The Venture Alley - A blog about business and legal issues important to entrepreneurs, startups, venture capitalists and angel investors.

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muir@megan_muir  Dr. Eve Riskin is one woman in tech who is actively working to “change the ratio” by increasing the number of women faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).  As Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the University of Washington College of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Director of the ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, she is a leader and a mentor for other women considering academic STEM careers (or second careers, following work in industry). Eve received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and her graduate degrees in EE from Stanford.  She... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muir@megan_muir  Jenny Lam is a co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, a small software startup focused on making beautiful software experiences. The company has shipped over 20 software products in the past 5 years. Their latest product is A Story Before Bed - the first (and only) service that lets parents, grandparents, and children record video of themselves reading children's books and play it back as often as they like on the Mac, PC, or iPad. Before Jackson Fish Market, Jenny worked at Microsoft from 2001–2007 as Creative Director of the Windows User Experience team. When she isn't running her... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Eric Savitz of Forbes has a lengthy interview with Mary Meeker up on the Forbes.com site, a companion piece to his profile of Ms. Meeker in the August 6 print edition (which you can read online here).  In the interview, she talks about venture capital, her work investing a $1 billion tech growth fund for Kleiner Perkins (half of which has been deployed to date), the influential reports she produced as an early Internet analyst, and some of the companies that interest her now.  She is someone who has seen - up close - the many ups, downs... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  The short list of Silicon Valley female CEOs at well-known tech companies just got a little longer.  Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli of The New York Times Dealbook broke the story today that Yahoo has named Marissa Mayer as CEO (its fifth CEO in five years).  Mayer comes to Yahoo from a prominent executive role at Google, having been hired originally as employee number 20 and the first female engineer at Google.  Yahoo's press release announcing Ms. Mayer's appointment as President, CEO and a member of the board of directors, states that the "appointment of Ms. Mayer, a leading consumer internet... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Career advice from some top women in tech - including Ursula Burns, Sheryl Sandberg, and Virginia Rometty, - courtesy of Siliconrepublic.com: Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, in an interview with Marketplace: "You have to have a very strong opinion with some facts and data to stand it up, you have to prove that you are right more times than you are wrong, and then you better walk into the room with something to say because otherwise you don't really add a whole lot of value to the group.  So if you are going to be in the... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Aileen Lee, partner at the famed venture fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a former CEO herself, has a great post on TechCrunch with reasons companies should considering adding women to their boards of directors.  Among the benefits Lee notes: By adding new blood to the boardroom, these companies are getting a four-fer, or more: gender diversity, and in most cases, age diversity around the table; better understanding of core customers; Social-Mobile-Local expertise and insight into digital platforms like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Path, Square, Flipboard and Pinterest that are fundamentally changing business; and hyper growth... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  I came across this Bianca Bosker interview from last fall with Padmasree Warrior, the CTO of Cisco, and thought she had an interesting take on being a woman in a technical field, working among mostly male colleagues.  “I always tell women that the fact that you’re different and that you’re noticed, because there are few of us in the tech industry, is something you can leverage as an advantage,” she said.  She also talks about some of the challenges women in tech face.  Read the full piece here. On a related note, as part of her response to... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Adriana Gascoigne is the founder and CEO of Girls in Tech, a non-profit organization she launched in February 2007 that is focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded professional and influential women in technology. Girls in Tech supports over 17,000 members among 37 active chapters worldwide. Previously, Adriana was the VP of Marketing for SecondMarket, the global marketplace for alternative investments, and was responsible for SecondMarket’s marketing, branding strategy, event production and digital media efforts. She has also worked at a variety of technology start-ups working in marketing, communications and analytics, including hi5, SocialGamingNetwork (SGN), Jambool’s... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Here is the second half of The Venture SpotLight interview with Rebecca Lovell, the Chief Business Officer of GeekWire, the tech news site based in Seattle.  You can find the first installment of our talk with Rebecca here. Biggest mistake you have made in your career/business?  Staying in a comfortable job for too long back in my corporate days. What did you study as an undergraduate at Carleton College?  I designed my own American Studies Major: sort of history-based with a little English and religion and women’s studies all mashed up.  I was absolutely set to go into a... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  The Venture SpotLight turns to Rebecca Lovell today, with the first installment of our interview with her.  Among the many hats she wears, Rebecca is the Chief Business Officer of GeekWire, the tech news site based in Seattle.  In that role, she oversees advertising, sponsorship, planning GeekWire events and generally helping GeekWire connect with the Pacific Northwest technology community.  Some the other roles Rebecca fills: mentor for TechStars and The Founder Institute; community advisor to Startup Weekend; professor of a class on venture capital investing at the University of Washington Foster School of Business; board member of the... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Penny Herscher, President and CEO of FirstRain, a search-driven business and analytics research firm, has a recent blog post that summarizes a talk she gave to women leaders of a hardcore semiconductor company in the Valley.  She’s talking from what she knows – she started out as an R&D engineer at TI – and has held leadership positions in tech companies for nearly 20 years. Her 5 keys to leadership as a woman in tech (although her ideas are not exclusive to women or tech) are excerpted below.  Read the full piece and other entries on her blog... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com   Today the Venture Spotlight is on Kate Matsudaira, Vice President of Engineering at SEOmoz, a prominent Seattle-based developer of search engine optimization (SEO) software and tools.  Kate has extensive knowledge of building large scale distributed web systems and web services, and currently manages the SEOmoz core technology team.  Prior to SEOmoz, Kate served as VP of Engineering at another startup, Delve Networks (now part of Limelight), where she helped create and monetize a large scale distributed system for online video delivery and search.  She has also worked for other leading technology companies such as Amazon.com, Microsoft and Sun... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Lesa Mitchell, VP of Advancing Innovation with the Kauffman Foundation, has an interesting piece out today: Women Entrepreneurs Are Trapped Within Glass Walls. In it she discusses the gender gap in science and technology based startups.  She points out that traditional explanations for a lack of women entering these sectors don’t seem to apply quite the same anymore.  For example: 45% plus of the undergraduates at MIT are women.  However, men continue to become entrepreneurs starting high-growth technology companies much more often than women.  In the attempt to determine why this disparity exists, Ms. Mitchell points to some... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  Earlier this week, in connection with a visit by President Obama to Facebook's offices in Palo Alto to participate in a Facebook Townhall, the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) announced a new startup alliance focused on women in tech - the Entrepreneurial Alliance.  Ping Fu, founder of GeoMagic, writes about the event and the new alliance on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog.  The alliance aims to help startups hire more technical women, retain them, and establish a successful company culture by making available practices used to create and maintain an inclusive technical culture... More

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com    Welcome to the Venture Spotlight, an occasional column in which we will profile startups, VCs, entrepreneurs, and technologists, and within these groups, women in tech.  Please email your suggestions of people doing interesting things in technology and in the venture world, plus your suggested questions for them.  Who do you want to read about and what do you want to ask? Women in Tech It seems that every year or so, there is a burst of articles or surveys about the lack of women in technology, with a slew of them coming out just this past month:... More