Paola grew up in Florence and began traveling when she was quite young.  Her mother was an entrepreneur and back in the 60s, particularly in Italy, that was rare.  Her mother had a ceramic business that was well known in the US so she went back and forth often.  She was also a single mother as her parents got divorced when Paolo was young.

She stayed in Florence for college studying architecture.  Her first job out of school was teaching the history of the Renaissance gardens to students at the American school in Florence.  She had a close mentor who was much older than her, 58, who became very ill with cancer.  This woman was in charge of production development and sourcing for an importer of home/gift and tablewares.  Paola basically took over while her friend was slowly dying.  Once her friend passed the company asked Paolo to take over the job.  She said no because it wasn't her field but should would help them find someone.  Time passed and before she knew it she was not only donig the job but enjoying the job and making really good money. She stayed with it for about 3/4 years.

Since she had now herself been exposed to the American market, she started working with her mother who was servicing large clients such as Target, Crate and Barrel and Starbucks.  It was an entrepreneur family.  Her mother realized what a good negotiator Paola was and let her begin to take over the company.  What is interesting is at that time everything was made in Italy and literally over night, it was 1998, everything moved to China.  She told her Mom that she had to go to China because you have to go where the customer has gone.  Instead, Paola went.

In China she had to train the Chinese to create the same type of product as they had been making over in Italy.  There was a time when you could easily detect where ceramics were being made either Italy, China or Portugal.  She had to take her Moms style of Italian ceramics to China. 

Paola literally parked herself in the Dowyan province which is about two hours outside of Hong Kong.  A totally different world.  She felt like she was watching a revolution take place.  The streets were full of prostitutes and workers, that was it.  It was like a military compound.  People were living in the factories as they have come from the north to make money.  The first year she trained them to create an Italian product and the second year she began to sell it.  The people were very smart and skilled and they picked it up quickly.

The hardest part about selling the products was the distribution.  Bed, Bath and Beyond and Pottery Barn would have to figure out how to get the products into the country.  She knew the biggest distributor in the US and connected them together to make the shift more seamless.  This was way before bringing in articles from China was just every day stuff. 

She began to consult for many American companies going all over the place from Eastern Europe and other parts of China as their product development person.  Then the market shifted again.  The Chinese market became so skilled that the higher end market only wanted goods from Italy.  She shifted her sourcing structure and moved back to Italy.  It was then that she finally had a child.  She had complications because of medial malpractice and lost her first.  It was devastating and she was 40 years old.  She got pregnant again and had another child at 41 and 42.  After that she fired herself.

Mentally the movement between China and Italy was overwhelming and to lose a baby and finally became a mother at 41 was the perfect time to take a break.  She originally thought she would just take off a year but before she knew it one year turned into four. 

After four years she realized that she couldn't sit at home anymore, it was time to get a job again.  As much as she enjoyed being with the kids, Paola had such high expectations for herself that she was feeling lost.  She returned to the market that she knew but after the economy had dramatically changed, the job that she had before would pay her 25% less.  So here she was trying to re-eneter the market place with the opportunity to make 25% less and then travel to China for two months at a time.  It just didn't sound right. 

She began to think about other women who were in the same position as her.  Women who wanted to use their brains, be good mothers and make money.  She was a single Mom too.  A friend of hers in Berlin said, why don't we put together a group of 4 women and do something.  Let's see if we can network together and just come up with something.  She began to think about women getting together, over a cup of virtual coffee, and socializing around their professional goals.  That is how WIth and Within started.

She was lucky to find a group of coders who lived in her town that happened to be some of the top coders in Italy.  They loved what she was doing and helped her create the site.  It was her background in architecture that helped her organize the wireframes.  It was her production background and skills of organization that really moved the idea forward.

Currently they are doing about 450,000 page views a month.  There are 4000 subscribers and the number continues to grow.  Most of the women on the site have done something before and are now trying to figure out the next thing.  Reorganizing your life after kids can be a tough process.  There are women who are VP's of large telecom companies on the site to women who have been collecting random items for years wondering what to do with that.  Women create professional groups around specific topics. 

In essence, she has built a linked in for where there are tools to promote your small business and get a mentor to help you, or a group.  Many women do not know how to monetize their soft skills and she is hoping through community, conversation and mentoring we can help each other figure it out.  The stories that Paola tells about many of the women who have had success with the site are inspiring.  The mother who loved cleaning and did it at her own home for 15 years and then took those skills and turned it into a business where she manages the cleaning staff of a castle in Umbria.  Another woman who has been collecting random teacups for years and has now built a store and site to sell her collectibles.  Her feeling is many women do not think what they do is worthwhile but it is and she is providing a space for them to realize how valuable they are.

I am impressed with Paolas get up and go.  She is driven and figuring it out as she goes along.  It is not easy to grow a community but so far, so good.  I am seeing a variety of singular women sites with different niches.  There is a place for many.  Paolas skills as an entrepreneur from the day she left college has allowed her to build on a set of skills that she was born with....pretty amazing at 45 to start on a brand new journey of building an internet start-up. 

Indu spent her earlier years growing up in Bangor before her family moved to Long Island NY where she went to high school.  She went off to Cornell University for undergraduate as a biology major with the thought that she would always be in medicine.  A typical statistic, Indian American family that admires doctors and tells their kids that they should become a doctor.  In high school, she ran the debate club, wrote for the newspaper and was an organizer of a variety of events.  A total self-starter over achiever with the goal always being medical school.  After graduating Cornell, she continues onward as expected to Stonybrook Medical School. 

It wasn't that Indu didn't love medical school but by her fourth year she knew that being a doctor wasn't what she really wanted to do. She thought that perhaps she could be a psychologist or a neurologist but Indu really felt that you had to get up every morning and be passionate about what you are doing and the passion wasn't there.  The structure and culture of the medical world for an extravert like Indu didn't fit.  You can't be a rebellious doctor. Her peers and professors were amazed that she had no desire for a residency and wanted her career to go in a different direction.  How could you not be a doctor?  Her father was so concerned he told her that at least she could always drive a taxi.  Funny enough, everyone else was so worried about her decision to change the direction of her life except for Indu. 

During her fourth year rotation in ICU, she would do searches on health care jobs in California.  She found a consulting company that focused on biotech life sciences in the Bay area and gave them a call.  After graduating medical school, she got on a plane and found herself in a complete life shift working in the Bay area.  It was 2000.  The boutique consulting firm was helping biotech companies get to market.  It was an incredible experience because of the broad exposure it gave Indu.  She was able to be involved with several stages of growth and the life cycle of these companies. Indu felt as if she was in her elemement.  She loved the community, she went to every conference, she embraced the culture.  She was able to wear several hats and get her chops wet running a division that focused on the pharmaceutial industry and clinical patient outcomes.  The radical notion that you can get information from patients on how they feel after taking certain drugs and the impact of that.  She is still passionate about that topic today. 

She decided that in order to really be an expert in what she was doing, she should go get an MBA as she thought that understanding the business side was important to her success.  She took a 3 year degree so she could work during the day and go to school at night.  It was exhausting.  After two years she decided to jump ship at the medical consulting company and spent the third year working for a hedge fund with a focus on health.  It was a great decision to get a MBA and learn about the biz side but working in the hedge fund industry was not.  The hours were insane and it was primarily a male industry.  She got to see that mindset and that was enough. 

She took a breather and got married and then took a few months off.  Indu had a meeting with a guy who had been a client of both the consulting and hedge fund firm and told him that she was thinking of starting up her own company.  He said, go on your honeymoon and when you come back, let's talk. I will be your first client.

She came back and told him about she needed someone to help her think about product and design.  After years of consulting she really wanted to build something.  She had left medical school, gone to get a MBA and in her heart she knew that she wanted to be an entrepreneur.  She had been incubating an idea for what she thought was web 2.0 meets health-care. 

The flexibility on how we communicate and share information with ourselves should be able to make the leap to communicating with your doctor.  She wanted to bring tech to the medical community through a software program with an easy user interface.  It was 2006 and Indu goes to a health community meet-up in the Bay area to see if anyone else is thinking about what she is thinking about.  She meets Matthew Holt who has been writing a blog about the health care industry.  He knew about health-care and she knew about running a business.  He was writing policy wonky stuff and they got to talking about and formed a connection.  Many conversations later they decide to do a small conference called Health 2.0 and the company was born. 

It wasn't what she expected, as is it ever?  At the time she was also working as a Venture partner working with a medical records start-up that connected doctors to their patients including running her consultancy firm.  So between her consulting contacts, the venture arm and the idea for Health 2.0, they were able to get Yahoo, Google and Webmed to talk at the conference.  The two of them knew nothing about putting together an event.  They were writing the script every day.  They decided to charge $1000 a head and before they knew it they had 500 people who had signed up and then they had a wait list.

Indu still remembers the first day of the conference.  Walking into the rooms and having an Israeli medical entrepreneur come over to her and say I am so excited that other people are interested in these topics around health-care.  Two months later they opened a bank account, created a LLC and she continued to consul for a few months before making the leap to be a full time entrepreneur.  The heart and soul of her business is the conferences.  Currently they put on conferences around the globe where on average 1500 people attend from Berlin to China to India to Paris. 

The other divisions of her company are in incubators around developers.  The Fed gives them money to stimulate health IT mandates in the country.  For instance, the Government has decided that we need to find a solution for tele-medicine in rural Virginia and they work on making that match.  Through a grant they have created an incubator arm, for companies to create health-care solutions.  This creates economies, jobs and companies.  The other division is focused on market intelligence as they are tracking over 1500 companies that fall into the web 2.0 space.  The criteria is health tech companies that are using or building software that is adaptable for the medical community, it must be user friendly and they must use data to make intelligent smart decisions. 

Indu might have been one of the first to jump from medical school into the tech world but she might have started a trend.  She currently mentors many others who have decided to take her track.  Talking with Indu is inspiring because she is working in an area that is going to undergo significant change in the next decade.  It has to.  Having smart people like her involved in educating people around the globe by creating conferences where conversations can take place and ideas form is a start.  Yet having an arm where companies are seeded so they can begin to form and grow is essential for change. It is like the tag line of Health 2.0, the innovation community. 

She has a one year old child and is learning about the balance between motherhood and being an entrepreneur.  The company is virtual as she lives in LA and Matt lives in SF.  As Indu says, what ended up happening in her career is serendipity but at the end of the day you have to trust you gut and she did. Worse comes to worse Indu can always fall back on driving a taxi but I am pretty damn sure that won't be necessary.

Lori grew up in Mammoth County, NJ.  Her mother was a special-ed teacher and her father was a finance guy for an apparel company...so apparel started in her blood a long time ago.  After graduating high school, she went to the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences.  Lori knew she wanted to do something entrepreneurial in the fashion industry so she began with the design end. 

During Lori's summer she worked in the garment center.  Her first gig was with Isaac Mizrahi when he was working out of Wooster Street in Soho.  Next stop was Gitano.  It was the heydey of the 80's in the schmata business and it was a very different place that it is now.  I know because I was in it too.  Gitano was backing Isaacs business so the move there made total sense.  After graduating, they offered her a job and she took it.

She started designing separtes and coordinates.  After one year, she moved into accessories.  The job was not only about design but production too and she began to travel overseas where the product was being made to Korea, Taiwan, China and the Philippines.  She was making moderate priced fashion jewelry for Target, Walmart, Urban Outfitters and Wet Seal.  She then moved to handbags, within the same company and primarily traveled to China.  The ability to design a product, get it manufactured and then see it hit the retail stores and sell is an invaluable experience.

Someone she knew was working on building a company called Promgirl.  It was 1999 and the company was backed by J. Barry (a dress manufacturer).  She decided to get involved from the get go.  It was exciting to be in a start-up.  The business took off, growing organically and now sells about 70,000 dresses a month.  Lori decided that she could either stick around to vest but she really wanted to start her own business and so she took the risk and jumped ship.

She really saw a void in the pet market and at that time there was, it was 1999.  She built a company called Pet Voyage.  Lori had designed an entire product line for pets.  She started selling to large companies such as Target growing the companies revenue to $3 million.  After doing it for 5 years, she sold it to Vo-toys and then stuck around for another 5 years to consult and create an entire other line of cleaning products and treats.  She was not only consulting for them but other pet companies. 

Still in her entrepreneurial mode, she was ready for the next.  Through friends she became aware that Neighborhoodies was available to buy.  She thought it was an interesting opportunity. She really wanted to turn this into more of an ecommerce business vs a brick and mortar business which is originally was.  The timing was right and she bought Neighborhoodies. 

Lori talks about how starting a company vs taking one over is a very different experience.  You are basically walking in someone elses shoes for awhile although you eventually find your way and find your own shoes.  There were dumpsters to clean out, things weren't as organized as she wanted, there wasn't enough customer service.  She basically had to update the brand and streamline the process.  The opportunities weren't being met from working with large companies to create products for their employees to ecommerce.  The thing about a customized business is that it creates a lot of efficiency and information for the end client creating a relationship that hopefully will last.

Lori has a small shop in Dumbo although the bulk of the business is coming from large customers and ecommerce the store front is a nice addition to the area.  She is now on a roll.  The key has been communications with the customers.  I really like what Lori has turned around and created.  It is a wonderful business that could scale to a place where it will provide the perfect life style business for her.  Is she a woman tech entrepreneur?  Perhaps because it is the web that has allowed Lori to evolve her business efficienctly.  Let's count her into the statistics and BTW, the product is super comfy and soft.  

Ariane grew up in NYC.  She went to college at University of Michigan majoring marketing taking as many classes as possible in the business school as possible.  The summer before her senior year she took an internship at Amex.  She returned after college with a paid job and stayed for eight years. 

She started her career in Amex in the acquisitions department and then moved into the marketing department working on sponsorships for large events such as the USOpen and fashion week.  It was a big company and a great company to wet her chops but she knew that she would never be a lifer.

Ariane's parents are entrepreneurs so it is not surprising that she is too.  Her parents worked together in their own shmata business in the childrens wholesale business.  While Ariane was at Amex, she started to take classes in the evening at Parsons.  She was looking for her "thing".  She knew she had a business head but wanted to figure out creatively how to make something with that.  At Parsons she took a lot of interior design classes. 

