-raising dinners, tapping corporate sponsors like the Big Three automakers, and then giving away small chunks of money to a wide array of charitable groups—totaling some $3.5 million to 420 entities to be pretty exact.

But that was before Carolyn Cassin and her Power of 100 Women movement came to town—or, rather, back to town in Cassin’s case. The Michigan-bred president and CEO of the foundation, returned from executive stints in Arizona and New York, has turned the foundation on its heels, so to speak. She’s reinventing the way the foundation does its job— and in the process, she hopes, showing the way for other non-profits to rethink their models.

Today, the foundation is geared to investing, rather than sprinkling out funds. It plans to make fewer awards, but of greater dollar value. And it plans to provide money to individuals, especially to women entrepreneurs. It’s even putting together a small angel investment fund culled from some of the most powerful and successful women in Michigan. Gone, you might say, are the days only of tea parties and fancy dinners. Enter power breakfasts, due diligence, and term sheets.

Here’s the gist of this unfolding story of innovation. The foundation, which is based in Grosse Points Farm, MI, about 10 miles up Lake St. Clair from downtown Detroit (the area’s zip code 48236 is said to rival 90210 in wealth), was formed back in 1986. Cassin calls it a “traditional, kind of old-school foundation.” It raised money primarily from “the autos” and other big businesses, and then redistributed the funds in chunks of $1,000, $2,500, maybe $10,000, to a variety of do-good groups.

Like many smaller foundations, the MWF was absolutely rocked by the recession, which caused roughly half its funding to dry up. That was basically the situation when Cassin was recruited for the top job in 2008. She was already well known in Michigan non-profit circles, having served for a decade as CEO of what is now called Hospice of Michigan. She had left the state in 1998 to work as COO of VistaCare, a venture-backed, for-profit hospice based in Arizona, and then became CEO of the Jacob Perlow Hospice (now Continuum Hospice Care) in New York. That’s where she was, a national figure in hospice care, when she was approached to run the Michigan Women’s Foundation. Wanting to give back more to the community from which she came, Cassin embraced the opportunity.

It was immediately clear, says Cassin, that the foundation as it had been conceived was in trouble. “It was hard to figure out what value proposition we brought,” she says. “I had a sense that the old model of running a foundation wasn’t going to work in the new economy that we were trying to create, or we were just going to all die in the old economy here in Michigan.”

Cassin didn’t have the answer herself, so she did what she knew best and took a business approach to her new role. “I went on what I called the listening tour around the state,” she says. “I applied the same model of what I would do had I bought this company.” She talked to people all over Michigan about what frustrated them most about economy and about the business model of philanthropy, trying to get a grasp on how to revitalize the foundation.

One place she turned was the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, MI. Kellogg gave the Michigan Women’s Foundation a grant that helped Cassin keep things going. But it was really an almost offhand remark by Kellogg VP of programs Anne Mosle that put Cassin on the path to what she thinks is salvation. Mosle challenged Cassin to go out and see if there were women who cared enough about the organization to really step up and help her reinvent it, saying something along the lines of: ‘If there aren’t a hundred women who really care about this, you should really distribute the money and go home.’

That remark stuck with Cassin as she drove back to Detroit. “I know 100 women,” she recalls telling herself. “I can find 100 women.” And that was the birth of an initiative Cassin called … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

The news in San Francisco and Silicon Valley last week hit every stage of the innovation process, from new tech companies being born to mature ones finding new investors, to old ones firing their CEOs and suing each other.

—I profiled inDinero, a Y Combinator-backed startup offering an online finance tracking tool that it bills as a “Mint-like” tool for small businesses.

—WePay, a Palo Alto startup that offers a PayPal-like service for group payments (and that also emerged from the Y Combinator, in 2009), raised $7.5 million in Series B funding in a round led by Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital Partners.

—The Palo Alto nanotech stalwart Nanosys announced a three-pronged deal with Korea’s Samsung Electronics, under which Samsung licensed Nanosys technology in the area of thin-film photovoltaic panels, agreed to fund development of cadmium-free phosphors for Nanosys’s QuantumRail product, and put $15 million toward Nanosys’s $25 million Series E financing round. Nanosys confirmed that it will use part of the funding to seek larger manufacturing facilities in the Bay Area.

—Luke reported on efforts at ZeaChem, a Colorado startup with laboratories in Menlo Park, CA, to scale up its technology for converting wood chips to ethanol without releasing carbon dioxide.

—Also in the biofuels realm, Solazyme, the South San Francisco company using algae to make diesel and other fuels, raised $52 million in a Series D financing round led by Morgan Stanley and Braemar Energy Ventures.

—I took a look at the real legacy of departed Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd and concluded that not only did he leave the company in far better financial shape than his predecessors, but showed the way toward the reverticalization of the computer industry.

