Hope you enjoy!

The wealthy acquire second homes, fancy cars, museum-quality art, and this season’s clothing and accessories. They hire assistants, house managers, gardeners, maids, drivers, nannies, and tutors – all in an effort to ensure they’ll have time to enjoy these possessions, and time to spend with loved ones.

For even when money is no object, time remains elusive. In today’s frenetic, fast-paced world, time is the ultimate luxury.

To some, networking seems yet another drain on time; it’s dismissed as inessential and easily abandoned for more important pursuits. Yet when done well, networking is crucial to efficiency and productivity, as strong and diverse networks provide quick answers and access to resources. When done well, networking actually saves time.

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Contrary to the “Queen Bee” stereotype, new evidence shows that female CEOs are much more likely to surround themselves with female leaders. Women CEOs are 50% more likely than male CEOs to have a female CFO and 55% more likely to have women running business units. This holds true in venture capital, start-ups, and microfinance, as well as in the corporate world. While female representation in in venture capital partnerships remains low, VCs co-founded by women have a much higher percentage of female partners than the industry average (43% vs. 7-8%). Additionally, female-founded VCs invest more in women entrepreneurs, with 17.4% of funding rounds going to female-owned startups versus the industry average of 12%.

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This is something I never thought I would do. But through “Stiletto Network,” I’ve come to expect the unexpected. As I celebrate the book’s one-year anniversary, I’m realizing just how many “firsts” the past 12 months have brought.

I’m going to tell you why Mii Amo is special (and of course I hope you’ll all sign up for the retreat), but first a bit of history:

Back in 2010, when I started this process, I’d recently stopped nursing my third child and couldn’t imagine embarking on a large project. I was exhausted, just hanging on, and freelancing for The New York Times while raising three active boys seemed like work enough – at least for the moment. I was not, as we say, leaning in.

Still, while reporting an article, I had a hunch that something was changing in the world, so every day I woke up and tried to figure it out. I was doing work that was personally interesting and engaging – interviewing smart, successful women about their lives – and work that felt right in a deep, intuitive way.

For the first time in my career, perhaps in my life, I had no plan for where it would lead. In fact, I’d taken 100 pages of single-spaced notes before I admitted to anyone (including myself) that I was writing a book. I was just loving the work.

This approach, and the book that followed, has brought more blessings, both personally and professionally, than I ever could have imagined, and I’ve become much more comfortable with uncertainty and risk. The past few years have also been filled with meaningful coincidences, what some (including Deepak Chopra, who blurbed “Stiletto Network”) call “synchronicity.”

Synchronicity led me to Mii Amo.

Last summer, after the whirlwind launch of “Stiletto Network,” I retreated to Maine with my family. I was elated by the response to the book, but also completely drained after two months of press and travel, and I longed to hike and bike and sail with my kids, to think and write and stare at the ocean.

Mostly I lived like a hermit in Maine, but on a rare night I ventured out for dinner with my wonderful friend Diana, a fellow mom and writer who lives in D.C. During a long conversation about struggling for that elusive balance, Diana mentioned a place she’d visited on her 40th birthday – a red rock canyon in Arizona considered sacred ground by many tribes, a place she’d found transformative and from which she returned with a well of energy and love.

“I think you’d love it there,” she said. “I think you should go.”

Of course this sounded great, if totally unrealistic; I was already traveling for speaking engagements and couldn’t possibly take more time away from my kids. So I filed it away and headed back to my frenetic city life. Then, on November 23, 2013, I received an email from Diana: “Hello Pamela!! Have been thinking about you and will call you soon to catch up.” Diana and I are close, but we rarely speak during the year for all the obvious reasons. Life is busy. It was unlike Diana to email me out of the blue.

The same night, I was having dinner with the amazing Melissa Biggs Bradley, founder of Indagare, and the former travel editor for Town & Country magazine. Melissa is of the most erudite people, and certainly the most well-traveled person, I know. Her job is to ferret out new and exciting destinations, to curate experiences for a glamorous clientele, so she seldom goes anywhere twice.

Yet here she was, talking about a place in Arizona she visits ever year, a place where magic happens. “Yes, it sounds New Agey,” Melissa writes in her review on Indagare, “but Mii Amo… is a place that makes you believe that a better you—and that can mean whatever you wish—is attainable.”

As Melissa spoke at dinner, I kept thinking, “This is Diana’s place too.” And it was.

