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Why aren’t there more female entrepreneurs?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and its crossed my mind from time to time this year.

I can count on my hands the number of female startup founders I’ve met this year: Shelli Trung @3six5dates, Nikki Durkin @99dresses, Nicola Gracie @FitIntegrate, Demi Markogiannaki @weteachme,  Jamie Wong @Vayable, Jodie Fox @Shoesofprey, Lara Solomon @Stepslearning and a few others.

I think that females have some interesting business opportunities in the entrepreneurial space because they can see ideas that males can’t see and are unlikely to understand. They will also be able to address female market needs much better.

Some of the best startups that I have seen this year are by female founders:

1. Taskrabbit: This was born out of Leah Busque’s frustation of not having enough time available to feed her dog and buy dog food. Taskrabbit is a marketplace for services – things you want done fast. For tasks like cleaning, moving, delivery of food, IKEA furniture and assembly.

2. Birchbox is a wineclub for cosmetic samplers from Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp. You pay $10 per month for a box of samplers, and if you buy the full product, Birchbox takes an affiliate fee. I must admit I was highly skeptical of this business, and this is an industry, product and market which I don’t understand very well. What I do understand though, is a subscription based business model where you get new products every month, 45,000 subscribers with 50% subscription growth month on month. Its brilliant and also worth around $40mil =)

Another startup, Pinterest which caught my interest (excuse the pun) has male co-founders, but a growing and loyal female userbase. Pinterest allows you to “create a virtual pinboard – a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow” collections created by people with great taste”. It has huge adoption rate and stickiness with females. From the pinboards that I can see, they’re centered around female content (because its mostly females users). Its sends a signal that are unique opportunities for females that are still underserved by today’s websites.

My thoughts are why there aren’t a lot of female founders? This is my hypothesis so hear me out. I don’t think its any one of these factors, but a combination of them.

1. Shortage of female programmers: Tech startups are technical in nature and based on my experience, I don’t know of many female programmers. In the Australian startup scene, most people I know are male and I’m sure that this is repeated in startups scenes around the world. The female programmers I do know are not in tech startups but working in software companies / digital agencies / in house, etc.. Take a read of Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experience as a female software engineer and the lack of females in computer science. Historically, programming has been a male dominated industry which I believe is changing and could be the biggest factor in this list as to why there are not many female entrepreneurs.

2. Body clock and family responsibilities: Females have to think about families, marriage, kids, and these kind of responsibilities a lot sooner than men due to the female body clock. I believe this has some correlation with risk taking, and hence their views on risk. This affects women in all industries, but particularly in the startup industry as explained below.

3. Startups require an appetite for risk-taking: You have to be comfortable with the fact that you are going to earn no income for a while, have no job security and you are taking a leap of faith with your idea. Starting a tech company is an incredibly risky proposition, and the chance of success is so slim and most are destined to fail. This is an industry that is inherently risky and my opinion is that the less responsibilities you have, the easier it becomes to do a startup. This is a controversial point, because there are many small to medium sized businesses started by women so this may not be that valid of a factor.

4. Access to role models and networks: As there hasn’t been a lot of females historically in startups, there aren’t a lot of female role models to aspire towards. The majority of the interviews that I’ve seen and books I’ve read are about male entrepreneurs. A few female startup people spring to mind like Marissa Mayer @ Google who I’ve seen speak and Randi Zuckerberg. With the emergence of successful female startup founders this will encourage a wave of new female entrepreneurs. Having access to networks is also critical for the success of startups, and initiatives like Women 2.0 and Girl Geek Coffees will assist in that.

There must be some reasons to explain the lack of female entrepreneurs in the startup world and feel free to disagree in the comments below. Its worth also reading on Quora on the lack of female co-founders and how females are paid less than their male counterparts.

The situation will change as there are many successful small to medium sized businesses started by women. There are just many more opportunities now to start a tech startup at low cost, startups becoming more of a viable career choice, and increasing number of female engineers and designers which will have a flow on effect in a traditionally male dominated industry. I think its only a matter of time before this changes.

I’m out like 2011,

Matthew Ho

This had been on my mind for the last week or so. A lot of things have happened this year, so here are some highlights of 2011 in roughly chronological order.