When Ariane was planning her wedding she designed the dresses for her bridesmaids.  She started to show people what she had created and wondered if this was the business idea she was looking for.  Her husband told her to go for it and she did opening up twobirds.  She went on to show her dresses on Martha Stewart and the business rapidly grew.  Currently she has an online store including brick and mortar locations in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Sydney. 

When Ariane got pregnant, she saw the same void in the pregnancy market.  Why aren't there simple one piece garments in a variety of colors and thus Hatch Collection was created.  18 pieces online.   What she did was smart.  She took the profits of twobirds to finance the start-up of Hatch.  It was certainly a leap of faith and I am sure scary as hell but Ariane is savvy and knew she had found a void in the market.  She will stay with the online platform for now as she figures out the needs of the customer and the business model.  So far, so good. 

As Ariane says, it is all about execution.  She has that right.  Also, execution has a snowball effect.  Once you get the first step right, it is easier to continue executing and then all of a sudden, there you are.  The hardest part is being a one woman band.  Having a partner is always a bonus so you have someone to confirm that the next step makes sense.  From what I see, she has done a helluva job trusting her own instincts.  I wouldn't be surprised to see a third concept under the umbrella of Ariane Goldman sometime in the future.  

Julia grew up in NYC.  At 6, the family moved to Paris for her father to teach at the Sorbonne.  It was there that he began the Pimsleur method.  Her parents put their children in the Parisian public school system though they very little French.  In two months she was bilingual and that experience changed her life. 

She returned to NYC to complete high school but never lost her attachment to France.  Julia went on to Yale and spent a semester abroad in Paris.  After graduating from Yale, she got on a plane and went back to Paris.  At that time it was the perfect place to go when you had very little money. 

To survive Julia began to freelance for film companies, vetting American scripts.  She had heard about the French national film school that was free and applied.  It was a six month application process but she got in.  She graduated with a MFA.  It was in school that she realized that she had a calling to make documentaries around social justice issues.  She decided to start her own company.  A woman having her own company in Paris was not exactly the right environment.  So Julia called her best friend from Yale who had taken the same path as her and together they forged together to create Big Mouth Productions. 

Julia produced 5 documentaries over the course of 5 years.  Nuyorican Dream, a gripping portrait of an American family from Puerto Rico; Innocent until Proven Guilty; a personal documentary on her family and Journey to the West, Chinese Medicine Today including another film on female excision. 

After 5 years Julia became frustrated with the process of raising money to make documentaries.  She would get a foundation to fund her films but then there wasn't a seamless channel for distribution.  Julia sat in a meeting at the Ford Foundation that brought together non-profits and film makers and there she brought up the idea to build a community web site so they could all work together.  Ford put in the seed funding and Julia created Mediarights.org

After running Big Mouth and Mediarights.org for several years, Julia became a full time fundraiser for nonprofits, first at Witness, and ultimately at Echoing Green. When she had her first son, she knew she wanted him to speak French like she did growing up.  She scoured the marketplace and couldn't find a good product that would help kids at that age when they are language sponges, before age six.  She thought I am a mom and a filmmaker, my father created the Pimsleur Method and bang she did what any good entrepreneur would do, she created her own multimedia method, and called the company Little Pim.

She knew that she wanted something that had legs.  Julia spent two years making the product right working with award winning film developers and renown scientists.  She shot everything in HD as she knew the power of video and digital technology was creeping up right around the corner. She also wanted to lower the bar for parents, so that even parents who don't speak the language could help their kids learn Spanish, Mandarin or French.  She reasoned, “you might not be good at math but you are your kid’s first tutor in math” and developed a system where parents could be their child’s language coach, using easy phonetics in the Little Pim method.

Little Pim went to market four years ago.  Parents love the product and they have won 23 awards.   The system is theme-based around playtime, eating and drinking, morning and evening routines, etc.  The system teaches you 360 words and phrases and you need to know 500 to be conversational in a second language.  They developed apps with PBS for ipad and two iphone apps as vocabulary boosters.

Little Pim makes total sense as more people who are third generation are returning to their countries and they want to make sure their kids still speak English or others coming here and want to make sure their kids speak another language.  Many studies have shown the positive effects of studying two languages on the brain and many cognitive advantages for people who are bi-lingual (increased memory, better analytic skills, stves off dementia later in life, etc.).

Julia is an impressive entrepreneur.  She has basically been one her entire life from the moment she started doing freelance reading scripts.  Very impressive woman. She also writes a great blog about what she believes in.  By the way, Julia's kids are 4 and 7.  Do they speak French fluently?  You better believe it. 

She started out in Southern Crown Heights and moved to Coney Island when she was 7.  The oldest of three girls who were raised by parents who immigrated from Haiti.  In Crown Heights they lived in a nice doorman building across the street from the Childrens Museum.  It was the 80s and even at that age she recalls strange gang activity with the boom boxes on the corners and kids breaking into cars in broad daylight.  One particular memory is seeing kids just sitting on other peoples cars refusing to get off.  It happened to her father and he asked them to politely get off this car.  Instead he spent the day in the emergency room after getting hit on the side of the head with a glass bottle. 

Her father was studying to be a doctor in Haiti when his Mom died. His dreams flew out the window as she was a single mother.  He came to the states and like many immigrants ended up in jobs that paid the rent not necessarily challenged his intellect.  He drove a bus for a private Jewish school.  They realized very quickly that he was a smart man and ended up promoting him to run the operations of the school. 

Education always played a big factor in Mathydle's life growing up including community service.  Every week she would either be in a soup kitchen or something in the community to help give back with her family.  Mathylde went to Edward Murrow High School and it was there, one day sitting in the library she had the idea of Urban Neighborhood Services, a multi-service place for the community.  She knew education came first and graduated HS and then began college at NYU at 16. No surprises, she majored in social work.

At NYU, she lived at home.  She worked for the Information Center during her college years including working with a small group that worked with the President of NYU.  She started a chapter of the Council for Unity on campus to promote racial diversity which has grown since she was there.  After graduating NYU, Mathylde was accepted into the Masters of Social Work program at Columbia University.  She literally started the day after graduating NYU.  No doubt driven by education too, after Columbia she applied to the interdisciplinary program at the Harvard Divinity school.  She was accepted and it was the first time she had left the nest of home.

At Harvard, Mathylde spent 50% of her time taking classes in the human psychology department and the other 50% at the divinity school.  After graduating from Harvard with a third masters she was missing her love for giving back to communities as it was part of her daily life growing up.  She was going to apply for a phD program but instead was intrigued by a Haitian minister she was speak in her parents native Creole tongue.  She went to volunteer in his organization and they hired her to be the head of program and development reporting to the Executive Director.  That job kept her in the Boston area for a few more years.  A professor she has met pushed her to go get a phD at Boston University while working for Caribbean Uturn and so she did but found she really did not like the program.  So after 3 more years post Harvard, it was time to return to NYC.

It was 2004 and she applied to get a phD at Columbia University.  She lived on the campus but kept feeling those ties back to her community in Coney Island.  When she went home she recognized many of the persistent problems that she saw as a kid.  Unemployment, the endless cycle of teenage pregnancies, bad accidents, poor academics, etc.  She felt like it was watching a community on a gerbil wheel.  Mathylde had always envisioned an organization that had an economic urban agenda that would help people move from point A to point B.  There are some things that the Government or social services just can't do.  So she might have been getting her phD she but she also began Urban Neighborhood Services.

Coney Island is certainly in the spotlight these days as an area that is being revitalized yet there are many things pushed under the carpet.  Mathylde is hoping to help the things under the carpet become part of the revitalization efforts from new jobs to hiring more of the people in the local community. 

Urban Neighborhood Services has built a platform that focuses on financial literacy, LBGT, summer youth, college bound seniors, etc.  It is all about community.  She touches about 100/200 people a week who come through their office which is about 10,000 a year.   She is even amazed how much she has accomplished on a small amount of capital and a skeletal staff.  She has put a lot of her own money in to this program while at the same time writing her dissertation.  Mathyldes big dream is to get funded by the right group that would be interested in taking this concept to other neighborhoods around the country that need a service like this.

I am so impressed with Mathylde.  She is confident, humble and probably over-educated but her passion is so obvious from the moment you meet her.  A very professional woman.  At Passover this year, we all spoke of organizations that we would like to support.  Someone brought up the desire to give to more community based organizations that are filling in voids of areas of need.  I spoke about Urban Neighborhood Services and what Mathylde had accomplished and after we all voted, Urban Neighborhood Services won a donation from the group. 

I am hoping for Mathylde that her dissertation which is on the mental health needs of the African-American community is soon finished and the desire to get more degrees is finished too.  I'd like to see her focus her energies on her entrepreneurial spirit and the organization she created, Urban Neighborhood Services.  She is definitely someone I will be watching. 

Let's start at the beginning.  Nancy grew up in West Hartford, CT on white bread and American cheese.  A sheltered life.  Her mom stayed home, her father was the local lawyer who also grew up in West Hartford.  Nancy and her father went to the same nursery school and that kind of sums it up.  Nancy kept busy with sports and lots of them.  When she got into Brown for college, she left and life changed.

At Brown Nancy majored in political science which turned into feminist theory.  She lived in Japan one summer in High School and returned for one summer in college too.  Thinking ahead about graduation, Nancy applied to law school and for a Marshall scholarship.  She was awarded the scholarship and embarked to Oxford upon graduation.  Oxford was a serious life changer.  The daily conversations with her peers were thought provoking, challenging and rewarding.  It was an incredible experience on so many different levels. 

Her two years at Oxford came to a close and she returned to NYU where she has been accepted to go to law school.  Her entire life, she thought she would become a lawyer.  After one week of law school she realized that she hated it.  The environment and conversations were 180 degree turn around from her last two years in Oxford.  She couldn't believe that she had thought she was going to be a lawyer her life and then poof, she actually hated it.  She stayed for a year but sometimes things are meant to happen.

February of her first year of law school, her great-Grandfather died.  He had left Nancy $5000.  She wanted to do something with that money to honor his memory.  He was a Polish immigrant who came to the US as a stowaway on a boat.  She had this idea for Dress for Success.  Men get dressed everyday in the same outfit where as for women it isn't so easy.  You have to put the outfit together and present yourself in a certain way.  Maybe schmata was always in her blood...her Mom's family had been in the garment biz. 

While going to school, Nancy began Dress for Success. She shared her idea with a professor who said she should go speak with Sister Mary in Spanish harlem and her group of nuns.  Nancy met with them and they loved the idea and said they would help.  Most of them ran social service programs in the area.  Their advice was to find a rich white guy to sit on the board and put her $5K in a six month CD.  She ignored the rich guy advice and put the nuns on the board but listened to the bad advice about the six month CD and so they business launched on no money because the cash was in the bank.  Nancy met with a pro-bono lawyer who told her to incorporate and she would need to appoint a secretary.  She was at a complete loss, in essence, she felt like a kid who just got off the boat from Poland.

Fast forward, she figured it out.  She began to fax people in the middle of the night because she realized if you faxed in the middle of the night then the fax would be the first thing on their desk the next morning.  She was shameless.  She asked anybody and everybody for money and clothing donations including a dying aunt and the family shunned her for Thanksgiving that year.

Nancy had put the second year of law school on hold once the business started taking off.  She was only making $30k a year which was not easy to make ends meet particularly if you liked shoes.  So every Friday night Nancy would play poker in the underground clubs around the city.  Guilliani closed those shops and instead Nancy would go to Atlantic City every Friday night for a year to supplement her income.  She made about $5-7k a year starting with a $200 ante.  Once she met her husband, she stopped the poker but it taught her alot.  She was mostly the only woman at the table and learning how to bluff, hold her cards tight and play the game was an education.

Over time the business grew and the brand became a household name.  Not only does Dress for Success give clothes to women in need for a job interview they began to do research.  That once women got a job working in an office they would be shunned from their friends on the block.  So Dress for Success created a professional womens group similar to AA where they bring in speakers and create a support system for women including teaching women how to put their clothes together.  That way Dress for Success is not just a one stop pick up for the wardrobe.  Having her office wall but up against an AA group for many years taught her a lot.

Seven years passed and she was bored.  She recruited her successor and moved on.  She has just turned 30 and wanted to do something a little crazy. She knew of an organization call Do Something that Andrew Shue founded.  A great vision with little funding that had just collapsed.  They had $75k in the bank left with $250K in restricted grants that they used but did not comply with where they were supposed to go.  They had 20 offices at one point and now were down to 6.  She decided to take on the challenge and turn the organization around.  This was before Friendster and Facebook.  The first thing she did was put everything on line which was the first step in the right direction.

Do Something is now the largest organization for teens connecting to social change in America.  They empower teens to make a change in their community.  Recently they did a campaign around homeless teens.  They called youth shelters across the country and asked them what is the one thing that most of the teens living in the youth hostels ask for...answer.. blue jeans.  In 3 1/2 weeks the campaign collected and cleaned 1,020,041 pair of jeans and distributed them around the country.  Pretty damn impressive.  One kid every sixty seconds joined the campaign.  They will do 30 campaigns this year.

What is interesting is as they have enrolled and engaged kids through texting and the bi-product has been that kids in crisis have been texting them back.  What did Nancy do?  Set up a new organization that is creating a 911 text hotline for kids which will set up referrals and collect data so they can start to spot trends such as acute bullying.  A wonderful side benefit of Do Something.  This new organization will having their first board meeting this week.

People assume when you start a charity that you are nice, earnest and sweet but Nancy will tell you that she is none of these things.  What she is an incredible entrepreneur and her focus on making a difference is something that has touched countless people.  My gut is if she had taken that $5K from her Grandfather and started a profit business she'd be sitting on a pile of cash and who knows what change she would have made for the world but lucky for many people she didn't take that angle.  Her passion, sharp mind and take no prisoners attitude is one that I am a huge fan of.  Looking forward to see where Crisis Text Line takes her over the next couple of years.  Did I mention that Nancy went back to NYU and convinced them to let her take the rest of her classes at the Stern Business school to get her law degree?  She did and so she might not like the law, she did achieve her childhood dream by getting her law degree. 