—LearnBoost, an angel- and venture-funded education startup that I profiled in July, unveiled its first product, a free online gradebook for schoolteachers.

—Speaking of books, I published a writeup of my conversation with Brad Inman, founder and CEO of Alameda, CA-based Vook, which recently sold its 100,000th video-enhanced e-book.

… Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

PAX East sold out months early. Attendance was twice what the committee had planned for the first game industry convention on the east coast in 10 years—more, if Atlanta isn’t your idea of “East Coast.” We filled the Hynes to capacity with 60,000 gamers, developers, press, and game company representatives. The show floor was jammed. There was a forty-five minute to an hour queue for every panel, and nearly every session turned folks away.

Next year, after a hugely successful first run, games will be taking over the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Games for Thought‘s major concern? Worse access to bars. Gamers poured (sometimes literally) a huge amount of cash into our city this weekend.

The consensus: The first ever PAX East outgrew the Hynes before it hit the ground. And for next year, and all the years coming—that’s a good thing!

Some of the usual suspects of the show floor at PAX Prime (yearly every fall in Seattle) passed on this sister East Coast Penny Arcade Expo. But vendors on the packed floor who showed their stuff were dealing with swirls of a solid crowd all day. The Boston Indie Showcase, the MIT/Singapore GAMBIT Lab areas, Turbine’s huge booth, and (off the floor) the Harmonix music lounge made our own game industry a bigger focus for industry and fans alike.

I’m CEO of a game startup in Somerville, but I was also there as an industry blogger. Having moved back home to from the West Coast a few years ago, because I feel this is the best place for me, my son, and now my new social game company, I was interested in what the rest of the gaming world was feeling about Boston. The best thing about being at an event like this with a press pass is that it gives you license to approach anyone with a question.

There was plenty of opportunity to ask. While people were in long lines for events, I found fans and pros from a half dozen countries and about twenty states, and asked them about their impressions of games in the Hub of the Universe.

The consensus? Boston rocks gaming, hard.

Whether it was a game developer from London, a gamer couple from Ohio, or PR consultants from the West Coast, everyone was rating Boston’s game industry on par with other US centers in everything but size—and recognized how fast we’re growing.

“Would you see this, packed to the gills, otherwise?” one fan from the EU asked. “We came from everywhere, and part of it is, we wanted to see what Boston has.”

Jeffrey Sheen, from Stargazy Studios in London, thinks Boston has it better than … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

On a desk, two magnifying glasses lie atop a small stack of books bound in a style reminiscent of a stately Victorian library. In any other video game company’s office they might seem out of place, but Bellevue, WA-based Her Interactive makes video games based on the written adventures of girl detective Nancy Drew, whose adventures have been published since the 1930s. So magnifying glasses and old-fashioned books seem as appropriate as the computers on company president and CEO Megan Gaiser’s desk.

Her Interactive is one of the fastest-growing computer and video game companies you’ve never heard of. Its product line—nearly 30 games for three platforms (with five new releases this year), and 7 million units sold in 11 years—comes from making the most of an oft-ignored niche in video games: girls and women who want interesting games that don’t patronize them. It’s a sound strategy, judging from the 20 percent of the adventure-game genre market Her Interactive has captured, according to market research firm NPD. The company grew from 25 to 55 employees in 2008, aided by the 1.6 million games sold last year, and has been profitable since 2002. “Each new game outsells the last,” Gaiser says.

Her Interactive was originally a division of American Laser Games in Albuquerque, NM, and was the only part of that company to survive bankruptcy, relocating to Bellevue in 1997. Gaiser joined that year as creative director, before becoming CEO only a year later. Gaiser had first moved to Washington in 1994, after 11 years of film making, to work on multimedia projects at Microsoft.

At first, Her Interactive had trouble getting games into the market. In 1999, when Gaiser attempted to sell the first Nancy Drew computer game, publishers told her, “Girls will never play video games because they’re computer-phobic.” Unable to get a publisher to accept the game, Her Interactive took … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

In the 1960s, there weren’t many role models a little black girl interested in science could relate to. As a child, Evelynn Hammonds, who would become the first black female Dean of Harvard College, looked up to the Lt. Uhura character from Star Trek. Today’s generation, said the dean, will have slightly more realistic women to imitate, thanks in no small part to organizations like the Science Club for Girls.

SCFG, an after-school mentoring program for K-12 girls that emphasizes science education, holds a special place in Xconomy’s heart—indeed, we chose the organization as one of the beneficiaries of this our second annual Battle of the Tech Bands in January. So I was excited to attend SCFG’s Catalyst Awards ceremony at the Broad Institute in Cambridge last night, which coincided with the organization’s 15-year anniversary. Formed in Cambridge at the King Open School, with an initial class of 16, the program has ballooned into a network of science clubs in Cambridge, Boston, and Newton, with over 400 girls presently enrolled.