- Places travelled: LA, Austin, New York and San Francisco (twice), Cairns, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo.

Pumping Iron @ Venice Beach - lift not real

- Flew between Sydney and Melbourne at least 6 times. I know this route fairly well now =)

- Been part of the youth leadership team at Padstow Chinese Congregational Church for the first 5 months of the year. Its great to see them doing amazing things. Our youth group is growing up so fast now!

- Started going to a new church in Melbourne.

- Attended UFC 127 in Sydney, my second live UFC event.

- Organised the first SXSW Meetup in Sydney and Melbourne for people from the music, film and digital industry.

Getting my Bruce Lee on - Austin, Texas

- Attended the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I saw the Startup Bus finals at SXSW and the energy and enthusiasm that the best entrepreneurs and hackers from around the world bring, and I wanted to be a part of that.

- Drove from San Antonio to Washington DC to help a friend move house. My US first road trip was a lotta fun! It was my first time driving in the US and I drove a big Penske truck (like U-Haul) and we were pulling a trailer with a car. We drove for 2 days straight halfway across America.

Roadtrippin' across the US - I drove this Penske truck!

- Finished up at Next Digital. It’s where I got my foot in the door in the digital industry and I closed a chapter of my life. I’m grateful for the opportunity they gave me three and a half years ago.

- Worked for airbnb, a disruptive accommodation website. Organised their first party in Australia and 110 people turned up. Organised an event where airbnb gave free ice cream to hosts in 14 cities around the world!

- Entered Australia’s first Startup Weekend competition to meet and test myself against the best entrepreneurs from Melbourne. I ended up winning!

- Organised Product Camp Sydney and spoke on the topic of innovation. It was rated as the most popular talk before the conference (thank you friends for voting for me). You can read about it here and here.

- Lived in Melbourne for 6 months. From Burnley to Fitzroy and now Northcote.

Streetart near where I lived in Fitzroy

- Started a meetup for Melbourne startup founders and hackers called MCombinator.

MCombinator crew - Melbourne's up and coming startups

- Attended events in SF and Palo Alto – Startup BBQ, Zaarly pubcrawl, Startup Weekend SF pre party. It was awesome to meet hundreds of people in the startup scene from the US and the world.

- Cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge which was an amazing experience and hung out with two friends, Vanessa and Dom from Sydney in SF.

Aussies at Outside Lands, SF

- Played my first game of squash.

- Became a godfather to Liam, Ashby’s son and one of my best childhood friends.

- Started up my own company, Native Tongue which came out of winning Startup Weekend.

- Launched a product and exhibited at Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing a few months later. It was exciting to be exhibiting alongside entrepreneurs from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, China, Japan and Australia. We were featured on some of Asia’s biggest blogs like Technode and some local ones too. Best of all we have paying customers!

Representing Native Tongue at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing

- Walked across the Great wall of China and got through the Great Firewall of China (hello VPN).

- Joined Melbourne’s newest co-working space, York Butter Factory and a fantastic community of local entrepreneurs.

- Took some salsa lessons and graduated from Salsa Level 1.5 (intermediate), despite missing two classes!

- Turned 30 =)

Phew, that’s been a big year!

I feel like I’ve done a lot this year. I’ve taken some risks and seized opportunities where they presented themselves. It seems like its paid off. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve given it 100%. My 2012 will be about focus and capitalising on the opportunities that I’ve created for myself.

I’m out like 2011,

Matthew Ho

Been spending the last few days watching a lot of tech videos, no doubt as seen by the blog posts below. I’ve watched the following inspirational videos from leaders in the tech space:

- Drew Houston, Dropbox

- Dave Morin, Path,

- Eric Ries, Lean startups

- Peter Vestabacka, Rovio

- Pony Ma, Tencent

- Fritz Demopoulos, Qunar

The last couple were at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing which I missed as I was exhibiting.

This is one of the more insightful ones by Fritz Demopoulos who is a foreigner in China and was able to build and sell two successful internet companies. He describes how to be successful over there, traits of Chinese entrepreneurs (‘Brutally competitive’), and the types of entrepreneurial opportunities that exist in China.

I’ve watched a lot of videos and I feel that this is part of my tech / entrepreneurial education – to learn from the best out there from the US, Europe and China.

I’m out like the day before Christmas,

Matt Ho

This is a cool video interview by Scoble previewing the new Path. I love Path – its so intuitive and the design is simple yet mindblowing good. Its one of my favourite apps – I just wish I knew more people using it!

I was in their office back in August and met Dave Morin, CEO of Path. Had a brief chat with him about the old Path. I liked the old product and it had a gorgeous design, but it just wasn’t sticky enough for me to keep coming back to use it. I like the new direction which is a smart journal which you can share moments with your close friends.

This video also highlights the importance of good design and how design culture has permeated throughout the whole organisation.

If you have additional comments particulary on how Path can be improved, add to this Quora discussion.

Dropbox is one of my favourite tools to use and a great entrepreneurial story. Check out the Mixergy interview here with the founder, Drew Houston:

Someone once asked me what it was like going out on my own as an entrepreneur. I told them it was like jumping out of an airplane with all the materials needed to build a parachute. An entrepreneur must be willing to take a risk.

- Glen Blickenstaff, CEO Iron Door Company.

Startup life isn’t easy.

I’ve only done it for 3 months so I’m still pretty new at it. I never figured it would be easy, but every day is an uphill battle.

You gotta be prepared to scramble.

By that I mean, able to address some glaring task that suddenly needs your immediate attention. Ability to hit deadlines. Do some things you’ve never done before. Quickly switch between tasks and juggle a bunch of things going on at the same time. But always keep on moving forward. It’s like you gotta be the king of scrambles*.

I feel like my startup has momentum and that’s part of the reason I decided to do it full-time. There’s no way that we could have gotten this far by doing it part time. It requires a lot of effort to get an idea off the ground. Much more than I realised.

I also have a lot more respect now for people that who run their own business whether its big or small. Whether its company with 15 staff to the owner of the local fruit store. Its actually a lot of hard work.

In the last few days, I’ve been working on product, reviewing designs, testing, talking to a lawyer, fixing our content, experimenting with Facebook ads, and organising translations of our app store descriptions. We’re now on the Korean and German Android market in those respective languages, with more to come. I also dedicate some time to finance and capital raising.

We’ve done some important things and hit some milestones. We launched a lite version, exhibited at Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing in October and now at 600 users.

I just gotta keep scrambling =)

————-

*Brazilian jiu-jitsu grappler Marcelo Garcia is known as “king of the scrambles”. He’s a 4 time world champ and 3 time ADCC champion. Garcia often competed and won in the absolute division which is a pound for pound competition with no weight class limitations and could be giving up 20-30 kilos to larger competitors. He simply had an ability to win against larger opponents with superior technique and an advanced understanding of leverage. In startup life, you have to be prepared to move and dance against much larger opponents, be nimble and agile, take their back and execute ruthlessly =)

There is something to be said about the people that you hang around. You are a product of the people around you. They influence your opinion, behaviours, likes and dislikes.

I recently read this article from Justin Kan, co-founder of Justin.tv on Techcrunch which really struck a chord with me. It’s what I had been doing implicity, creating a culture around me of like minded people. I met Justin when I was in San Francisco recently, and he’s a cool guy.

Influenced by fitness freaks

He stated in this article that if you hang around obese people, there’s a high likelihood that you will be obese too. I’ve been hanging around the @indexmedia boys, Joseph and Adam and they’ve been on the 4 hour body diet, hitting the gym and basically getting fit. They’ve been on this no-carb diet, and ever since they told me about it, I decided to try it as well. I heard about it from other people, but when your around people that talk about it all the time, its infectious. So I’ve been eating lots of protein for breakfast including Adam’s recommendation of eggs and omeletes.

Creating  my startup culture

Similarly, Justin mentioned that people outside startups view people inside startups differently. People outside the industry think that you are unemployed whereas startup people think its normal. We’re all just trying to make it. We’re all trying to build our business and scale for success.

Thus, I created my own startup culture.

Last week, I went to the iOS cocoaheads meetup and the day after I went to Android Developers meetup in Melbourne. Both times, I was the most non-technical person at the meetups, but I enjoy immersing myself in these events and learning and absorbing as much as I can. Over time, I will become more technical and understand more about these mobile ecosystems.

I also particapate in the Silicon Beach community in Australia. Its like a hacker news community with over 1,000 members. Its growing rapidly as more people discover entrepreneurship, startups and want to get involved. I went to the meetup on Thursday night and 150+ people turned up. Its once a month in Melbourne.

I feel like I need to be surrounded by other startup people to be successful and this is how I’m doing it.

What saves startups is like minded people

Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote this essay recently about why startups are saved in the Valley (i.e. why they survive). It really comes down to the people. Being surrounded by entrepreneurs makes it a social norm. Those chance meetings with other entrepreneurs. Why a college kid who arrived in the Valley was able to meet Sean Parker, who knew a lot about the internet, knew investors and how to operate a company and protect the founder. Other entrepreneurs can guide you and help you with your ideas.

I agree with Paul Graham that the success of your startup is highly dependent on the environment that you are in and the people that you met and work with.

The Silicon Beach events are normal in San Francisco/ The Valley every night. The two weeks that I was in San Francisco, I went to 3 events when I had time. I went to the SF Startup Weekend pre-party and at least 100 people turned up on a Wednesday night. The week after I went to Palo Alto and attended the Appbackr/TuneIn BBQ and 150 people turned up.

The next day, I went on the Zaarly pubcrawl and 150 people went on a pubcrawl through the streets of SF. It was rad! I met at lot of people and some that I still stay in contact with.

Co-working space

We have recently been evaluating different office spaces. I decided to take my startup to a co-working space. I believe that our best chance for success lies in being surrounded by other startups. We need to be part of an startup eco-system. It will cost money and is more expensive than working from home (free). But we need to be out there and exposed to the right people. Hence, we decided to be at the York Butter Factory, a new startup co-working space. Their vision is to make it like Plug N Play / Dogpatch Labs / General Assembly, which you can read about here.

There are certain advantages of being at a co-working space:

- exchange of ideas
- being noticed – angels, VC’s, corporates potentially dropping by
- success of other startups around you
- social norm of being in a startup

Australia is not the Valley

I know that Australia will never be Silicon Valley, which is a very unique ecosystem. The Valley has been through many cycles, with over a decade of experience in startups and technology. Successful entrepreneurs can know what is the next best thing and a path for new startups to take. They can re-invest money back in.

I remember walking around University Ave, Palo Alto which is famous for startups hanging out. I was looking around the cafes for people talking about startups. I couldn’t find any. I didn’t know where to go or where to hang out. Apparently I ate at the crepe cafe which the late Steve Jobs used to eat at (but I had no idea). As I was leaving, the street I noticed one guy saying to another “this is a problem that has never been solved before”. I knew they were into startups!

I then walked past this guy wearing a Plancast tshirt and I stopped him and asked if worked for Plancast and how I love the service! He told me he didn’t work there, but his friend was the founder. He actually worked for Color, the well funded app that’s struggling at the moment and being reinvented. We had a good chat about the app and he knew someone at Airbnb. I then met his friend who was with him, who worked at Team Banjo. I asked what it was, and he said I should try it out and get back to him. It turns out its a similar app to Roamz. These kind of chance meetings which Paul Graham spoke about don’t happen anywhere else. It normal to bump into people like this in The Valley.

What you can do – create your own startup culture

The best thing that I can do is create my own community. So I started my own meetup of like minded people and friends, which meet once a month in Melbourne. Its primarily for founders of companies where we can share like minded issues and socialise. Its very informal and we have dinner together. Right now we have about 25 people in our group, all Melbourne based startups.

Find the meetups in your city, be surrounded by other startups and look at using a co-working space. We can’t all be in The Valley but you can choose to be surrounded by like-minded people and be immersed and create your own culture.

I hope that helps you in your journey.

Cheers,

Matt

I’ve been asked several times “what do you do?”. I’m still trying to define my role as well within my startup. Over the last few days, its become clearer to me what I need to focus on as a non-technical co-founder. This is my attempt to explain my role.

In an online startup, there are many hats one must wear. I have started learning development, and whilst useful, there probably won’t be a need for me to program just yet. I can probably get to the level where I can hack a simple app together, but I can’t compete against people that have been doing it for years.

Wearing 500 hats

There are many other hats that I need to wear and as Dave McClure puts it, a founder has “500 hats”.

In an online startup, its important to have a technical co-founder – people with development skills. After all, it is an online business and that’s the bread and butter. However, there are a whole host of other skills that are needed. Fred Wilson describes another role which is product and points at Dennis Crawley from FourSquare as a good example. I’ve tried to use this as an example and read up about him – I’ve actually met Dennis in person.

“To us, the ideal founding team is one supremely talented product oriented founder and one, two, or three strong developers, and nothing else. The supremely talented product oriented founder should have been obsessed about a product area/idea for a long period of time and just has to build something to satisfy their passion/curiosity. That’s about it. Joshua Schachter/Delicious, Jack Dorsey/Twitter, Dennis Crowley/Foursquare are the iconic examples of this kind of person in our portfolio.”

- Fred Wilson

The above description pretty much describes me.

Not many people actually know this, but I had the idea about this product when I was in university. About 9 years ago, I was in 4th year university and I was studying Mandarin (class for extra credit). I thought about making CD’s or cassette tapes which people could use in their cars. Oh my how times have changed! Mobile phones now seem to be the best way to distribute this kind of product.

Essentially, I have to be OBSESSED with my product. I need to play it and use it all the time. In addition, I need to understand the product landscape. I have to be familiar with all the competing products out there and also gaming products. So I’ve been downloading and using these products as much as I can. I need to understand what makes an awesome game and makes a great language product.

I also need to understand these areas as well:

- Game Level Design

- User Experience / User Interface (UX / UI)

- Mobile appstores and how they work

- Artwork

- Game music and sounds

I don’t need to be an expert, but I need to knowledgeable about these areas.

I need to also understand languages which is a critical component to our game. How language is constructed, how it is taught and the academic research out there. So I need to become a psuedo-language expert fast =)

I have to keep up my Chinese studies. I constantly think about our language packs and what goes in them. I update the packs and source the words, check the sounds and images we have.

I consider all the above “product”. Its part product strategy, product positioning and just knowing everything out there about mobile language games and mobile games.

In addition, I have to handle the business aspects of a startup. This ranges from business development, marketing, financing, legals and admin.

After the app is developed, there will be a lot more business development and marketing activities. Half the battle is building the app and shipping it (getting it to market). The other half is getting traction and building a community behind it.

I hope that helps explain what I do.

I’m out like job descriptions,

Matt Ho

Just a quick update on my programming self taught lessons. I’m now doing approximately 1 hour a day if not more. Spent some of Friday night and Saturday night doing more python lessons.

In the last few days, I’ve gone from lesson 12 to lesson 18 in Learn Python The Hard Way (LPTHW).

I’ve also tried out Code Academy which I found really good. It’s an interactive way to learn Javascript, which could be applied to any language I would think. You type a line, it gives you a response in the form of a positive automated statement, like you are talking to a person/robot e.g. “that’s awesome, congrats!”. So its actually quite fun. I spent like 30mins playing it, got to a certain level of proficiency. It then gave me a badge and the ability to share this on Facebook. Code Academy is such a simple concept but very well thought out.

I started playing with Ruby as well, as a lot of startups use it. I was reading about the differences between Ruby and Python. A few of the responses on Quora suggested that I use Try Ruby. Its an interactive way to learn Ruby, without the chat type responses and gamification layer of Code Academy. It was pretty good, but was easy to get stuck and not know what to do. I eventually abandoned it after level 5. I feel that I should concentrate on Python and get a basic understanding of that before I move on.

With LPTHW, I feel like I’m learning by forcing myself. The lessons are kinda boring and it is harder to learn. You have to run come commands from the bash terminal and fix them when things go wrong. Its definetly not as fun as Code Academy. The engagement level is much higher on Code Academy because it is enjoyable and that is more of a style of learning I look forward to. Its given me some ideas on how to apply gamification into our Native Tongue products as well.

I’m out like the economy,

Matt Ho