Kate grew up in San Francisco going south to UCLA for college.  She majored in sociology, spent a semester abroad in Madrid where she honed her Spanish speaking skills.  When she graduated Kate went directly to law school at Hastings.  After law school, Kate practiced law for more than 12 years.  She started out as a litigator for commerical law and grew into managing litigation for their clients in London.  She said that at one point she got sick of fighting people.  Originally she took a job with a small firm that got acquired by another firm and then got acquired by an even larger firm.  So although she worked in 3 different firms, it was always the same people. 

When I spoke to Kate she didn't seem so enthusiatic about the practice of law.  She said she went to law school because she really never thought she'd be a lawyer for that many years. What she really liked was the academics.  The hobby of law academics became a real job and she wasn't sure she ever loved the practice.

Tal grew up in Southern California and went to college there too.  She comes from a family that puts a huge value on education.  She grew up with the mantra that education was number one, keep close to your family, stay home and be the top of your class.  She achieved all of that.  Her parents are Israeli so she spent every summer in either Israel or NYC and spent one random year in Winchester London at 15 living with her mom and stepdad.    Like Kate, Tal went directly to law school after graduating from college yet after graduating from law school she spent some time traveling on her own through Europe before going to work. 

Tal took a different direction in law than Kate.  She went into child advocacy.  She really enjoyed the legal part but the job definitely had a bend toward social work and the life decisions weighed heavily on her after awhile.  She got really good at going to trial and that was her favorite thing.  She knew how to win for the kids which was extremely gratifying.

Tal had this idea a few years back after reading about the dangers of drinking water out of plastic bottles.  She didn't want to drink out of metal container because it tasted like a canteen.  What kind of product could be healthy and clean?  We are shipping water in plastic bottles that take over a hundred years to decompress.  It makes no sense.  She had gone to law school with Kate's husband and asked his advice on her idea.  She thought to herself, I have this idea but how do I start?  She started by doing research on the water bottle industry.

Slowly she started putting one foot in front of the other.  For two years she worked as lawyer during the day and as an entrepreneur on nights and weekends.  She put together a power point and hired a young designer with her own money to create her product.  The designer built some 3D models.  Tal had a friend who had sold his company to Microsoft and asked him to be an advisor.  He said yes and put her in touch with some people. 

Once she had finally created the beaker for the water bottle and realized she needed a partner.  She sent an email to her closest friends and said she was looking for someone to do this with her...was anyone game?  She had dinner with Kate and Tau was surprised when Kate mentioned the email saying that she was seriously thinking about coming on board.  After lots of conversation, Kate pulled the plug and jumped on board.

Once the two of them came together, things ramped up.  They started to plan for launch and distribution.  All they had was a photo of their product on an iphone.  Launching a consumer product business is very different than launching a web company.  They found four great engineers who were connected to manufacturers in China.  They trusted their gut and went for it. 

The first product they lived with but wasn't exactly what they wanted and they began to tweak it as they used it.  They wanted something simple, purposeful, timeless with no bells and whistles.  They also had to built a website. 

Both Tal and Kate went to Los Angeles and literally walked the streets trying to think about who would want to buy the bottle.  They branded it as an accessory besides being inspired by wellness and sustainability they wanted the bottles to be sold in the right locations to start so that the brand would build in that direction that they wanted.  They looked at museums, design shops and hip boutiques to get inspiration. 

Their first order was from Turpan.  They did a silent happy dance when they got the order over the phone.  Tal had done a lot of research on how to sell to Turpan and it paid off.  Then they did a trunk show for Henri Bendel and the smaller stores started pouring in.  Having those two stores confirm that they myBkr was a good product is the reason all the other stores poured in.  It is a herd mentality.  When a larger retailer confirms the product it makes it easier for the smaller companies to buy in.  Taking a leap of faith into a new category is not easy for many.

They launched the website which was a success as they used a special VIP code.  You could give 5 other people your special code and they too could buy a bottle.  That was key and the orders starting rushing in. 

It has been a year that they have been in business.  Their product is seen as a fashion product and they definitely plan on adding more products to their line.  They want to be the Apple of environmental iconic products that people use to consume.  It is impressive how two lawyers went about figuring out how to build a brand around a lone water bottle.  The two of them are focused and head over heels that they have their own life, their own business and have never been happier in their work life.  Their story is inspiring and guarantee there are more women out there who have the same story...after 12 years in a more traditional job jumped ship to start their own thing.  i LOVE it.  

Payal has great energy.  She is smart as a whip and beautiful to boot.  She basically has the whole package.  Payal grew up in Randolph, NJ.  Her parents both ran away together from India to the US so they could get married.  They are both chemists so it isn't surprising that Payal went to MIT for her undergraduate degree.  She has always been a math/science junky being the first girl to win the math/psychics award in her high school. 

At MIT she was one of the only two people of her year to major in operations research.  For the management end of this degree she learned about marketing finance, operations and supply chain management.  The engineering part was about theory and optimization.  She built an application on how radiation beams should be positioned to fight cancer.  Looking at curves and how they work is heavily math oriented and certainly you need to be a rigorous thinker. 

After graduating Payal went to work for Baine capital as a general consultant.  Her first summer she worked at JPMorgan.  Her sophomore summer she worked in investment banking doing financial models and although she appreciates it knew that was not something she had any interest in doing.  Her junior summer she spent at the Monitor Group.  I liked how she took each summer to learn different parts of the finance world so it makes sense that Payal ended up at Baine. 

Through our her entire life she has been a dancer.  Her love is Indian dance which she has been doing she was three.  Even at MIT she created MIT Chamak, a dance group at the school  She believes that dance and her dance teacher taught her discipline which is one of the main key components to her drive.  While working at Baine she was also dancing with a Bollywood dance group when she had time.  It was truly her passion. 

She had been at Baine for three years and thought about going to business school but instead took a different path and got a job at Warner Music Group.  It was an interesting time as companies like Spotify were getting into the market and negotiating with musics companies on how artists were going to benefit from these new channels. 

At the same time, Payal decided to start the Sa Dance company after office hours.  She put together the top ten dancers she knew and she would work from 9-6 and then dance every night while growing that business.  She knew how to build a business and eventually the Sa Dance company performed at Alvin Ailey to a sold out crowd.  She was bringing Indian dance to the stage.  To her, the dance company was like geometry, it was a problem to be fixed. 

Payal knew that although she was burning the candles at both ends she did not want to let Sa Dance be her career.  She was entrepreneurial and began to think about what she wanted to do next.  She took a trip to San Francisco in the summer of 2010 trying to get a feel for what the entrepreneurial world was all about meeting founders and alike.  While she was out there she tried to find a dance class on line and couldn't.  It was then that the idea for Classtivity was formed.

Payal went back to NY and continued to work for Warner Music until she was ready to be an entrepreneur full time.  Classtivity is about leisure classes.  She knows that the first thing that they have to do is solve the problem of getting the classes filled with the best teachers for the vendor.  There are over 15000 classes in NYC alone every month so to begin building a comprehensive directory in NYC is the first challenge.  Just like math, this is a problem that needs a solution.  It is similar to the data mining work she did at MIT.

I love the idea.  What I am really excited about is that Payal was one of the handful of companies accepted into the spring program at NYC Techstars.  I hope to mentor them through the process. Taking a variety of small businesses and helping them connect with more clients, understand their data and grow intelligently is not only providing a service to the vendors it is a providing a service to class takers.  A match made in the cloud. 

Kathyrn Finney certainly had other plans in mind when she embarked upon her career but she couldn't be happier in the spot she is in today.  Growing up in Minneapolis in a very safe middle class community and she will tell you that she was not the only black person there.  Minneapolis is a melting pot of major headquarters from General Mills, Target, 3M and more.  Her father was an engineer at Microsoft so she grew up with a computer her house.

Her education is interesting.  In Minneapolis, at that time, if you got accepted into a university while you were still in college, the state would pay in full for you to go.  Kathryn was accepted into St. Thomas for her junior year in high school to be a freshman so she embarked on her college education at a young age and the state of Minnesota paid for it.  She then got a full ride to Rutgers to finish off her junior and senior year of college.  It was a good transition.  Rutgers accepted all her credits from St. Thomas and she got involved with student politics and played rugby.  This program was called the post secondary option that was funded by an investment that the state had in the Oregon Trail.  The Oregon Trail is a video game to teach children about the 19th century pioneers on the Oregon Trail.  It became incredibly popular and was state funded thus giving back the revenues to the education system.  Brilliant. 

Kathryn got a fellowship to go to University of Ghana while at Rutgers and off she went.  Her family was originally from Ghana and had this desire to see what it was all about.  She believed that she was always going to work in in the International World even taking Japanese from seventh grade through graduation.  In Ghana she worked with the group that was involved with Women in the Center of Politics where she got learned about nutrition around breast feeding. 

While she was in Ghana Kathryn got seriously sick to the point where she thought that she might have to be med-vacked home.  She had malaria.  She eventually got better but it was scary and decided although she had a love for politics that she would point her career in the direction of medical school.  She came back and graduated from Rutgers and got accepted into Yale for graduate school.  She majored in International Epidemiology which is the study of how diseases affect populations.  She wrote her thesis on violence, virtues and viruses, the impact of violence against women and HIV in Southern Durban.  Making her way back Africa this time where her political desires merged into her new medical outlook.

After Yale ended Kathryn was offered a fellowship to work with International Planned Parenthood in Ghana.  Perfect.  It was a time when family planning agencies were going through a paradigm shift from birthing centers to the development of young women.  She was supposed to stay in this job for two years but her father became really sick.  She returned to Minneapolis to become a care giver for her father for a few months.  He father told her that she needed to move on with her life and not take care of him.  She didn't want to go back to Ghana because it was too far so she ended up in Philadelphia taking classes around medicine while thinking about applying to medical school. 

Instead of medical school Kathryn took a job with the International Center for Epidemiology and Public Health that was working with UPenn and Thomas Jefferson University.  The job was about gathering data and statistics with doctors around the world.  She traveled frequently travelled internationally.  1/2 weeks at home and then 2/3 weeks abroad.  Not a great way to have a life.  Surprisingly enough at that time she met her future husband and then her father passed away.  All of these changes made her take a step back to reassess what she really wanted to do.

She got married and found herself in serious debt.  She had taken so many loans out for school and had just jacked up her credit cards.  She had truly got herself into a mess.  It was 2003 and her husband suggested she write a blog about the things that happened to you....because you have a lot to say.  So she did.  Thinking back on it she was probably depressed.  Tons of debt, living in a city she didn't love while most of her friends were in NYC, her father just passed away and she felt lost. 

She began writing about going to sample sales, being in debt and trying to stay on a budget. She started to feel like she was getting her life together.  Someone from the Associated Press contacted Kathryn and wanted to know if they could do a piece on her blog.  The article would be about her and how she traveled to sample sales.  The article was published in January 2004.  She had no idea what would happen in the post of that article.  Traffic took off and someone contacted her about writing a book on how to be a Budget Fashionista.  The book came out in 2006 and is now in its 11th printing. 

It was challenging doing a book when publishers were clueless about the blogisphere.  But the book took off and so did her site with about 450,000 uniques a month.  She has created an entrepreneurial business through her blog with revenues from partnerships and advertising.  There are four people that work for her.  Kathryn has an amazing attitude and is full of energy.  It has been quite an interesting ride.  She and her husband moved to NYC where she has worked growing the company so it can be independent of her.  As Kathyrn says, the blog and career kind of came out of nowhere.  Is she sorry that she didn't go into politics or medicine, not one bit.  All of those experiences are part of the dots that she has connected.  Those experiences helped her get to where she is now, the rocking Budget Fashionista who finds herself being an author, TV personality and blogger.  She has also given back by creating the Robert Finney Foundation after her father that provides scholarships to African American High School and College studnets pursuing studies in tech fields.  You gotta love it.   

Pooja was born in India but went to Nova Scotia Canada between the ages 2-8 and then to Cleveland Heights Ohio between the ages of 8 - 11 because her father was getting his post-graduate degrees.  The family returned to Patna India when Pooja was 11.  Talk about culture shock. Boys and girls were not even allowed to talk to one another there.  Patna is one of the poorest areas in India with not only plenty of crime and poverty but very traditional and orthodox in its ways.  Her father was the first of his family to ever leave India and because of why he went he placed a huge value on education.  Her parents pushed both her and her brother to succeed at the highest level in school. 

Pooja went to an all girls school in India.  She saw many girls in her school leave in 9th grade and earlier to get married and never return.  Her parents did not want to her to be married at that age but to finish her education first.  She studied hard and got into IIT, Indian Institue of Technology.  Only 1% of the applicants get in.  It was a tremendous challenge for her because in Punta where she was not allowed to talk to the boys about her studies.  So the boys would study together and she would have to study by herself.  Few girls if any go to IIT.  It was like being in her own echo chamber.  She passed the test and found herself as a freshman at IIT with 400 boys and 20 girls.  Her major had 50 boys and 3 girls.  She figured after the challenge of learning to take the test to get into IIT by herself and being in a school with so few women that anything could be possible.

In college, boys were allowed to talk to the girls and the girls were allowed to talk to the boys but because they hadn't for so many years they never learned how to.  It was awkward for everyone.  After finishing her undergraduate work at IIT she went to the University of Maryland to get her graduate degree in computer science.  Her father was very concerned that she should not wait any longer to get married and found her a suitor the first semester of her graduate work.  She had only met this guy once.  He was living in SF working as an engineer.  The plan was after they got married she would go out to SF whenever she could and eventually move to SF.

Pooja realized very quickly that this relationship was not a good one but she did not want to give up because the stigma of divorce would be so great to her family.  His idea of a good marriage is that she would have no opinions, no thoughts, no ideas, nothing.  She gave it 3 1/2 years.  She lost 30 lbs over the stress, her body was breaking down because she was so unhappy.  Her parents supported her decision to finally divorce him.

At this point Pooja was living in SF too and working as an engineer at Oracle.  She left Oracle when she got divorced and went to work in a start-up of 20 people.  It was thrilling.  She learned a lot and then went over to Facebook to work as an engineer.  She wasn't there a year and she got into Stanford Business School.  She would lose all her Facebook shares is she went to Stanford because she hadn't been there long enough to vest but decided that it was the right move. 