In the same spirit with which I wrote “Stiletto Network” – doing what feels right without over-thinking – I immediately signed up for Indagare’s annual trip to Mii Amo (which means “journey” in a Native American language). I found its location, activities, guides, and healers to be every bit as powerful and restorative as my friends claimed (see Melissa’s piece, Mii Amo: An Addiction, posted after our January trip).

It’s an honor to be leading this retreat, which coincidentally coincides with my 40th birthday. Synchronicity.

But when we broadcast suggestions or requests on social media, there’s no guarantee that valued sources or experts will see them and respond. There’s no consistent way to cut through the noise.

At least that’s what Claudia Batten, a serial entrepreneur, found when searching for technology hardware experts. Despite being extremely well-connected – Batten has thousands of ties on LinkedIn, thousands of (real) Twitter followers, and hundreds of Facebook friends – she lacked a quick way to tap her contacts for advice. Instead, she found herself individually emailing people she thought might be able to help.

“It was really inefficient,” Batten says. “But even worse, it was ineffective.”

Batten and co-founders – who agreed that their increased connectivity had diminishing returns – created “Broadli,” an app to catalyze the targeted assistance they observed among “super-connectors” and highly effective peers. “LinkedIn is a powerful tool,” Batten continues. “It’s great that everyone is in this awesome digital Rolodex, but now let’s put them to work.”

Broadli enables users to activate their networks strategically, to zero in on people who can be most helpful at a particular time. The app connects to a user’s LinkedIn account and pulls in contacts, which the user then sorts into categories: “Inspired,” “Dormant,” “Don’t Know,” and “Want to Know.” Folks with whom she has close, personal relationships are “Inspired” and form a trusted network. All other contacts are divided into one of the other clusters and stored for later networking potential.

From there, the user defines her mission – the foremost thing she is trying to accomplish, such as moving to a new city, changing jobs, or launching a company or charity. Her “Inspired” inner circle can then make tactical introductions to members of their own coteries to help the friend advance toward her goal.

In developing the app, Broadli co-founders aim to facilitate the “intentional generosity” they’ve experienced in trusted networks. Networking, they say, isn’t a zero-sum game. Rather, it should be about building relationships that go the distance, helping others without expecting an immediate return.

“Networking for ambition alone is a thing of the past,” Batten continues. “It’s supporting people to help them achieve their dreams because, when they do, you feel the ‘win’ yourself. It’s supporting people because you care about their lives.”

One might expect such idealism from starry-eyed Millennials, but Broadli’s three initial co-founders are high-flying female executives in their late-thirties and forties. After decades in the workforce, the women were looking for a better way to work, and Broadli’s corporate structure – or lack thereof – mirrors the flat, non-hierarchical collaboration they hope their app will accelerate.

Even before last month when Zappos, the online retailer, announced its plan to abandon a traditional top-down org structure in favor of self-governing circles for the company’s 1,500 employees, Broadli co-founders worked successfully without titles, job descriptions, or ownership of ideas. The process of incorporating forced Broadli to name a president, but co-founders insist this “old-world” paradigm runs counter to creativity and innovation. Major advances, they say, result from openness and diversity.

While Broadli’s team now includes two male co-founders, Matt Null and John Weiss, the entrepreneurs say the app was created from a “feminine perspective,” which values collaboration. “Real collaboration is working together to create something new in support of a shared vision,” says Alessandra Lariu, a Broadli co-founder who is also CEO of Shout, a global advertising collective. “Real collaborators behave in a ‘what’s mine is yours’ manner.”

Weiss says he finds the forward-thinking nature of his female colleagues refreshing; they consistently focus on possibilities for the future, he says, whereas some male-dominated organizations tend to emphasize past success.

Still, the Broadli crew cautions against getting mired in group-think and wonders how their model will scale (they’ll be watching Zappos closely). But for now they’re continuing the experiment.

“We’re so excited about the possibilities of this venture – not only for the ability to extend purposeful networking, but also for the opportunity to create a way of working together that is qualitatively different from other workplaces we’ve known,” says V. Mary Abraham, a co-founder who is also a lawyer and knowledge management expert. “An organization created by women who are consciously looking for a better way is a wonderful thing!”

Last fall, I was privileged to meet Academy Award-winning director Cynthia Wade, who won an Oscar for her documentary “Freeheld” in 2007 and was nominated again in 2012 for “Mondays at Racine.” Cynthia also directs commercials and works with advertising agencies that want to use real people to tell engaging, emotional stories.

