Watch The Y Combinator Female Founders Conference Live

If you are not at the Female Founders Conference at the Computer History Museum this afternoon, you are either a guy, out-of-town or one of the many that got turned away from the oversubscribed event.  

This is the first purposefully gender-specific Y Combinator conference and probably the first time the Computer History Museum has seen such a critical mass of women within its walls. The conference is seriously almost all women with an estimated 450 females in attendance.

The schedule has already kicked off and Y Combinator founder Jessica Livingston and Homejoy founder Adora Cheung have already taken the stage, imparting such apropos insights as “If you’re not the technical founder, then your job is everything that’s not technical” and ”It’s best if you’re a user of the solution your startup offers. That way you can have a conversation with your users just by thinking.”

But there are many other female role models (Livingston holds that 2014 is the “tipping point” for women entrepreneurs) who have yet to take the stage, and you can watch them here. Video and schedule below.

SCHEDULE
1:30-2:20pm: Registration

2:20pm-2:40: Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator)

2:40-3:00: Adora Cheung (Homejoy)

3:00-3:25: Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)

3:25-3:45pm: Elli Sharef (HireArt)

3:45-4:05: Kathryn Minshew (The Muse)

Break

4:25-4:55pm: Diane Greene (VMware)

4:55-5:25pm: Fundraising Panel (Danielle Morrill/Mattermark, Ann Johnson/Interana, Jamie Wong/Vayable, Michelle Crosby/Wevorce)

5:25-5:45pm: Elizabeth Iorns (Science Exchange)

5:45-6:05pm: Jessica Mah (inDinero)

6:05-7:00: Closing remarks/Cocktails and appetizers

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2014 Could Be The ‘Tipping Point’ For Female Founders, Says Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston

Y Combinator held its first ever Female Founders Conference Saturday afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In opening remarks, Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston said that the sold-out gathering is “the most over-subscribed event” in the famed startup accelerator’s history.

For an organization whose biannual Demo Days have become known as one of the hottest tickets in Silicon Valley, that is no small feat — and it could signal a sea change in the entrepreneurial landscape.

“Because YC invests so early and is so focused on funding outliers, we tend to see trends first. So when we see that 25 percent of startups in the current Y Combinator batch have female founders, I’m certain something is going on here,” Livingston said. “In any big change there’s always a moment when people think it is a tipping point. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, we feel like 2014 was the tipping point for female founders.”

Livingston kicked off the event by sharing basic advice that she likes to share with all startup founders, such as the importance of having determination, empathy, focus, and thriftiness (the bullet points are in the image above, via an image shared by Twitter user Becky Cruze.) She then entered into more personal territory, sharing more targeted advice specifically for female founders.

“I thought about what advice I’d give to my sister if she were starting a startup,” Livingston said, adding that she had had second thoughts about sharing gender-specific advice in a public forum. “Things can get pretty heated out there on the Internet on the topic of women and tech, and I really agonized about what to do…. but I’m going to risk it and speak candidly.”

Here are the three key pieces of advice Livingston shared for female founders:

Having children and starting a business is hard — but possible.

“Based on my own experience, I’d say it’s easier to start a startup before you have kids,” Livingston, who has two sons aged five and two, said. “In the first few years of YC

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