In an entrepreneur class at Stanford, she became so intrigued by everyones individual business ideas.  Pooja really wanted to create a support group for women who were computer scientist majors.  She realized if she broke it down starting her own company was not such a big deal.  That idea evolved into how can she build something that would help students get through school easier.  What kind of support would they need.  She took baby steps by learning ruby on rails and building her own website called Piazza.  It has now been up three years and and they are helping over 100,000 people how to study better with their peers.

Piazza was launched in 2009.  There are now 9 employees and she just closed her series A round after a few rounds of angel investors.  An idea that started in her brothers garage during her two years at Stanford is not a full fledged business.  

On the personal side, two separate people told Pooja that she should meet this guy who grew up as a first generation American from an Indian family that had moved here.  She finally did and they became fast friends.  He is also in the start-up world.  They have been married now almost one year.  He is her mentor and her best friend.  Her parents still live in India and it has become much easier on them since she got married.

What is interesting is that her parents grew up in a very conservative part of India and raised their children there too.  It was her fathers desire to have his children educated before getting married that in essence changed everything.  They raised thinkers and children that challenge the norm.  Pooja is a cindrella story.  She left a life that she was supposed to live and found one that not only gave her the ability to pursue her dreams to transform the way people teach at the highest level possible and she also found someone who she could happily spend her life with. 

We met again in a month.  I asked if there was still an opportunity to invest in the first round because if I was going to be involved in Catchafire and be her mentor, I needed some skin in the game.  She had not completely closed out the first round which happens often because as the companies start ramping up the amount of time spent raising money gets overwhelming and many raise enough of the first round and just take a breather before returning to call it a day.  I was thrilled to become an investor in Catchafire so it worked out for both of us which makes for a good relationship.

Rachael was born in the Cambra area of Australia and lived there until she was 8.  The family owned high end restaurants that were descimated in the market crash of the early 90's in Asia.  Her Mom decided to take a job in the foreign services moving up to be the highest ranking diplomat who is Chinese from Australia.  Impressive considering that there is certainly plenty of racism as well as chauvinism so being a top woman Australian Chinese diplomat gave Rachael a good role model to learn from. They moved to to China right after the Tianman Square event starting in Beijing then to Gangzhou and back to Beijing. They lived behind International walls.  One hundred students in Rachaels graduating class that represented sixty nations.  She had no concept of race relations, a third culture kid.

Rachael moved to NYC to go to Barnard for college.  She convinced Barnard to let her study abroad for one semester of her freshman year.  That meant going to live in Biosphere where she lived in the middle of the Arizona desert with fifty kids from all over the nation.  They studied earth and stars watching the planets rise and set from their handy NASA telescope. Biosphere was an enclosed ecological system that studied life systems which was a pretty radical project.

That summer she spent working for Shell thinking that she would change the world from within that organization.  Not so easy.  Sophomore summer she spent doing credit derivative sales and trading at Goldman Sachs.  Junior summer she moved to UBS to do sales and trading to investment banking and they offered her a full time job after graduation.  A complete change from Biosphere.  Rachael grew up in an idealistic world not knowing that the world is not a utopia.  So coming to NYC and getting into a tough business and working 80 hours a week was eye opening.  She knew that her real goal was to use the markets to create social change so being inside a bank was the perfect track to learn.

Rachael wanted to use her skills as an investor as a volunteer but the only thing that was available was a day of building homes.  It made no sense to her.  Why isn't there a platform for this?  She quit banking when the thoughts about Catchafire began to seed and took a job in micro-financing.  It was poverty alleviation that she was passionate about and took her banking skills to work on that.  She had put away some money and wanted to work at Finca International.  They didn't have anything for her so she took a six month pro-bono job in their DC office which opened up opportunities for her while she applied for graduate school. 

She got into Duke for graduate school in public policy.  Before going to Duke she took off for six months and went to Central America traveling through Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama etc chilling and surfing.  After her first year at Duke, Rachael landed an internship with Brac which turned into a job.  Brac is the largest non-profit in the world serving over 140 million people worldwide.  They asked Rachael to work with another woman, Susan Davis, to create a foundation and raise capital for their African expansion in 2006 in the USA.  A great opportunity so she put off finishing her second year of graduate school.

It was this expansion that the real roots for Catchafire took hold.  In order for them to grow quickly in the US, Rachael reeled in her personal friends to do pro bono work for the cause.  She got each person to do small projects over the course of nine months so she and Susan could focus on raising the funds.  After nine months they had raised $40 million and the foundation was set.  She realized how empowering pro bono is and the capacity it has for non-profits.  Without those friends doing the small pro-bono projects they would have never been able to have this kind of success.

Rachael returned to Duke to convince her professor to let her write her thesis on Catchafire.  Her argument was that Wendy Kopp did the same thing and now we have Teach for America.  Can't argue with that.  She spent an entire year focusing on the space and opportunity before graduating in 2009.

Rachael returned to NYC and started Catchafire.  I love the tagline, Give What You Are Good At.  The organization has provided almost $6 million in services for non-profits.  The company is on their second round of financing.  Non-profits and social enterprises are paying Catchafire for access to a data base of professionals.  We help them craft their projects to insure success.  All the companies that have worked with us so far have been delighted with the pro-bono work that has taken place.  It is  a win win for everyone.  Catchafire continues to grow as we have rolled out to Boston and more cities are around the corner. 

I love the model.  A profit company that does social good and in turn that helps both sides of the coin. Rachael's story is inspiring.  She is a smart saavy entrepreneur who has shown to be capable of not only scaling a business but managing a growing organization.  I wouldn't be surprised to see Catchafire become a household name just like Teach for America.  Just watch. 

Every year our kids school has an event called Love Makes A Family.  What I love about this annual event is that kids from each grade (K-12) put up pictures of their family all over the school.  It is an exhibit.  So what does a family mean?  Gay families, inter-racial families, single parent families, divorced families, re-married families with new step-siblings...a family is a group of parents and children living in household...end of story.  Karin is trying to create a place where families in the 21st century, no matter who they are, can have a community around a topic, fertility, that is not discussed so openly in many places around the globe.  I bet everyone reading this piece knows at least one person who has used medical technology to get pregnant or have children.

Karin grew up in Marin County in a family of first generation Germans.  Both her Mom and Grandma made there way through Canada to get here.  Her Mom had her own law firm and practiced International insurance.  Great role model.  Karin graduated high school where she had won a few journalism awards.  Her teacher told her that she needed to go a good liberal arts school to be a great journalist and it should be Smith.  Smith it was. 

Her junior year abroad she spent in Germany.  Karin spoke the language fluently and wanted to spend some time in a place that was in essence her roots.  While she was there a hipster teacher told her to check out the film house.  She walked in and met a film maker and became his PA (production assistant). She was totally bit by the bug. 

Karin went back to Smith for her senior year focusing on a documentary thesis.  She always loved telling stories through journalism so this was just a different outlet.  After graduation she went to work for Bill Jersey, a documentary film maker for two years.  He had gone to USC and gave Karin the advice that she should go there too.  So she did. 

At USC she found a lot of trust fund kids who had deep pockets to make their films.  She really wanted to make the most of her time at USC as it s was a huge financial drain to be there for two years.  Karin made a short film while she was there called SEED.  It was about homeless teens living on the streets of Hollywood Boulevard.  Karin spent a lot of time living on the streets with them to get their story.  She first created a fictional thesis to document what the story would be about before going out to get funding.  Robert Zemeckis was her professor at USC and she asked him if she could put his name down as the executive producer.  He said yes and with that she was able to get everything donated.  She was seriously scrappy and probably in a little bit above her head yet her ambitious nature pulled it off.  Karin was even able to get Rose McGowan to play the lead.  The film was a success playing at Sundance going on to win awards at the Austin Film Festival and Palm Springs International Festival.

Afterward Karin pounded the pavement with scripts.  Although the conversations were interesting she needed to make some money just to pay the rent.  She found herself taking a job in TV doing shows, series and documentaries.  Then Oxygen came into her life as they were looking for some producers.  She took a job doing their daily news magazine in Los Angeles.  At that point the hot word was convergence.  It was a great gig and she met a lot of wonderful people and after four years the show was cancelled.

While at Oxygen she had met Michael Rosenblum, a self-proscribed video journalist guru and he said come join me and we are going to do something with the BBC.  It was so old school there.  They weren't even creating their own content so over the next four years they helped 250 journalists learn how to create, tape and edit their own content.  Karin continued to come back and forth to the states.  She still wanted to make another documentary and found herself co-producing and being the cinematographer for City of Borders, a documentary about the underground gay community between Israel and Palestine.  The film focuses on the one gay bar in Jerusalem which is an oasis for many in that area of the world and the community that goes there.  The film went on to play at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009.  Again, telling stories. 

Karin is now entering her thirties and wondering to herself, how about my life?  She took a full time job at the BBC and met a really nice guy.  Three lost pregnancies later that relationship ends.  She is 37 years old and wants to be a mother.  Not so easy being a single woman particularly in England where they do not even have a program around anonymous sperm donors.  She starts to think about who would her sperm donor be?  She finds herself traveling to Denmark to try and get pregnant.  17 attempts and 3 failed pregnancies later they basically tell Karin enough.  The whole experience felt like medical tourism meets fertility treatment.  She had given that attempt three years of her life.  She asked about egg donation but that wasn't something they did.  She thought about adoption but the chances were so slim.  She felt incredibly dis-empowered and wanted to take control of her life.  So she did.

Karin knew one thing when this was all over she wanted to create a community towards the pursuit of building a family.  She returned to London and started to take care of herself.  She began doing meditation, reading nutrition books, sleeping more, doing accupunture and creating a better balance in her life.  She met a friend who said he was game to help her have a kid.  One try and she got pregnant.  A friend for life.  Karin is now a single mother of a ten month old son.  See..a happy ending.

She went on maternity leave at the BBC, took a trip to San Francisco and applied to Astia with the idea of Fertility Planit.  She was accepted to the program and moved her life back to the states with her son in tow.  At Astia she really learned about how to grow a start-up business.  It was Los Angeles where she had so many connections and it was there she could start to raise some money and put together an incredible advisory group.  The vision is not only about the obvious, getting pregnant but it is also about complimentary medicine, mind body spirit work, positive reflex and what it takes to create a non-traditional family in the 21st century.  There are more adults living alone now more than ever.  What is indisputable is that the way we create families and move into adulthood has changed dramatically over the past fifty years.  Fertility Planit wants to be around those conversations.  It is the stories that lend itself to this space. 

I really think Karin is on to something here and Los Angeles is the perfect place to begin.  She had connections there and if you think that people having babies at 40 are not using fertility treatment, think again.  Perhaps a reality show around the trials and tributions of fertility is in her future...

Nestio makes it easier to find an apartment.  Simple to use, efficient and organized.  Timing in life is big as people have attempted to do this before but based on their traction and the other opportunities out there, the timing appears to be right on. 

Caren grew up in Monmouth County, NJ.  No surprises, her father was an entrepreneur.  He has a business in management waste, recycling.  Caren is the oldest of three kids.  After graduating from high school she jumped across the river and went to college at NYU.  She was accepted into the Gallatin School of NYU where you get to really plan your own curriculum, aka an entrepreneurial education.  Caren took full advantage.  She always knew she wanted to own her own business so she took as many courses as she could that would help her lay the foundation for her own biz.   Although she was writing pitch decks at 18, her parents said, graduate from college first and then we can talk.

She had majored in brand building and publishing and after graduating college decided to take a job at Nike doing corporate sales and marketing thinking about understanding brand building and wanting to learn more before going out on her own.  After a year she left.  Wasn't what she wanted to do.  Next stop was into publishing at the Wall Street Journal in sales.  Her father said, and I totally agree with him, learning sales is key as it will help you in a variety of other ways as you grow your own business.  She was selling to large financial companies such as Barclays, Morgan Stanely and the NY Stock Exchange.  She continued to get promoted up the ladder eventually doing sales in luxury tech in Latin America and Europe but she kept thinking that she had to start her own business.

Personally she kept moving a lot.  She was frustrated by the real estate market as we all are.  There had to be a better way.  She had met Matt, one of her partners about four years back and over the years they kept talking about businesses that they could build together.  Caren finally figured out what she thought she wanted to build which was a company originally called Urban Apartment and asked Matt if he wanted to join.  He had worked building brands such as Red Bull, Nike, Esquire and Lexus.  He said yes and introduced Caren to Matt who was the tech guy who worked with him doing the back end.  Perfect partners, a back end tech person, a front end product person and Caren the biz person.

In the summer of 2010 they closed all their legal documents with no funding and began to build out the company.  They decided to apply to Techstars and got in.  The first day they looked around and thought to themselves, boy are we lucky we got in to this.  Your game improves, your ideas improve, your businesses improve when you spend every day for 3 months with other smart entrepreneurs...doesn't hurt to have the tech community checking in on you every day either.

Their tech is clean and simple.  Caren is sharp as a tack and I love her team.  She was named one of the 15 women to watch in tech from Inc magazine.  The needs of real estate are scattered and Nest.io is moving them to one simple place.  An old school business that finally woke up and is taking the real world online.  There is tons of data there to be used but that is part of the evoling story....and btw, I am investor.

Her business is called LIttle Borrowed Dress.  It is a simple.  You rent a dress instead of buying a dress for a wedding that you are going to.  It really works for the bridesmaid dresses.  Most weddings are done around color.  A bride wants all her bridesmaids to wear lavender.  Corie has dresses that are simple and basically look good on anyone who is size 2 or size 18.  The 100% silk fabric drapes just right and you can rent the dress and return it and never have to see it in your closet again because let's be honest....you don't want to.  

From a business angle, these dresses actually can be rented out again and again and Corie has done that.  What is also interesting is that she has provided the dresses for weddings that are trying to do it on a shoe string budget and others that have no expense to spare.  The start-up is the tough part because the majority of people spend eighteen months preparing for a wedding making a long sales cycle.  Corie has a list of 600 people waiting to pull the trigger on their time line.  What she has also learned is that people want to try these dresses on.  So perhaps a type of Avon model makes sense down the road instead of shipping dresses back and forth around the country...but that is all about the evolution of the business. 