I had dinner with Cynthia and liked her so much that I invited her out two nights later to another dinner I was attending with some friends in advertising, as well as Michael Crook, a talented photographer (female – don’t let the name fool you) I’d met months before at a charity event.

We gathered on a rainy night at a cozy restaurant on Bleeker Street and, as with all #StilettoNetwork dinners, there was no explicit goal or agenda; we were just there to catch up and/or get to know one another.

Cynthia and Michael talked for much of the night, and within a month Cynthia pitched the idea for a short film called “Selfie,” with Michael as the featured photographer, for Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.” On Monday, the 7-minute film Cynthia conceived and directed premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s a beautiful collaboration, and it’s going viral now.
YouTube.com/Dove

“SHOWING UP to these networking meetings is the key to success!” Cynthia wrote in an email. “That dinner was challenging to get to, as I was traveling down from MA just for the dinner and back – and I’d only just gotten back home from a week business trip, so it would have been easy to stay home. I AM SO GLAD I WENT.”

So are we. Congratulations Cynthia and Michael!

In 1992, a group of male Silicon Valley executives with roots in the Indus region realized they were being treated like second-class citizens. “We had foreign accents, different educations and values. We dressed differently. People thought, ‘I can’t put this guy in front of a client, I can’t invest in this guy’s company,’” said Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and academic who teaches at Stanford and Duke, among other institutions. “We couldn’t pretend there wasn’t a problem.”

They created The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), which stokes entrepreneurship for members globally. Members systematically sponsored and invested in each other. Each prosperous Indian found a promising protégé to groom. The mentor did whatever was necessary—from making introductions, to personally funding, to buying new clothes—to help the greenhorn adapt and achieve. The members aimed, as TiE’s website says, to foster a “virtuous cycle of wealth creation and giving back to the community.”

TiE now has about 13,000 members in fifty-seven chapters across fourteen countries and, as a result, Wadhwa, who was the founding president of the Carolinas chapter of TiE, said Southeast Asians have become a disproportionately successful, sought-out bloc in the workforce. “It worked for us because we banded together,” he continued. “We fixed the problem systematically and led by example.”

So why haven’t women appropriated this formula for success? “Women fit into society better because you’re only different in one sense. It’s easier for you to pretend you’re the same as guys, but you need to recognize there’s still a problem.”

Even the white boys agree. Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur who has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia, said that Silicon Valley in the late 1970s was a sea of homogeny. “The notion of Chinese or Indians running a company was laughable. They were good engineers, but couldn’t run a company,” said Blank, who was listed as one of Harvard Business Review’s “Masters of Innovation” in 2012. “Over the last thirty years, almost every ethnicity started a support group. People collect over the notion of tribes, and the women-thing is the next rational barrier to fall. I have two college-age daughters, and it’s time.”

These guys have a point, but they don’t realize it’s already happening—because the really vibrant women’s networks have been completely underground. Without declaring an explicit agenda like TiE’s, women across the nation have been adopting the Indian model for success. They are mobilizing their #StilettoNetworks (i.e., tribes) and, for the first time in history, seeing a monetary return on time invested with girlfriends.

Karen White (President & COO of Addepar; former Oracle & private equity honcho; Stiletto Network Chapter 6) says that when a woman attends some esteemed institution of higher learning or gets hired by a reputable firm, the onus is on her to be active in her network – both inside and outside of her company.

We must work hard for others if we want others to work hard for us. We should lead by giving.

“People choose all types of criteria to favor – their alma mater, ex-football players, women,” White says. “But you have to be a contributor. Networks give you access, and if you’re in a network – at least in Silicon Valley – it’s assumed you will participate. All you have is your reputation around your capabilities and for keeping your commitments. You can fail at your venture, survive that, and move on to thrive in the next. But without the pillar of your network, your chances of succeeding are de minimus.”

In Silicon Valley, there’s less segregation of friends, family, work, church, temple, mosque. It’s all blended, and men and women see a fuller spectrum of each other’s worlds. This is way the rest of society is heading too.

People are relying more on their networks and less on their organizations.

So, what are you doing to feed your network? Whom have you helped today?

I’ve found these groups among women in all industries and age groups — from CEOs to aspiring Millennials to moms launching businesses in their basements. This proves that you don’t need to be famous or fabulous to create a Stiletto Network, and you need not begin with major connections. Anyone can do this.