Hammonds and Larisa Schelkin received Catalyst Awards for their work promoting the involvement of underrepresented groups in science. Hammonds was cited for her accomplishments at Harvard and at MIT, where she founded the Center for Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine. Schelkin is the CEO and co-founder of the Diversity Outreach in Math and Engineering (DOME) Foundation, which promotes math and science education for minority groups.

H. Kim Bottomly, immunobiologist and president of Wellesley College, delivered the opening remarks. She reflected on how fortunate she was to have an advisor in her college years that accepted female PhD students. “Back then, talent and passion weren’t enough” to succeed in science, she said. “You also needed to be lucky. Well, women should not have to depend on luck”.

In the reception before the awards, fourth-graders Jackie Park and Carmen De Benedictis were demonstrating one of the engineering experiments they performed at the club— six cylindrical pillars made from tightly wound index cards, each having a circumference a little bigger than a quarter. Park explained how the distribution of pressure points allowed the pillars to support a heavy book, and even a person standing on top of that book. Park said she likes science because “it answers all our questions” and “is really cool” to boot.

The speakers made clear that the mission of Science Club for Girls is larger than simply preparing women for careers in the lab. Bottomly reminded the audience that science was served not only by the academics, but by “lawyers, lobbyists, and writers”. Hammonds echoed the sentiment, telling the girls in attendance that even if they did not become scientists themselves, they should strive always to be “champions of science.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

A study last year by Cristian Dezsö, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s business school, found that the more women a company has as senior managers, the better it performs financially—and that the advantage comes from a “female management style” that emphasizes teamwork, collaboration, and innovation.

To highlight women executives in Massachusetts who are leading their own companies to success, the Boston-based nonprofit group Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology (WEST) announced the winners of its second annual Leadership Awards today. Gwen Acton, WEST’s president, said in a statement that the award winners “exemplify Massachusetts’s innovative vitality in the technology and life science industries—qualities that contribute to the on-going launch of new ventures and new products.”

The four awardees are:

Beth Friday, vice president of worldwide client support, IBM. Friday oversees technical support and product quality for IBM Rational Software and was one of the IBM managers overseeing the consolidation of the company’s software operations in Littleton, MA. Friday is also executive sponsor of the IBM New England Women’s Network. (There’s an interview and podcast featuring Friday here).

Beth Marcus, founder and chief technical officer, Zeemote, a Chelmsford, MA-based startup that makes wireless controllers for games on mobile platforms such as cell phones and portable game pads. Marcus holds more than a dozen patents, is a former faculty member at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and has founded four startups, including one, EXOS Inc., that was purchased by Microsoft in 1996.

Adelene Perkins, president and chief business officer, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a developer of cancer drugs based in Cambridge, MA. Perkins is former vice president of business and corporate development at TransForm Pharmaceuticals, former vice president of emerging business at Genetics Institute, former CEO of MetaMorphix, and former healthcare strategy consultant at Bain & Company.

Janet Wolfe, president and founder of Wolfe Laboratories, a contract drug development lab in Watertown, MA. Wolfe is a former faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. She serves on the advisory board of United Way’s Math, Science & Technology Initiative, and was named Boston’s 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

WEST is spotlighting these four winners “so that others might be inspired and gain the benefit of their experiences,” said Sandra Glucksmann, chair of WEST’s s board of Directors and senior vice president of research and business operations Cerulean Pharma, in today’s announcement. “Their achievements and stories are a ‘how to’ for other women and their companies to be successful.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The energy and environmental sectors, like all too many other parts of the business world, have a dearth of women in leadership positions. But a new networking group dedicated to changing that situation is launching officially tomorrow in Boston. Called New England Women in Energy & the Environment (NEWIEE), the group’s goals are to foster networking and collaboration between women interested in energy and environmental issues, provide educational opportunities, highlight women’s achievements in the sectors, and recruit more young women into energy and environmental enterprises.

The group’s founder and executive director, Judy Chang, says she created NEWIEE late last year because “I realized that women were thinly spread throughout the energy and environmental sectors and wanted to bring them together in the form of an open, aware and dynamic organization,” according to a statement the group circulated this week. Chang is a principal at the Brattle Group, a Cambridge, MA, firm that specializes in consulting and expert testimony on economics, finance, and regulatory issues.

The group plans to organize educational panel discussions in areas such as new cleantech and green-energy technologies. One event held in January focused on financing energy and brownfield projects amidst the economic downturn; speakers included Charlotte Kim, a partner at Choate, Hall and Stewart in Boston, and Beth Barton, a partner at Day Pitney in Hartford, CT.