Corie grew up in an entrepreneurial household in Olympia Washington.  Her Mom was a computer programmer and her Dad was an engineer.  Between the two of them they boot strapped a company in their living room while their daughters watched them make it worth after ten years of sweat and equity to build it and five years to get to profitability.  They built a product design company that built software for moving liquids.  Perfect back end product for a commercial business.  Being entrepreneurs made an impact on all the girls.

Corie graduated from high school and went to the University of Washington but realized she would possibly stay in Seattle so she transferred to University of Arizona for a totally different experience.  After graduating she moved to NYC to go work for Deloitte in their operation consulting division. 

She thought she should go to graduate school.  Ended up in London at business school and after one year decided it wasn't for her.  She returned home and came up with the idea of Little Borrowed Dress returning to NYC to launch.  

Corie has even enlisted her parents to help her out.  Got her Dad to put on a tuxedo at a wedding trade show in Seattle. BTW, it worked.

If you are engaged and working on the wedding.  Check out Cories pop-up shop in Soho starting February 19th, by appointment only.  Trust me, the dresses are great and your bridesmaids will love them.

Fatma grew up in Southern Turkey.  She had only been to the US once before going to summer camp in middle school so coming to the US for college was a bit of a culture shock.  She went to Grinnell College in Iowa where the town has a population of under 10,000.  She had no idea what small town meant as to her Cambridge, MA is a small town.  She loved the school so she stuck it is out majoring in econonics and spending her summers home in Turkey.  Fatma took her junior year abroad at the London School of Economics in a year long program which included the summer months.  It was a nice balance between the small town of Grinnell and the cosmopolitan city of London. 

After graduating college Fatma took a job in Chicago working for an economic consulting group.  She stayed for a year and returned to Turkey.  The company she worked for in Turkey was located in Istanbul and they did freight forwarding.  Her job was about international logistics, in essence an import/export company.  She knew that she wanted to go to graduate school and got into MIT for their two year MBA program. 

It was at MIT where she met her co-founder Eugene Gorelik at the Web 3.0 class.  He is a computer scientist from Latvia who moved to the US at 17 working in a few start-ups as a developer and is now finishing his masters in system design at MIT. 

Fatma admits that the idea came in to her head at the beginning of her second semester at MIT as she spent a lot of time on the web shopping for new products.  She started a blog about discovering new products but found it frustrating to find the latest and greatest products that were not mass produced.  She had to really dig down to find cool geeky products that nobody knew about.  It was her network of friends who helped her find the best new gadgets.  She launched Curisma with the concept of a way to discover cool stuff through other people.  Crowd sourcing new technology products.  You can follow people and users will have access to data and tools.  A very targeting marketing platform. 

Within 3 months of releasing the beta they have over 15000 users.  They launched in October 2011.  Get on Curisma and give it a try.  I love that Fatma went from Turkey to Grinnell to London and Cambridge after just two years in the working world to pursue her own ideas as an entrepreneur. 

Susan started her life in Chicago moving to a suburb of Michigan when she was ten.  She admits that she was a wild child growing up with access to Detroit where she would go to small clubs and see the early musicians of the Motown explosion.  Her passion was fashion.  At 16, Susan worked her way in to Affiliated Models in Detroit never telling them her real age.  She started doing fashion shows for them all over the area and was spotted by Hudson's, a retail store in Detroit, to come and work as their fashion coordinator.  She worked for an amazing woman who was from NYC.  After working there four years, her boss literally made her apply to FIT.  She told Susan, you have to go to NYC and you have to go to FIT...and so she did. 

At FIT, at least then, they give you credit for all the work you have done in your career so in essence she could get a degree without even taking a class because she had so much work experience.  It was became of all that experience that she was still driven by working so she took classes in the evening and worked during the day.  She worked for a company called Rosewood Fabrics.  The best thing that came out of that was she met her husband there.

After graduating, Hudsons begged her to come back.  Her boss wouldn't let her.  She said if you go back to Detroit you will never leave.  Instead Susan goes on an interview on the 42nd floor of the Empire State Building.  She walks in to the room and there is a very large man with a cast up to his hip, sitting at his desk doing card tricks.  She notices that there is a huge hole in the window of the room.  They have a wonderful meeting and he hires Susan on the spot to start on Monday as the supposed assistant designer.  She arrives on Monday to find out that she is the designer.  The designer had been having an affair with the owner and they had gone skiing where he fell down and had this accident, they have a huge fight and she had thrown his crutches and other related shit out the window before Susan got to the interview.  Welcome to the world of shmata. 

Susan stayed there for seven years eventually running the business.  After that she left going into a partnership with two other people to build a bit of a better business than she was in before.  Selling to places like Victoria Secret, Spiegel Catalog and the Limited doing private label.  Things began to go sour in the end for a variety of reasons and those golden handcuffs started to come off.  It was time to leave again.

Another company had been courting Susan and she decided to go work with them.  She ran a division for them for 5 years before they sold out to a publicly traded company.  She was part of the partnership and did not want to sell but everyone else did.  After a year they ran the business into the wall and a year later the publicly traded company went belly up too. Next.

VP of Design for Coldwater Creek.  A great experience running the design team and opening up their brick and mortar businesses from 2004-2007.  Then it was just time to pack it in. 

Susan had spent her career traveling the globe.  Sourcing from Russia, China, India, Turkey and other areas depending on what project.  She would meet these amazing artisans who had no idea how to monetize their businesses.  The world was becoming more homogeneous and she wanted to figure out how to change that.  It was if design was being flat-lined. Her friend who was a photographer was seeing the same thing so they decided to create a coffee table book that would sell the wares of artisans around the world.  It was through this project that she started to think about what she wanted to do next. 

Susan found herself at a party talking to Edie Weiner, a futurist on technology and design, and she loved the concept.  She told Susan that she would be on her advisory board and she had to get other amazing people to get involved  The original idea was a semi-annual coffee table book that was a compilation of photographers, writers and artists.  The concept was that this book would be like going on a journey somewhere.  If you went to India what would you want to see, buy, and read. 

It was late 2008 when they started to talk to people about their business plan and the world imploded.  People were no longer writing checks they wanted to see something built first.  The book was first, the website would be second and the partnerships between retailers would be third.  They took 30 artisans and launched the site in December 2010 very quietly.  They did a small friends and family round showing the product at small events for UJA and the Berkshire Theater Festival. They had great feedback.

Now they are up to 52 artisans in 15 countries.  The platform gives artisans the ability to sell their products globally.  Most of these products are geared towarded a high end market with prices starting at $200 up to thousands of dollars.  Susan is also helping mentor the artists.  She wants to see their worked placed in the right hands including hotels and a like. 

I really like what she has created because RareCulture is something that Susan is passionate about and passion is a big part about being a successful entrepreneur.  She has a great eye for design.  I agree with her that at one point the world starting to become homogeneous.  We are seeing that change through places like MouthFoods and Etsy.  People want to buy things are that are not mass produced and connect with who they are.  Susan has created something special.  Check out RareCulture.  Overtime I expect to see the site grow into an incredible rare global market place. 

Amanda grew up in rural Vermont, really rural Vermont.  She was always interested in media growing up and figured out how to get an internship at a local radio station at the young age of 14 creating a yard sale roundup.  She would go on the radio to tell people about the sellers of tractors and live stock to match up with the buyers of their wares. In many ways with her latest company The Talk Market she has returned to her original roots.  Also during high school Amanda campaigned for Bernie Sanders and spent a summer in his congressional offices.  So it made sense that she left Vermont to attend the foreign service school at Georgetown University.  In her junior year she was awarded a Truman Scholar as she believed she was commited to a career in government or something in public service.  She started out with that idea.

Amanda interned in the media affairs department of the White House in college one summer.  She spent  her junior year abroad in Venezuela and Spain taking courses in economics during the time that Chavez was trying to get elected.  An interesting time to be there.  She had also spent a summer in NYC interning at Merrill Lynch.  After graduating from Georgetown she went directly to NYC taking a job with Merrill Lynch as she decided finance was more up her alley than Government. 

At Merrill Lynch where she began in mergers and acquisitions and ended up moving into the private equity division.  She then left Merrill to work at Falcoln Head where she began analyzing commerce for their companies who were interested in expanding to online shopping distribution channels.  While she was there she hired Matt Singer to do some freelance work for her, he happened to be married to her best friend.  Matt had been selling products at QVC in the hundreds of thousands and understood the power of online commerce. 

Then Amanda decided that as interesting as this was that she wanted to go to business school because she wanted to do something entrepreneurial.  She attended Harvard Business School and graduated there in 2006.  For her, what she learned there was invaluable.  HBS was a place where you had to defend your ideas by discussing them daily.  It wasn't something she was comfortable doing.  It forced her to speak comfortably about her views by putting her on the stand every day for two years. Amanda was given a Baker Scholar award when graduating which is given to the top 5% of the graduating class of HBS.  Impressive. 

After graduation she became one of the founding partners of Capital Acquisition.  She worked on SPACS where you take a publically traded shell and convert it into another company through an acquisition.  She led a $260 million offering by putting a team of people who were investing in mortgages together as a public vehicle.  It was very successful and Citigroup underwrote the whole thing. 

Amanda continued to talk with Matt as he is married to her best friend.  They decided it was time to start a company and so they launched The Talk Market, aka Videolicious  They understood the power of company likes QVC and HSN yet there wasn't a way to create huge volumes of video for retailers.  On a side note, years ago I sold to HSN and QVC.  It was at the very beginnings when HSN, located in Clearwater, Florida just launched.  The guy behind it literally sold some type of gadget out of the back of his car after announcing it on an ad on the local radio.  Tons of people showed up to the parking lot where he was stationed and he sold out of every item and the idea for HSN was born.  It was an incredible place.  We'd get these huge orders and they would put it on the show and the items would sell out in minutes. Back to the story. 

Their idea was that they wanted to create turn key solutions in video for retailers, large and small.  They started out with 300 small retailers to understand the market and flush out what they had built.  They realized they were on to something when they started cold calling large companies and they were ushered in the door immediately.  These videos are created by each individual company and they tailor each of the products to the needs of their client.  Recently they just launched their first mobile app with Martha Stewart and Conde Nast.  Their product was working with the Fortune 500 companies that allowed them to quickly scale.  They have made over ten and thousands of online video to date.

The real market that is of interest in helping everyone else in ecommerce be able to make video, aka the smaller companies.  They have been scrappy, smart and lean.  There was eight employees to date in the company.  I love what Amanda is doing.  To me, this is just touching the surface of what video is going to be able to do online in the years to come.   Hence, that is why I am thrilled to be an investor in Videolicious. 

Lynn grew up in San Diego with two parents that were entrepreneurs.  Her Father is a real estate developer and her Mom is a child psychologist who built a line of stress management tools for adults.  Lynn moved north to go to Stanford for college.  She majored in urban studies.  In her junior year she took off for a program in Florence, Italy.  She lived in Florence the summer before school learning Italian so she was able to take courses at the Stanford campus and the University of Florence where the classes were in Italian.  The University of Florence was on strike half the time she was there and she ended up connecting with a group of women who were on the soccer team.  She had played field hockey and soccer in high school so she tried out and before she knew it Lynn was making 99 lira a week and traveling around Italy playing womens soccer for the University.  It was the best way to learn Italian even though her team was a bit dysfunctional smoking cigarettes at half time.  She took off a short period of time from school to finish off the season. 

Back to Stanford where she finished up her degree, on time.  After graduating Lynn moved to Chicago to work for LaSalle Partners.  A small private real estate development company where she worked in the analyst department.  It was 1996.  On the side, Lynn found herself spending a fair amount of time doing research helping friends who were graduating to find the right job for them.  This was before Hot Jobs and Monster.com came on to the scene.  Her roommate in Chicago told her about two people in San Francisco who had just launched a company called Bridgepath that was focused on finding jobs for recent graduates.  Maybe she should go work with them?  She left Chicago and moved to SF and began to work at Bridgepath.  It was a great experience working in a true start-up out of the back of a computer store.  She stayed a few years before starting her own company. 

Lynn started a company around commerce.  She wanted to launch something give emerging designers a presence.  It was a great idea way before its time.  It was too expensive to launch those brands.  The company was called Xuni.com  She had raised money to grow the business but after two years she walked away.  

She went to work for the Gap thinking that it might make sense to go into something a bit more stable.  At the Gap Lynn worked in the real estate acquision division.  Things were really changing at the Gap then and not only did they open stores, they closed some too.  They were looking at the placement of stores like Old Navy being down the street from the Gap.  In the end, although an interesting job, working in a large company environment was not a long term career move. 

Her next stop was working for a hotel hospitality group.  She was randomly reading an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this company and went on line to read about the CEO.  She saw that they were looking for someone who knew real estate and was entrepreneurial.  Perfect.  She built twenty hotels while she was there and what was fun is that every hotel was completely different based on where it was based.  So in Vence they brought in graffiti artists to create something interesting on the walls.  Each project had a different twist.  She was able to work with the creative, construction and finance people all at the same time.  Then the chain sold out and became a national brand so it was time to move on.

Lynn took a step back as she had two twin boys at home.  One day a friend asked her if she could ask her nanny to help her get a babysitter quickly.  She trusted Lynns nanny so she trusted that who ever she got to come would be good.  Of course trust is the key word here when you are leaving your child with someone.  That tiny transaction created the idea for Urban Sitter.

She built a site bringing in a tech partner, a media person and an operator.  The site started with forty parents and forty sitters in the SF area this past August.  They are now up to 1300 parents and 1200 sitters.  Think of Urban Sitter as an Open Table for sitters.  Most of the sitters are college age or just recently graduated and this is a great way for them to make money.  The sitters are tech saavy so they get the information through texts.  They put on the site the times that they are available.  Then they tell their friends to sign up to be sitters too.  Parents can see how the babysitters are connected to each other using affiliation programs and star ratings.  For instance parents can see a babysitter that is being used by other parents at their kids school which provides a trust and comfort level.  They also have a third party that does background checks but in essence it is the trust that other people have knowing that they have used a sitter and if they liked them then they would be willing to book their friends too. 

They are now focusing on Brooklyn and other areas already growing to 100 sitters after one week of launching.  They are also changing how the transactions are taking place.  Many of these sitters use that money for rent and other things.  So they would prefer it if the money back to them through an online transaction so cash isn't sitting in their pocket when they leave the job.  It also gets rid of the weird factor of being paid.  So many times parents end up coming home and looking at each other asking who has cash.  The credit card piece helps verify the parents for the sitters too.  Not surprising that 95% of their sitters have some type of online payment account they use.  People can get promoted within the site too for instance a sitter can say I am available every single Friday night.  Parents will eventually pay a transaction fee depending on if they booked the sitter weeks in advance or just the day before. 

Brilliant idea.  Makes absolute sense.  A win win for both the parents and the sitters.  Look to San Diego, Seattle, Denver, St. Louis and vacation spots for Urban Sitter soon.  Perfect for an urban saavy tech population.  I wish this was around when my kids were little. 

Tara grew up in Alberta, Canada on a farm where is gets to be 30 below quite often.  Her parents settled in that area of the world where her father put down roots as the local veternarian.  Her mother was an artist so she grew up in a household with two entrepreneurs.  She didn't go far from home after high school and went to college in Calgary studying communications and cultural studies. 

After graduating Tara got a job working for a gas company in the corporate communications department.  The company was in the midst of being acquired so she decided to move into the advertising space once the companies merged and she was given a financial package.  She always had an interest in the online world and had worked on flash, and web design development in college and those skills were rare in Calgary.  It was 1999 and a lot of advertising companies were expanding their interactive departments.  Tara joined an advertising company and did work for the Alberta Childrens Hospital and Big Rock Brewing company.  She stayed there for a year and was part of one of those mass exits where a huge group of people get up and leave.  Tara left and partnered with some of those people to create her own agency. 

She had a little bit of money from the her package when the gas company merged.  She had bought a condo and used the rest that she saved to start her own company.  Day one she had clients.  Big Rock Brewing came with her so that was a huge plus.  Tara grew up knowing that her father, who was dirt poor growing up, as the property that she grew up on housed the one room shanty that he had been raised in.  Seeing how her father had worked his way through college to create a good life for himself and his family she realized that she too could do something on her own. The power of an entrepreneur.

Her company grew and she opened up and office in Toronto three years later moving there herself.  It wasn't a good time.  SARRS hit and their biggest client pulled out of Ontario.  People were scared to go out so they had to cut back most of their marketing efforts especially the online stuff.  They had even won an award for their online/offline second life campaign.  She had built this campaign where there was a funky night club called cream soda night and bars would participate through their client Big Rock Brewing but they had pulled out.  The bars however still wanted in so Tara started promoting their bars and through that gained a whole group of local clients in Toronto. 

It was 2003 and Tara started a blog called HorsePigCow.  Then around 2005, Shel Israel, a PR guy who wrote the book Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the way Businesses talk with Customers with Robert Scoble contacted Tara about one of his clients who was writing a blog and wanted to hire someone to do community in his start-up and this client was interested in a Canadian to do it...would she be interested.  Ten days later she was in San Francisco working at the start-up called Like.com

That was life changing.  When she got to SF she felt like she had finally found her people.  Like.com was funded and it was 2005.  Tara started to work on building out community marketing.  She spent all day on her computer buidling out relationships with people.  Tara finally launched what she was working on  and within 24 hours there were over a million photos uploaded and 20 million registered users.  Tara was the only non-engineer on the staff and the only woman too. 

What she created is something people wanted to know about so she started taking gigs as a public speaker about the power of community and how to create it.  She eventually had to get an agent as she has now spoken at over 115 conferences around the world.  She was eventually approached by a literary agent to write a book which she called the Whuffie Factor, Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business.  The term whuffie is from a science fiction novel where whuffie is is the currency you get for being nice and social.  It was published in 2009 and is now published in eight different languages. 

It was 2006 when Tara started thinking about Buyosphere.  She was looking for a black skirt on line and was overwhelmed with what was available but there was nothing she wanted.  How can you have so much choice but nothing worth while?  She knew there had to be a way to filter the information coming at you.  She pitched the idea in 2009 but nobody was interested in ecommerce then.  She returned to Montreal because getting a green card was impossible and launched Buyosphere in 2011 after finding the right co-founders.  They were able to boot strap this through friends and her speaking engagements. 

Originally the idea was a place where you could organize your buying history.  Very data driven.  It was like something between a Pinterest and Svpply.  There was still too much choice and not enough clarity.  Then she met David Rose, an investor, who asked her "did you ever find your black skirt"?  It was then that she realized that it made more sense to leverage the power of collective knowledge to find that black skirt.  Once she figured that out raising money came quickly.  It essentially came back to building community which she understands better than anybody.  Crowd sourcing a community to find you the perfect black skirt.  Ask the right people and you get the right answer. 

The product is still evolving as brands can buy into courting the leaders who go to the top of the leader board.  Her story is interesting and as always the dots connect to get her to where she is today.  Just another small tidbit is that Tara is a single Mom.  She had her son while she was at University and he was six when she started her first business.  Tara never talked about that part of her life with me until we emailed after our conversation.  Granted I was a bit crazed that morning as I usually get all the details but our conversation was about business and that is what we talked about.  Quite impressive.  Check out Buyosphere, now that they have been funded I am sure that we will see a lot of interesting growth on that site. 

Elena grew up in Russia near the Baltic Sea.  An only child of two mechanical engineers.  When she was 15, Elena won an academic scholarship that was sponsored by the US Government.  The concept is to promote international exchange in developing countries and put students in our school system for a year.  Elena spent a year in Yuba, California with a host family going to the local high school.  A huge public high school with a large Mexican and Sikh population.  There were 3 exchange students in her program.  The other two were from Mexico and Germany. 

After that experience she decided to apply to other schools in the states to remain here for her education.  She had a student visa and was able to continue through college and grad school with no problems.  After years in Russia all Elena could think about was warmth.  She was not really given any guidance besides her own desire to be warm.  She applieid to Florida Atlantic University, got in and got a free ride.  The most important thing at that point was being on a beach.  She would go home in the summers and winter breaks to see her family in Russia and her parents totally understood the need for Elena to stay in the states, it was safe and there were opportunities. 

After graduating she went to work for the University of California San Diego, while going to graduate school, in their network security program.  They had a network telescope where they could study reconnaissance activity on hackers.  At the same time Elena was applying for military grants to stay in the states.  What was amazing was how difficult it was for her to get a green card.  Our country paid for Elena to get a degree in computer science and she was figuring out for the US Government how hackers hack our systems and they wanted to sent her back to Russia. She eventually figured out how to go from a student visa to a work visa to a green card.  Elena is the type of citizens we want staying in the US. 

After getting her masters at UCSD analyzing hackers for her thesis she came to NYC during her summers in grad school working for ATT where she fell in love with NYC.  At ATT she worked on specialized research on how routers talk to each other.  Not only was the job fun but so were the summers of art, music, ballet and good food.  Not surprising that after graduation Elena accepted at job at Abacus in NYC as a developer.  A company funded by Bessemer.  She stayed only for a year analyzing large scale data because she was able to land high paying consulting jobs.  She thought that having a full time job was more stable but after working in a start-up she realized that it wasn't so scary going out on your own. 

Elena took a bunch of jobs for large financial companies who paid her plenty to just figure out how to get the job done.  She did that by hiring people in Russia to get the jobs done at a much lower cost.  It was through those lucrative jobs that she was able to put money away and start her own company. 

Elena started to think alot about how clothing is paired together.  She became a student of streetwear watching how people had so much style on the street.  How could those people share their sense of style with others.  It was back in 2007 and Polyvore didn't even exist yet when she began to think about this.  In 2010 she finally got her green card and Elena decided to quit all of her consulting gigs and start her own business.  The market had matured and she felt it was time.

Elena created Clothia.  A virtual closet where you can upload items from your own closet and from the web.  You can try on clothes through augmented reality.  She wanted people to have the same experience that they would have at a clothing store or in their own closet.  You can literally scan your body into the computer and begin.  There is always a look and fit issue in the dressing room and if you can do it online that is a game changer.  You can look and interact with yourself. 

It is not a full virtual experience it is technology.  It is the beginnings of something interesting.  Certainly the uses of this platform are beyond the closet and that will be part of the evolution of the company as they figure out the revenue model.  That is what I like about Clothia.  Elena has set Clothia up as a completely different platform.  Keeping your own clothes in an online closet so when you go shopping for something else online you can literally put on your favorite black pants and try on a jacket with it from a store to make sure it works before clicking buy. Takes the concept of mix and match to a whole other level. 

You can check out the demo here.  A computer science major from Russia becomes a start-up Woman entrepreneur because she won the opportunity when she was 15 to come and study in the states.  Great story. 

From my birds eye view, this has been a year of change for women.  When Nancy Hechinger and I put on the Womens Entrepreneur Festival a year ago we did so because we wanted to celebrate women.  Celebrating how many women are starting their own companies, making a difference in the world and are influencing the way we live our lives is much more empowering than conversations around topics such as there aren't enough women in a particular field or enough women sitting on public trading boards or enough women running companies.  All of that might be true but if one hundred women start a business next week that thrives then there are more women CEO's and more women running companies.  The game can be changed. We need to support those women.  I am seeing that game change every week.   

Positive change is taking place as women are champions and mentors of each other.  I see more women creating businesses that give them the independence that they are looking for.  Through networking, connections and sheer intelligence they are succeeding in a very different way than they were twenty years ago.  We are collaborating with our peers and that is not something we did so easily in the past.  We are looking to make changes from outside not from within and that is the only way change will take place.  

Women listen, analyze, communicate and perceive things contrary to their male counterparts.  The women that are succeeding at being entrepreneurs are focused on success and that success means a lot of different things.  Success in their own personal lives as well as their careers, success in being independent and being able to get it all done and particularly success in a work environment that works for them. 

2012 is going to be a big year for women.  There are a few things that I'd personally like to see happen.  I'd like women to stop apologizing and to never utter the word I am sorry for the decisions that they have made in their careers.  I'd like women to stop starting their sentences with I think.  Just get in there and speak your mind.  Truth is women have the ability to do it all.  We can decide to go to work, we can decide to stay home, we can decide to work part-time, we can decide to start our own companies, we have so many choices.  We need to stop judging each other for the choices each of us have made and instead start applauding each other for who we are.  We are all individuals with different sensibilities when it comes to our own priorities, our own sense of style and our own ways of living our individual lives.  We are all unique women who bring a tremendous amount to the table.

I am looking forward to the next year as I get the opportunity to talk to more women entrepreneurs who are creating companies, communities and their own identities as role models for every woman regardless of age.  All 55 of the women I spoke to this past year ( or so ) have shown all of us that being an entrepreneur is certainly hard work but the upside of owning who you are is empowering on so many levels that we should all think about no matter what career you have chosen, be it an entrepreneur or not, how do you make your career your own.  That kind of thinking is the key for more women to have ownership of the career paths that they take.  

As Rosie the Riveter, a symbol of womens economic power, said, "We can do it."

Noha grew up in Jerusalem, Israel.  She left when she was four.  Her mother was from Argentina so she took her and her sister back home until she was seven and they returned to Jerusalem.  Stayed there only one year to get her life in order and then immigrated with two young girls in tow to the US landing in Baltimore, MD. 

After graduating high school Noha went to American University in DC.  She majored in Spanish and Latin American studies keeping her ties to Argentina spent a semester of junior year there.  She graduated in 1996 and took a job with NISBCO, a non-profit organzation focused on consciencious objects in Latin America. Keep in mind that during college she also spent a summer selling produce from a truck on the side of the road so perhaps fruit was always in her future.

She left NISBCO after six months and traveled with her boyfriend (now husband) through Mexico and Guatemala.  They decided that they wanted to get out of the DC area and 70 and sunny in San Diego seemed like a good place to hang their hat.  Noha took a job working for a childrens publishing company where she had the pleasure of reading childrens books all day and editing them.  One year in San Diego was all they could take.  They took some time and traveled again but this time to the Middle East, Europe and Greece eventually landing back in the DC area.

Noha took a job in a marketing firm but always had the desire to go to graduate school.  She got into Columbia University and others but decided NYC was the place for her.  While at Columbia Noha became one of the co-founders of the Global Social Venture Compeition.  An initiative promoting businesses with a social and environmental impact.  How to be a profital entrepreneur while making a social impact is so important.  After graduating in 2002 she went to work for Unilever in brand management.  Worked on the Ragu brand and in the health and wellness area of the company under the Lipton label. It was there that she realized how much people had the desire to buy healthy products.  The scientists at Unilever wouldn't eat the products that they were making and that sent her a sign.  The large companies really aren't agile enough to create new categories that are truly healthy products.  She stayed long enough to understand a product from idea to shelf. 

When she left Unilever her husband was just finishing his teaching fellows program and they decided it might be their last chance to really travel like they wanted to.  They took off for India and Thailand.  It was 2004 when they returned and the job opportunities in the food business were scarce.  She met with a friend who was in the Investor Circle and began to talk about how in Israel dried fruit is every where but not in the states.  Noha wrote a business plan on the concept of creating a company around dried fruit and submitted it to the Investors Circle.  It wasn't accepted but the plan started to develop a life of its own.

At first Noha thought she was too risk adverse to start a company on her own but her food interests became apparent to her and the concept she had just clicked.  She began to speak to scientists she knew in the food business, found a commodity broker in the fruit industry, dialed up some people she knew who were in the design business and Peeled Snacks was born. 

The original concept was peeled fruit and nuts but the nuts were in a separate bag in the fruit bag and because of the preservatives that wasn't working.  The shelf life was too short and the nuts were too high in calories (customer feedback).  Also the distributors did not want something that had that short of a shelf life.  She took out the nuts and did fruit only.  An evolution in the business model. 

It was now 2006 and her sales person left so her husband decided to come on board.   She raised some money from friends and family and really started to grow the business.  At first they were focused on healthy snacks on the go focusing on airports, gyms and grab and go locations.  In 2009 they were approached by Starbucks to be part of their healthy snack category with single servings.  That was a huge validaiton of her business model.

Between 2009 and now they have started to focus on grocery sized bags that are the right size for grocery shelves.  The new packaging is really beautiful.  Those products will run from $3.49 to $3.99.

The products are made in upstate NY and Colorado.  Noha sources products from family farms in developing countries...this is where her Spanish comes into play.  Peeled Snacks has actually helped sustainable farms with loans in order to help them grow and create the right products going back to her desire to build a company with a social mission. 

Not only has Noha been focused growing Peeled Snacks over the last seven years she also created a group called New York Foodies that has built into a community of over 400 people.  Did I mention that she also has a 3 1/2 year old and six month old.  Pretty impressive that she was able to have kids during the key growth of her business.  You can do it if you want. 

The business is now about to expand to another level.  Peeled Snacks was ranked as one of the fastest growing companies on Inc's list for 2011.  Pretty impressive...and the product...it tastes great. 

Keya grew up in Austin, Texas.  Her parents are both professors of molecular biology as UT Austin.  They both came here from India in 1977 to do their post-graduate work and that is where they met.  Keya left Austin to go to college at Stanford to major in international relations.  Taking her junior year abroad in Seville, Spain where she studied Spanish and sangria.  She graduated in 2003 with a Fullbright Scholarship and moved to Bogota Columbia.

In Bogota she worked with a NGO that worked with refugees who were internally displaced due to the armed conflicts throughout the region.  She stayed a year and then with her boyfriend (now husband) backpacked around South America for three months.  Instead of moving back to the states, they both took jobs in India and moved to Bombay.  He took a supposed safe job working for Lehman Bros and Keya worked for a human rights organization focusing on womens rights.  She even wrote a book while she was there about womens legal rights in the work place with her boyfriend. 

A year was enough and they both enrolled in the Phd program at Princeton in International Politics. After two weeks she realized it was the wrong program for her but she stuck it out.  She spent two years there, got her masters and then went to work on Hilary Clintons campaign in 2008.  She moved out to Los Angeles for a year working on the campaign finance end while her husband went to Yale to get his law degree.  After the election Keya moved to New Haven to be with Tom.

In New Haven she got pulled back into politics.  Ended up running the campaign for the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano.  An incredible experience because it is such a different angle being local.  You get to interface with real people every day.  Believe it or not, after this experience Keya went to Wharton to get her MBA.  I kept giving her a hard time about how over educated she is. 

At Wharton she got so wrapped up in everything she had just left and then getting to school she realized that she completely forgot to register to vote.  She missed the deadline.  It was then that the idea of Elect Next was formed.  She was taking a class at Wharton where they had to come up with a prototype for a business in one week and then she got such unbelievable feedback and traction on Elect Next she realized she was on to something. 

Keya knew she needed a tech co-founder and literally stalked developers at Penn.  She found Paul Jungwirth, a Phd student and got him on board.  She took a leave of absence at Wharton to pursue building her start-up.  Keya is looking for funding right now.

I am not so sure about the revenue piece of the business although alot of companies would pay for their data but I do love the concept.  Go to Elect Next and check it out.  What is interesting is people who go through the process of answering the questions and find that the candidate that best aligns with what is important to them isn't who they thought it should be end up contacting Keya to tell her that the site must be broken.  Now, doesn't that say something.   

Sharon owns 3 vineyards including Rare Cat, Common Dog and Amici.  She is also a big supporter of women entrepreneurs and has put together a group in the wine industry that get together a few times a year.  Each vineyard became part of her umbrella over the past 15 years.  I loved speaking with Sharon because her passion for food and wine is evident but her career has been all over the place continually being drawn back to her passion for wine and finally making a full time life out of it. 

She grew up in Hillsborough, California which is about two hours south of Napa.  Stayed in California going to UCLA to major in economics.  She has always been obsessed with french and not sure where it came from.  In 5th grade she won her parents over to take french instead of spanish and never got it out of her system.  She took her junior year abroad in Bordeaux where there was an economic program. 

In Bordeaux she spoke with french with anyone who would speak to her.  When anyone asked her if she loved wine she always said yes.  She got to know everyone in Bordeaux and eventually ended up at Chateau Haut Brion on a rainy day talking to Jean-Michel Damase who began to teach her everything about wine as they drank from 83's and 82's right out of the barrell that had just been stored to a 66 from years ago.  It opened her eyes and her heart.  She was hooked. 

She returned to UCLA graduating with a degree in International Economics with honors and immediately moved back to France.  She took a job as the lowest ranking person, the low of the low, in a two star kitchen.  She had been introduced to Jean-Marie Amat who owned St. James at the time.  After a year she ran out of money and moved back home.

It was the early 80's and she took a job working for a steel company.  She tried to find a job in Napa but there were none to be had.  At the steel company she was put in the tech end of the business where people seemed almost scared of but she was happy to try anything.  She flew everywhere to figure out what the platform would be.  They wanted to promote people in the industry and they put Sharon in charge of customer service with outside sales calls including technology with the customers, credit and business relationships.  That was when a PC was connected to a main frame. 

Sharon decided to leave the steel industry to go to the Monterey Institute of International Studies to get her MBA.  After graduation she went into publishing.  It was in publishing where she realized that her knowledge of wine was an asset.  In a field that is all about connecting with people she could use that social skill in her job.  It was 1985/86.  Although she would have loved to get a job in Napa the only things available were a marketing director of Christian Brothers. Instead in 1991 Sharon and a group of friends got together to buy a small vineyard for their own personal cellars.  They made wines and called the vineyard Amici, Italian for friends. 

Her knowledge of computers got her a job at Inkotomi as VP of sales in 1995 which were the early days of the internet.  She was the 13th employee at Inkotomi.  That company is the perfect case study of what happened at that time.  She was involved in growing the business to be a $36 billion company that went public and before crashing in the dot com bubble and then eventually being sold to Yahoo for $234 billion.  It was a crazy time.  She closed a deal at 5pm and had her kid that night.  It was time to get out and she did right before they went public.  Inktomi was a place where buyers and sellers could communicate.  It was a remarkable place before the white suits came into the business and changed the company and the structure.  The industry changed but those early days for everyone who was part of it were remarkable. 

Early on the internet was about changing the world.  When you spoke to CEO's across the board they will say the most important thing in the next ten years is innovation but if you look at linear one dimension experiences it is someone who has a plethora of experiences, like Sharon, who understand human interaction and technology that are able to build on that success.  She has always felt that those diverse experiences made her able to see ways to create solutions to adapt to whatever industry she was in. 

After having her first child and leaving Inktomi she took at job with VIsa.  She was working on some really big projects there and it was fun.  Yet, in 1997 she realized that Amici vineyard actually was commercially viable so in 1999, her and her husband, John, bought the majority share and moved the family to Napa.  Her live as a wine maker and love for Bordeaux was coming together.

Her husband came in and took over the management and sales end of the business.  In 2004 Sharon went back to Bordeaux, with the family in tow, to study wine.  It was like getting an executive MBA for a wine oeneologist.  Her kids spoke French and went to French schools.  They bought a place in St. Emilion, a beautiful village and the first Unesco Heritag site.  When they returned to the states they went directly to St. Helena to live.  Not having a direct path in her career played a huge part of her success later on, one that Sharon feels very strongly about. 

After returning she then launched Rare Cat which is her personal project of high end wines making only sauvignon blanc, chardonary and cabernet donating some of the proceeds to charities.  Exquisite wines with incredible complexity.  She also started Common Dog which she says is doggedly delicious and obedientally priced.  Amici is somewhere in the middle of both of those other vineyards and they try to create lots of quality for the price.  Most bottles range around $35 but compete with $100 bottles from other vineyards in blind tastings.  Just as another side note she owns and runs Wine Villas, a luxury rental company with properties in Napa and Bordeaux.

There is a saying in the wine industry, if you want to make a million then you have to start with ten million.  Sharon laughed when I mentioned that but she is thrilled to be able to take what she has grown and hand it down generation to generation.  Another one of Sharons passions is women.  She found that in Bordeaux people loved that she was a woman in the industry but not many in the US although women account for buying 60% of the wine purchased.  How do you communicate to women how to buy wines.  She started a group with women from Napa and Bordeaux to get together and meet each other.  They held 3 days of seminars on wine making, selling, branding etc.  It was a huge hit.  It helped this group break down barriers and all of a sudden they have created this non-competitive group of women in the industry who are sharing and mentoring to make the wine industry a better place.  There are 30 women from all over the world who are part of this now.  They even have a website, Wine Entre Femmes. 

It wasn't easy following Sharons story.  She is full of life and bravado and is much more interesting in sharing her love in the present than her past.  Her goal has always been to get back to Bordeaux since she landed there in college.  She now spends half a year in Bordeaux (St. Emilion) and the other half in the states loving both the culture, food and independence of the wine industry on both sides of the globe.  Sharon proves that you never know where life can lead you, each step of the way connects with the next and you can use all of that to start a brand new endeavor in something that you love when the time is right. 

Mauria was raised by a single Mom in Texas making her way to Stanford as a computer science major.  She did a lot of teaching on the side when she was there.  After graduating Mauria embarked on a journey around the world returning back to the bay area when her trip was over where she took her first job out of college at Netscape as the product manager working on the browser.  Next she jumped ship to AOL to become the manager of communities which was a totally fun experience where chat was just starting to ramp up.  Next stop was Good Technology that built mobile hardware for mobile devices.  There were ten people when she got there soon becoming 250 before selling to Motorola which in turn sold to Visto.  It was 2001 and hardware for software was cutting edge stuff. 

After three jobs and a nice exit she took some time to travel again coming back to the bay area when her journey was over.  She went to work at Paypal working in the consumer management area where she launched the daily deal.  Mauria also had a board seat at Say Now which was eventually bought by Google. 

Claire lived in Korea until she was 14.  For political and education reasons her Mom wanted to educate her children in the US.  They didn't speak a word of english and landed in the Berkeley area of California.  Soon figuring it out she went to Berkeley doing her undergraduate and graduate work there.  Claire worked in semi-conductor companies after graduation where they were in need of analytical software system to track their floor systems.  Although she was doing software her degree was in operations research with a slant towards optimation engineering.  At her job she ended up doing lower level back end software for a data base company for seven years before getting recruited to Netscape in 1995. 

At Netscape all the engineers were on one floor eating lunch and dinner together everyday.  They wanted to base their business on service and tool products.  Those were the days when manifestos would show up on her desk and she would have to figure out how to build those products.  They would release the product and 20,000 people would download it in 12 hours and then they would be on to something else.  She finally ended up running the security area at Netscape before it was sold to AOL. 

After AOL bought Netscape, Claire went to work for Sun Microsystems.  Really hard work and very bureaucratic.  It was interesting but she went with the theory that life is too short and she was too entrepreneurial to deal with the bureaucracy and jumped ship to Napster.  Berteslmann was in the game at that point and she helped re-architect the business and security system to productize the model to create revenues.  They built it and were told not to launch it instead they declared bankruptcy.  Claire helped them sell what was left of the company before moving to Blue Martini software. 

In 2000 Blue Martini went public and then collapsed in 2001. It was the time of the big bubble.  It was an ecommerce play.  The company moved to Nexttag and she stayed on for another six and a half years.  Claire did a variety of jobs including general manage and president of the travel and education business before it was sold and they brought in a new ceo.  It was at this time she wanted to do something new.  She was married with two teenagers.

Mauria had this idea for Citrus Lane, a highly targeted, curated specifically for each customer baby and childrens products delivered monthly to your door.  Mauria has two kids of her own who are four and 22 months.  She was looking for the right partner to do this with.   Claire was introduced to Mauria through a guy that had worked for Claire at Netscape.  He didn't think Claire would want the job because she had hired over 500 people for an executive team in her past but they met and totally hit it off.  Their lives have changed from working in these large companies to becoming real entrepreneurs, creating a market, a brand, a product to doing support work for the staff and even cleaning the toilets.  You know what, they love it. 

They raised capital after 3 1/2 months of proving their model with a seed round.  Greylock invested.  Citrus Lane are care packages for parents.  They send a new package every month that has a theme in the box with really well researched products geared towards the age of your child.  They try to maintain value and people really appreicate it.  You get full on products from a bib to a sippy cup to a diaper cream.  3/6/12 month packages.  They are finding that not only are people buying them as gifts they are buying them for themselves.  They both know from their past careers that listening to their customers is key. 

I seriously love this story.  Two super smart women who have worked in some of the top companies in the bay area who got off that track to create their own.  I am seeing more and more women jump off that track and be their own boss.  These two women are role models for the next generation of women entrepreneurs. 

I got on Tripod and played around for awhile asking Sally questions here and there over the next few days.  Eventually asking her if she had started the company by herself.  When she told me that she had I scheduled a time that we could talk.  Not surprising when we finally spoke she knows both Geoff and Julia at Editd where I have an investment as they all live in London.

Sally grew up in the Lake District of northern England.  So incredible beautiful there and Sally said there were tons of kids and lots of freedom.  She left to go to school at the University College in London.  Before going to UCL she did a gap year living in Madagascar doing marine research.  A gap year is big in England.  Everyone gets a student loan for that year but because she had always had a job mainly working as a waitress and she had been classically trained in music and sung at weddings and events so she had put away a decent amount of cash.  Even when going home at Christmas she would pickup a job a the local pub.  Good work ethic. 

UCL Is a very entrepreneurial school.  She majored in neuro and human sciences and considering going to law school after graduation.  The last day of her final exam she decided to take the money that she had saved and start an online business.  She launched yourfaithplanet.com which was a website designed to help young people taking a gap year plan their trip to do work overseas. 

The gap year is a very lucrative business rife with middle management companies being paid huge amounts of money that never go to the destination group ( the organization that the kids go work for ).  Sally was invited by the Guardian to write an article on this issue.  She uncovered how people were being ripped off and figured there had to be a better way. 

Sally began to connect people with local organizations that had been vetted and trusted to take volunteers.  When she made that connection kids were saving the $5000 that they were giving to the middleman.  Two girls were in the Phillipines called Sally to help them connect with an organization in Manilla.  She did and they took the $5000 they saved and gave it to the organization they were working with.  That money paid for 50 kids to go to school and one to have needed surgery.  She realized that she was on to something.

She began to connect visitors with like minded people.  She got involved with youth conferences to help kids refocus their lives outside of college.  Then she started to hear from the parents of these kids who would wonder if Sally knew someone in Rome that was local for their holiday.  She began to make more and more local contacts.  When you go somewhere when you know someone local the experience is totally different.  That is how Tripbod was created.

The travel industry is broken and I know I am seeing a variety of different sites and models trying to figure out what the next generation will look like.  When you travel to certain areas that are poor and the ability to get rid of the middle man and pay a local directly is empowering.  What Tripbod is doing is gathering a local army of volunteers.  Think Etsy for travel.  Each entrepreneur, in their local areas, create their own shop on Tripbod.  Each shop sets their own price based on what they will do from helping someone plan their trip, taking them somewhere special when they get there or just making reservations.  The website add 15% to the cost which they take for running the site and doing the diligence on the tripbods. 

Every local has to be approved and vetted by Tripbod.  Right now they have over 300 tripbods in over 80 countries worldwide.  The company has a team of six.  Liz Sutcliffe is Sally's co-founder who was with Rough Guides when they met.  They then found a tech co-founder, Pete Moran.  The founder of Rough Guides came in as a mentor and an angel investor put some money in too.  They also have an intern that is paid through UCL.  In essence they are boot strapped but will start to look for funding soon.  The next big opportunity is the Olympics that is coming to London in 2012. 

I love the whole concept.  Connecting travelers with on the ground experts in the local area they are traveling to.  Creating an army of entrepreneurial travel guides around the world is clever.  Loved speaking with Sally too.   She is super smart and loving the start-up world as she had taken her work ethic and experiences putting them to work to help others see the world in a different light.  Shaking up the travel industry at a local level. 

PhilanTech is working to solve a problem in the non-profit sector.  There are over $43 billion in grants awarded each year.  Yes, that is correct, $43 billion.  13% is spend on administering the grant which is one of my biggest pet peeves.  Hugely inefficient.  If 2% of that 13% was spend on the service delivery that would be quite an impact.  Wouldn't it make sense if there was a company that had an online platform similar to the common app for colleges to apply for grants.  Foundations really don't want that but PhilanTech has created something that at least helps the applicants.  But let's go to the beginning of how PhilanTech got to this place.

Dahna grew up in Montreal.  She speaks French, went to a Jewish Day School and grew up in a family that spoke English.  Her father is a lawyer and her mom had a background in advertising.  When the kids came onto the scene her mother chose to stay home but was involved in several charitable activites.  When Dahna graduated high school she went to Williams in the states to go to college. 

In college she majored in English and did an internship at a literary agency as well as a software company in Boston.  After graduating Dahna worked for a company doing cdroms for k-12 and then moved on to work for the Global Education Network.  GEN was trying to democratize colleges like Brown, Wesleyan and Williams by bringing steaming video across the country for people in rural areas that couldn't afford to go to these schools.  There mission was a bit before its time.  Dahlia loved the software business and decided to go to Harvard for graduate school to get a masters in education with a concentration in technology. At one point she went on to get her MBA at Stern Business school. 

She will tell you that she always had an entrepreneurial bend particularly with a bend towards social good working in venture philanthropies such as Ashoka and Blue Ridge Foundation.  While at Harvard, she did work in a middle school in North Adams volunteering her time.  The school was in need of funding and Dahna was always into playing guitar and songwriting.  She had a musicial cd made and took the proceeds of that cd and gave it back to North Adams.  That experience sold her on the entrepreneurial creativity to give back.

After getting her masters she got funding from the social network fund at NYU in 2004 to build the grant making product she wanted to create for the non-profit world.  She plugged away at this for seven years.  She started putting her product in front of people and the response was that the product didn't make sense.  So back to the drawing board getting money from friends and family to relaunch in 2007.  Dahna changed the model to a profit model that helps non-profits.  Grantees of the non-profits who pay an annual service fee get to use their service for free.  Foundation are beginning to use their grant making tools and they pay for that too.  Online grant management tools are changing the way these foundations are doing business.  They are also building out a research component as they evolve like giving companies the ability to troll through their data base to look for possible companies that would match their mission.

Timing is everything.  Having people build technological platforms to help businesses that have historically been found through introductions and also run very inefficient organzations, PhilanTech is changing the way these companies do business. She is helping them get into the 21st century. 

Dhana has learned one very important thing as an entrepreneur...listen to your market.  She built a product that no one wanted.  I give her serious cred for not giving up and pivoting the product but not the idea.  She is super smart and obviously driven.  I am looking forward to see how the group of women at Pipeline help Dahna grow her company over the next year.  The good news is that Dahna is getting traction. It is now about getting more companies to use PhilanTech products so they can be more efficient with the grants they give. 

Tereza was born in LI to Czechlosvakia political refugees who got to the US with about $100 in their pocket.  They each came separately and then re-met here and got married.  Initially her father was a caretaker of a large estate although a top engineer in Czechlosvakia.  They moved to Pound Ridge after connecting with her mothers’ old friends who was a holocaust survivor and her father got an engineer job in Stanford.  Terezas mother was a Mary Kay lady and Tereza grew up watching those sales tapes and learning exactly what it meant to be an entrepreneur.

She was recruited to play volleyball at UPenn.  She had studied opera too and had to make a choice between volleyball and opera.  Volleyball won out.  Tereza was one of the top six players in NY State when she graduated high school.  Through out college she had a variety of internships from MTV, CNN and a NBC local affiliate.  At NBC she worked for Tia O’Brien who was just coming off of maternity leave and she would bring Tereza along when she would interview people and through that experience she really learned how to see an opportunity and grab the moment. 

She had been to Eastern Europe before with her Mom on a trip and really felt compelled to return after graduation.  The first time there was life changing and the second time it became clearer to her where her parents came from.  Five days after graduating college she put on a backpack and found herself in back in Eastern Europe.   About 2 months after she was there the Berlin wall came down.   The idea was to come to this part of the world and become a journalist.   Tereza was totally focused on this taking German and French classes prior to coming so she could hit the ground running.  She knew that this part of the world was changing and wanted to be part of it.  I remember watching the wall come down on television and thinking how much I wanted to get on a plane and be part of history taking place.

Her first job was for a Czech economic magazine.  They had no money to pay her but the third day the guy she is working for says although they can’t pay her he could take care of her.  Quickly realizing what that meant she said let me think about that and walked out the door across the street to the Prague Post.   She got a freelance job there writing about changing businesses while networking her way around Eastern Europe. 

It was an exciting time to be there.  You could feel change in the air.  She got a call about a company that had just received an opportunity to create the first national television channel for Eastern Europe.  They had nine months to launch or they would lose the license. Tereza spoke four languages, knew the area and not surprising she was hired.  Ronald Lauder was funding this.  They hired the best and brightest to parachute in and Tereza would help them learn the ropes and translate for them.  You learn a lot when you are translating for people who are there to launch a national television channel.  She quickly learned it was either programming or sales to get to the top.  She maneuvered her way in to sales landing a huge sponsorship when no one else could landing her the opportunity to work on the biggest accounts.  The learning curve had ended and she felt it was time to return to the states.

Tereza returned to the states and decided to go to Wharton business school.  She still wanted to return to television and after having an internship at Disney in Burbank, the summer between the first and second year, she knew that she wanted to be in an urban area after graduating.  She was up to her eyeballs in debt and opted to take a consulting job at Coopers Lybrand figuring that being in a structured environment would be a good learning experience.  She would learn how to manage people. 

The group that she was working on did cross industry strategies.  She worked with large brands and agencies strategically thinking about joint consortia to do their media buying as a group to get major discounts.  She was working in the business to business marketing space of each of their clients.

While she was at Coopers they merged with Price Waterhouse and eventually sold to IBM.  Helping with the merger integration and always being the youngest in the room she was given the opportunity to be a partner.  Once the companies merged they decided to eliminate 75% of the employees in her division so she quickly jumped to the accounting side where the CFO/COO needed someone to run strategy.  That person is now one of her investors.  She stayed there for two more years until her father got sick. 

Her father was never a healthy man but this time it wasn’t good.   Tereza had one kid and living in the city with her husband. They barely had time to bury her father and then her mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  She moved with her husband and daughter to Pound Ridge to help her Mom.  They were considering buying a house down the street to be with her Mom and then her Mom died.  After that she had to give herself some time to just do nothing but grieve.  They never left Pound Ridge.

The guy that had hired her at Coopers was now at IRI and called her about doing a new innovation project with a large client.  Would she be interested in coming in to work on this?  The job was 15 minutes from her house so she said yes.  That job led to another project and then another project and then another project.  It wasn’t where she wanted to be but it brought in an income and she was close to home.

One afternoon she was sitting at Starbucks and picked up a book called planning the next five years of your life.  She didn’t move until she finished the book.  That was a pivotal moment.   After putting down the book she said to herself, I am going to start a company.

At first she thought about doing something in education and decided that wasn’t the right one but actually by saying no to that was empowering and relieving at the same time.  She had always been bothered about wondering how do I look.   At her mothers eulogy she wore this old blouse she found in the closet and wondered to herself who is going to tell me that this is ok to wear.  She had just got an iPhone and wondered as she was uploading her pictures if she could send out a blind survey to friends asking how she looked.  The idea for Honestly Now was launched.

It was 2009 and her partner came along six months later.  She knew she wanted the site to have structure and allow the users to keep their questions private.  As people began to use it she realized having a more public site was the way to go.  Although other similar sites were being launched she kept at it gearing Honestly Now to the 30-50 year old audience.  Through fundraising the initial site became a more complex idea.  Honestly Now got funded which for any first time entrepreneur that is empowering as someone else believes in what you are trying to create.  There are now four people working in the company, the product is socially integrated, questions have their unique urls and the audience continues to grow.

I am a huge fan of Terezas.  Her career including her family ties to Eastern Europe is very much a part of who Tereza is.  She has bravado and her willingness to roll up her sleeves and do whatever it takes to succeed in her business while juggling life as a mother of two (great and supportive husband on the sidelines) is dazzling.  It is impressive how she has quickly become a leader and voice of women in the tech community of NYC.  I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with her and not only enjoyed listening to her story again but her insight into being a woman entrepreneur.  As I told Tereza when she got funded, I hope Honestly Now hits one out of the ballpark. 

Sue spent some of her earlier years in Chicago because her father was getting his Phd at University of Chicago.  He then got a job managing all the Asian investments for Hyundai and they found themselves moving to New Jersey and eventually back to Korea.  When her father returned to Korea her mother stayed in the US with the kids because of the education.  That ended up being a six year separation which was hard on everyone.  They would see each other in the summer and holidays but that was it and it was hard on everyone and so after six years of this the whole famiily moved back to Korea. 

Sue's first language is Korean, second English which she didn't even begin to learn until pre-school.  Her parents only spoke Korean in the house, had Korean playdates and went to a Korean church. Her brother was born in the US but Sue was not.  For her brother, he could go to an American school but for Sue she had to go to a Korean speaking school  It was a rote memorization type school.  After leaving basically an all-black school in Chicago and then going to a Korean speaking traditional school wasn't easy.  Her parents realized that she should go to boarding school back in the US.  They chose an all girls school; Madeira in VA.  When it was time for her brother to go to school they had already learned which school made the most sense.  Alas, the oldest is always the guinea pig.

After graduating Madeira Sue decided to go to Africa for a year to teach English to understand different cultures and continents.  The tsunami hit and her parents said said no way are you going to Africa so instead she returned to Korea.  She got a job doing secretarial work at an electronic trading company and after a few months moved quickly into programming. 

She took school very seriously but her carpal tunnel syndrome was impeding her life.  Sue was going to take off some time in high school because of her carpel tunnel syndrome as over time it was getting worse.  At this point she had been to a variety of doctors and had tried a variety of things.  Her parents had a connection to a famous accunpunturist in Korea.  This guy was so good that he would continually move after he retired because he would get up in the morning and there would be 30 people sitting at his door.  Sue went to see him and after two treatments she was fixed.  Her had retired and because Sue was planning on being a doctor she begged him to let her learn from him but he said no.  She called him Grandfather. 

Sue left Korea and began at University of Chicago as a pre-med student.  Two quarters in and the acupuncturist, Grandfather, finds out he is very sick and tells Sue if she wants she can come back to Korea and learn his ways. She put school on hold and spent the next 8 months learning acunpunture. She also programmed study guides for her to review his techniques. She worked doing electronic programming of what he was doing.  Unfortunately he died and she returned ot the University of Chicago to continue her medical studies.  During school she also worked in a hospital and a bio-chemistry lab.  She was working the entire time she was in college because her parents both became unemployed and she was supporting them as well as putting herself through college.

She had one year left and her brother was going to be in college that year too and financially things began to spiral.  How could they find the money to get them both through college including just the day to day expensives and leave with as little debt as possible.  If it was a mortgage you would look everywhere you could to find the best price but for some reason she found it frustrating that only a few options were put in front of you.  It was then that Sue thought about building an application to troll the web for the best loans possible.   

She knew she had a business there and went to the Kaufman Foundation and other non-profits to ask for funding.  She knew she could build something big and needed a partner.  Originally started by building a website focused on helping consumers compare student loans.  They pivoted by essentially expanding to help consumers manage the entire financial aid process.  They were unable to raise capital as a non-profit and changed the business model to a for-profit business and begun to raise money from angel and venture investors.

How did she go about finding her partners?  Sue started using her social network, Craigs List and Linkedin.  She was still coming up dry.  On Valentines Day she put her name on OKCupid thinking maybe through that she would find a business partner.  That was how she found Sam.  They had been talking and finally got together to finally meet face to face about three hours before meeting with the CEO of OKCupid who happened to be involved with the Excelerate program.  Her and Sam had never really prepped for this.   She was talking about the concept for about 25 minutes and the CEO of OKCupid turns to Sam, who has the title of CTO, and asks what would it take for you to come on full time.  Sam responds that in order to quit his day job they would need cash.  The CEO of OKCupid asked Sam, "if I write you a check for $15k right now on the behalf of Excelerate, would you give two weeks notice?"  Sam had literally just met Sue three hours ago.  He paused and said, "yes".  They were both immediately excpted to Excelerate.

They have a great group of investors from SF, Chicago and NYC.  They have created a variety of products including one that helps people manage their monthly payments based on what they borrowed and that part is a paid model.  Suppose you get into 5 schools and you want a place to consolidate all of your financial aid in one place and be able to connect with the financial aid officers of each school.  Alltuition makes that happen.  Loans should be a last resort and Alltuition makes it easy from soup to nuts so people can concentrate on what really matters....focusing on their education.