Need more evidence? Channel 7 WSPA recently aired a fantastic segment showcasing Stiletto Networks in South Carolina — groups like “Women Mean Business” in Greenville and “Sparkle” in Spartanburg. These are local female entrepreneurs, women merging business and friendship and helping each other grow.

To quote Laura Thomas, WSPA anchor/reporter: “It’s a community of women with high heels, and even higher hopes.”

Women like Laura Skelton, owner of River Falls Spa; Duffy Baehr, owner of Baehr Feet; Anne Anderson, owner of Herb & Renewal; Brooke Shugart of Studio B for Pilates and Barre; Brandy Gutierrez of iRecycle; and Sara Riddle, who is opening a maternity and nursing store called Haute Mama.

“We have many roles,” says Shugart. “We’re mothers and wives and business owners, and I just feel like it’s very important for us to encourage each other.”

So when the geeks dared her to venture upstairs, Kaplan took a chance. Hey, it was the year 2000. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come up and say hi.”

Mike Hudack had dropped out of high school to work for a start-up and his buddy Charles Hope, sporting a nostril pierce and dreadlocks flopping halfway down his chest, was an odd candidate to write software tracking ingredients for a kosher certification company. But it paid the bills. The group talked late into the evening, and Hudack struck Kaplan as some sort of boy genius.

Fast-forward five years and Kaplan was still in touch. By then Hudack and Hope had partnered with two other techies they met at a group called “New York City Geeks,” and the guys spent nights and weekends hacking away on an information management program they’d developed, thinking it could form the back-end of a larger company – like a platform for TV shows on the Internet. The hackers knew Kaplan was smart and personable, and they wanted her to be the face of their operation. She could talk to people, help raise funds or bring in partners, maybe turn their project into a business.

Kaplan, who had worked for MTV for four years and been a television reporter for five, could see how Web video might be interesting. “I trust my instinct on big things,” Kaplan says. “I remember the date, time, and moment I had my first Starbucks coffee and thinking, ‘This company is going to do really well.’ I remember the first time I had a Snapple, what I was wearing, and I thought, ‘This company is going to do really well.’”

Kaplan felt the same about Hudack. Though her friends started staging interventions – did she really want to work with these guys? – she was ready to gamble. “If I ever know anyone who’s going to be the next Bill Gates, it’s this guy,” she remembers thinking. “If he starts a company, I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and go work for him.”

After a sputter-start in May 2005, when the site gained a total of two fans – Shlomo Rabinowitz, a bar owner in San Francisco, and a girl named Pepa from Spain – Kaplan and her team began to reach out to potential users to see how they might meet their needs. At that point YouTube had launched, but no one had heard of it, and no vernacular existed for the platform they aimed to provide. Written blogs had yet to hit mainstream and “video blogs,” as homemade films were then known, were even more fringe. But Hudack responded to requests and, a few months later, they re-launched at a barbeque in Hoboken, New Jersey. That night they picked up 500 users.

The five first-time entrepreneurs sketched a logo for their company, Blip.tv, on a bar napkin. The geeks would code on Saturdays at Hudack’s loft in Chelsea, then convene every Wednesday evening with Kaplan to strategize about how to quit their jobs and devote themselves to Blip.tv. They met in the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center because it had free WiFi. “We would get food and go up the escalators,” Kaplan recalls. “We had the feeling of taking over the world.”

Over the next few months, they attracted more users with better videos, but they had to find a way to make money. Still, none of them had connections. They’d never been part of a start-up community and no one knew angel investors or venture capitalists. Kaplan’s immediate task was to raise money, so she started going to events every night, asking anyone she met for advice.

Six months later, her co-founders were getting antsy and Kaplan was under pressure. She still couldn’t prove there was a market for their technology. “Investors would say, ‘Okay, I see what you’re doing, but how are you going to make money?’” Kaplan says. “They needed some bet to place, some reason to invest in this business.”

That December, Kaplan attended a dinner celebrating women in media at the Paley Center, where she was overwhelmed to be in the company of legends like Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, and Jane Fonda. Joan Gerberding, a radio executive Kaplan knew, asked whom she’d like to meet, and Kaplan said Gerry Laybourne – a woman to whom she was already indebted.

Years ago, Kaplan had been a politics junkie who ditched college to volunteer for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. She loved what MTV was doing to encourage young people to get involved in policy and she wanted to be a part.