NEWIEE will celebrate its launch on Thursday with an afternoon reception at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. The reception is being sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which is running a conference at the World Trade Center this week called Building Energy 2009.

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Woman-led businesses in Massachusetts are outpacing state and national growth averages, and are less concentrated in lifestyle or retail sectors than their national counterparts, according to a report unveiled today by Babson College and the nonprofit Commonwealth Institute. Indeed, female-helmed firms are particularly well represented in tech and life sciences industries.

The report is based on data from the sixth year of an annual survey of firms with female chief executives. “Woman-run companies have consistently outpaced the local and national growth rates for the six years of our study despite the economic conditions,” said study co-author I. Elaine Allen, Associate Professor of Statistics & Entrepreneurship at Babson College, in a press release. In 2006, over 60 percent of the firms grew by more than five percent; the average for all firms in Massachusetts was 3.3 percent, and the national average was 3.1 percent. Still, woman-led firms comprise just 2.7 percent of Massachusetts’ total.

Another point highlighted in the study is that Massachusetts’ women-led companies buck the national trend of focusing mainly in retail and real estate. Rather, they are most heavily represented in professional services (38 percent), high tech (9.8 percent), construction (8.5 percent), travel and leisure (7.8 percent), and health care, pharmaceuticals, and medical products (7.2 percent). Indeed, two of the top 5 women-run Massachusetts firms are in technology industries:

The full list of the top 100 woman-led businesses is here.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

There’s an interesting discussion going on at The Scientist‘s website about discrimination in academia, and particularly at MIT. The conversation was sparked by an essay written by Frank Douglas, formerly Professor of the Practice at MIT and director of the school’s Center for Biomedical Innovation. Douglas, who is black, resigned last June in the wake of the institute’s decision to deny tenure to James Sherley, another black professor who earlier in the year grabbed headlines with a hunger strike protesting his treatment by MIT. Douglas’s piece, written for the publication’s October issue (The Scientist issued a press release about the article today), explains his decision, citing “an unconscious discrimination against minorities” at MIT. Douglas writes that he resigned because of that attitude, “and because my colleagues and the institute authorities did not act on my recommendations to address these issues.”

Douglas’s article is particularly thought-provoking because he does not paint discrimination as a cut-and-dried issue. Rather, he speaks of “the complex, insidious nature of discrimination in a university context.” He also makes some subtle distinctions between how institutions address charges of racial inequity as compared to those of gender discrimination, an issue on which MIT has made substantial progress since biology professor Nancy Hopkins and other women faculty members pressed the issue in the 1990s.

Notably, Douglas talks about the standards of excellence on which tenure decisions are typically based: papers, research contributions, and such. But he also speaks of two other types of standards—what he calls “social acceptance” and “best fit.” These can rest on factors such as an individual’s style or demeanor and how they are perceived. If these standards enter into tenure decisions, the fact that members of minority groups might well have different styles and demeanors can make it harder for them to gain tenure. Douglas suggests that “MIT needs to reexamine its criteria for discrimination of social acceptability and best fit to ensure that it is relevant in a rapidly changing world.”

Douglas makes it clear that he did not resign over Sherley, but over what he perceived as the lack of will on the part of MIT—which is a beacon of economic growth for Massachusetts and the nation and should also be a beacon of diversity—to really examine racial issues. The essay in The Scientist quotes his resignation letter to associate provost Claude Canizares: “The issue for me is not whether Prof Sherley should be given immediate tenure or not. I cannot judge that and would not even presume to do so. The issue is: Why has this great institution not been able to find a mutually, acceptable solution for a problem that affects, not only Prof Sherley, but every present and future minority faculty member? I am convinced, and I have other reasons to believe this, that the will to do this is lacking.”

The questions raised by Douglas of course need to be taken seriously—and they impact not just universities, but government, business, and society. As he makes clear, it’s not about the “rightness” of specific actions, but about the rightness of the process. There’s an old saying about justice: “Not only must justice be done, it must appear to be done.” The same is true about a tenure system or charges of discrimination: not only must the system be fair, it must be perceived to be fair.

Xconomy sought comment from Hopkins, whom Douglas credits in his article for leading the fight against gender discrimination at MIT. “One has to be deeply concerned that Douglas believes that MIT, and perhaps all leading research universities like MIT, do not yet understand diversity issues well enough, or have enough commitment to them, to be able to successfully address the under-representation of minority groups on the faculty,” Hopkins replied. “I am extremely sad that Douglas did not stay on at MIT to help solve this problem. In particular, he had much to contribute to the important initiative on race that is now under way at MIT under the leadership of Professor Paula Hammond (Chemical Engineering) and faculty representatives of the five Schools of MIT.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share: