Women In Tech: The Debate Rages On

This women in tech debate has really taken off, and I am glad.

Here's the guy who introduced me to Twitter, JP Rangaswami.

Women are underrepresented in a number of dimensions in the tech world, and this is noticeable in conference line-ups and in start-up founder lists. .... Take The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE in short..... TiE was created to ensure that people of South Asian extraction were given the funding opportunities they were otherwise being denied. There was general acceptance of the engineering excellence of such people, but for some reason question marks were raised about their ability to run companies. Which meant that the “engineers” never got funded when they went forward with business plans..... We need to make sure that we eradicate prejudices that go along the lines of: Women don’t code. Founders must code. So women can’t found startups…..Systemic problems often need systemic solutions

I am glad he mentions the organization TiE, and draws the connection between gender and some of the challenges faced by brown people. And the thing he says about it being just fine for women entrepreneurs to not be coders, that is a theme a ran with when I blogged about a panel discussion here in New York City during Internet Week. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) I just had an email from the panel host Neha Chauhan yesterday saying she is working to launch her own startup in October.

And finally JP touches upon a theme I touched upon in a post I put out this past hour, (Gender Talks) that some of the biggest solutions are perhaps political.



Shefaly Yogendra: “Women in tech”: What Gives?:

Super Angels

Brad Feld: Serious Questions For Super Angels: As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, “Gosh, I could do a lot more investments if I had a fund.” .... Now the micro-VC is a mini-VC. Does this keep scaling, or does the mini-VC succumb to the same challenges that $200 million funds ran into when they turned into $1 billion funds? ..... There’s a renewed focus and interest in early-stage investing going on in the United States



Some of the best bloggers in tech are VCs. I have often wondered as to why the top tech entrepreneurs are not also avid bloggers. It would make sense to avidly blog while you are trying to build a company. But there really are no entrepreneur versions of the top VC blogs. I wish it were otherwise. I felt this while reading this post by Brad Feld, quoted above.

The venture capital worlds has been seeing some major churn. And it is so much fun watching the drama unfold through the various VC blogs. It is gripping. It is like watching a good movie. There is high drama. It is capitalism in action. Blogging has brought forth much transparency to VC action, and that is a good thing.

Early stage investing is seeing some major fermentation. That will impact the VC world in that investing, even at mega scales, will become more hands on. VCs will have to get more involved.