Laybourne was at the time leading Nickelodeon, the children’s network that was part of Viacom, the conglomerate that also owned MTV. After Kaplan learned that Laybourne’s husband and son had also attended Wesleyan, Kaplan’s alma mater, she wrote Laybourne a passionate letter explaining their connection and requesting an introduction to MTV.

When Laybourne agreed to see her, Kaplan hopped a train from Washington, D.C. to New York for a 15-minute meeting that would jump-start her career. Laybourne reached out to the president of MTV News and encouraged him to hire Kaplan, who then worked there from 1995 to 1999.

Ten years later, Kaplan was still grateful. She remembered Laybourne’s open kindness and wanted to thank her. So Joan Gerberding walked Kaplan over to Laybourne’s table and interrupted her conversation with Diane Sawyer, saying: “Gerry, this is Dina Kaplan. She’s starting a media company focused on Web video and I think you’ll benefit from it.”

“I said, ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but you helped me get a job at MTV ten years ago,’” Kaplan recalls. “And Gerry once again said: ‘Come see me tomorrow. Here’s my number. I’ll make time for you.’”

The next day, Kaplan arrived in Laybourne’s office to explain Blip.tv’s technology. Laybourne in turn revealed that Oxygen Media, which she’d founded and was running by then, was sponsoring a contest for Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance, a reality show featuring plus-sized (that is, “Fabulous And Thick”) women in a beauty pageant. Producers wanted to invite women across the country to send in photos and videos celebrating their own curves, and Blip.tv seemed to have the goods to support it.

Oxygen paid Blip.tv a sum in the low five-figures for software enabling consumer-generated content – in this case, evidence of zaftig hotties in suggestive poses – to be uploaded on its site. They made a handshake agreement in December, signed a contract in March, and the contest debuted in April. “Our geeky CTO was looking at large African American women for three months, but that deal changed the future of our company,” Kaplan says. “I don’t know where we would be today if Gerry hadn’t taken that chance on us.”

Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance online pageant was a hit. It went viral in communities around the nation and established credibility for Blip.tv, enabling the company to land a contract for hundreds of thousands of dollars to power CNN’s iReport, a compilation of news footage submitted by citizen journalists, just a few months later. Blip.tv’s founders were scrappy and inexperienced, but they were the only team competing for CNN’s business who had effectively executed a project for a large media company.

Kaplan went back to investors with proof her company could make money. Blip.tv soon raised $550,000 in angel funding and, in subsequent years, $30.3 million from top-tier venture capital firms.

The company, which now goes by “Blip,” focuses on original, episodic Web shows and claims about 330 million video views per month. But eight years ago, when her enterprise was struggling to survive, Kaplan thanked Laybourne, and the media maven’s reply stuck with her: “My job right now is to enable the next generation of women leaders.”

“I made a social contract with myself at that moment,” Kaplan remembers. “This woman probably just changed my life, and I will pay this forward. With whatever power I have, I want to be the Gerry Laybourne to many future women to come.”

One executive I spoke with for Stiletto Network recalled an episode at a National Venture Capital Association event about a decade ago; men and women were mingling amiably when an NVCA rep decided to corral some ladies into a separate room to confer on a report by the Athena Forum about the state of women in venture and private equity.

By Canyon Castator

“The report showed that the number of women had dropped three-tenths of a point, and some woman shook her head and said in hushed tones, ‘This is terrible,’” the VC recounted. “We were just twitching in our seats. I stood up and said I appreciate the earnestness, but if there are a bunch of women with MBA’s making half a million a year while women in the garment industry are slaving away, well… I’m not crying in my chardonnay. Only 2.5% of VCs are women, and some of them made so much money in the bubble that they can retire. So I know the women who changed the number that much statistically.”

Her point? Sure, there are issues, but let’s get a little perspective. And, in the wake of the Ellen Pao scandal at Kleiner Perkins, Anne Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic dirge (“Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”), the debate over leaning in, and the carping over Marissa Mayer’s baby, she had some other thoughts:

“I wouldn’t mind rewinding the clock a few months, when we could just do the work and the topic on everyone’s mind wasn’t gender and work. Is that selfish of me? Anti-feminist? Is the dialogue always supposed to be kept alive, like a balloon ball on a concert floor? As if the collective consciousness says, ‘Watch out! It’s going to fall off the radar! Quick, somebody do something to get everyone talking about the inequities of work/life balance and the perils of being a woman at work again!’ I’m exhausted trying not to think about it and just do it.”

So what’s the answer? How to launch a constructive dialogue without being branded whiners, and without suffering gender fatigue? How much is too much?