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« Silicon Valley: Staid Engineers Avoid Bohemian Gays? | Main | Bravo! I Love You Google! »

Apr 29, 2004

Comments

kirsten

Rock solid post, Evelyn. And great insight. Many women-led firms, particularly those with lower burn rates and operational costs, don't need VC backing. And often times loans can be aa better choice based on your business model. Wishing you all the best wit your goal to maximize and optimize revenue per team member. Let re:invention know how we can help you with your efforts!

Suhit Anantula

Evelyn:

I like the idea of making an impact which matters . This for me is also the most important thing.

Suhit

Yvonne DiVita

As a whole, I think women are supportive of each other, and I think we deserve funding from banks or VCs if we have our business plan in order and we can show not only dedication, but creativity and innovation. I found a useful place online to explore funding opportunities which I am going to check out: http://www.womanowned.com/growth/funding/opportunities.htm

Hal O'Brien

Hello, Evelyn. I came over here after your comment on Mitch Kapor's blog.

I think the big conflict of ideas here is one that Joel Spolsky once did a great article about: Do you want to become Ben and Jerry's, or do you want to become Amazon?

He uses Ben and Jerry's as an example of a company that took 20 years to build up, organically, over time. Amazon is his example of a company that tried to do a big "land grab", dominate a field before other folks even quite realize the field exists.

But to me, there's a flip side:

Are you (by "you" I mean the entrepreneur or investor) in business to Make Money Fast!, or to build an institution over time?

To me, the tech sector has historically seen companies go public mostly to Make Money Fast!, not because there was any true need for the company to do so. People have tended to have their "retirement number", or whatever... The amount of money where they would quit being in the workplace altogether.

One of the reasons I think Microsoft generates so much ill feeling toward it is that in an industry where everyone is trying to hit their "retirement number" and cash out, MSFT has always taken the long-term, we're-here-as-an-institution worldview.

This post is feeling very rambly to me as I write it. I hope it made some sense.

Since you appear to have disabled HTML, here's the link to Joel's post:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

Evelyn Rodriguez

Hal,
Thanks for that great link. That is a well-done article on Joel's site. I do think more many women opt for the Ben & Jerry's organic approach. I don't want to say much about my own business idea - but it doesn't fall neatly into either category. It has qualities of Amazon and qualities of Ben & Jerry's. For instance, it doesn't require loads of capital to start off in the first phase. However, I hinted that network effects would come into play (in a later phase). Organic growth could be somewhere in between Ben and Jerry's and Amazon (for instance, follows a Fibonacci sequence). I think there are a few business models that don't fall in either camp.

I'm all for growth, but I'm just not fond of the institutionalized ingrained thinking that is prevalent in public companies.

Part of the reason I was so down on public companies is that if you are doing anything that doesn't fit a "mold" then it is just not understood or appreciated by Wall Street. I'm not in the mood to fight an uphill battle in addition to running a company.

However, I think Google is showing that even that "mold" can be flexed and morphed quite a bit more than I imagined. I was the one that was rigid in my thinking until they pushed the limits in their SEC filing. I think we'll see more people pushing the limits and edges in various directions is what I was implying in Mitch Kapor's blog.

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