Keen On… Hacking Gender: How Women In Silicon Valley Can Become Jane Bond

Next StoryCoupons.com Files For $100M IPO On The NYSE, Trading As CoupFacebookTwitterLinkedInWomen in Silicon Valley With Nilofer Merchant

Despite incremental improvements, the gender bias issue in Silicon Valley remains an important one. Last month, in response to the furor over an interview about female hackers, Paul Graham announced a conference dedicated to female founders. But I beat Graham to it, producing a sold-out event last week at the San Francisco office of BloombergBETA entitled Hacking Gender.

One my panelists was the very successful writer, social media guru and public speaker Nilofer Merchant whose email signature line says: “Sent. By. Bond. Jane Bond, that is”. So I asked Merchant how all women in the Valley can, like her, become Jane Bond and overcome bias.

“Have grit,” she advises. And “perseverance”. What women (and men) need to understand, she says, is that “bias exists.” It’s ingrained in Silicon Valley and results in women not being seen by men. And so they don’t get jobs or investments or leadership roles.

But Merchant does see things improving. While she thinks that Graham needs to admit he’s biased, she is much more positive about Marc Andreessen’s recent confession on Twitter that only 11% of his followers are women. That’s how you hack gender, Merchant says, by acknowledging the problem, talking about it publicly and then trying to fix it.

View the Original article

Silicon Valley Lost, and Found

Silicon Valley is a place that is just as much about people reinventing themselves as it is about people reinventing industries.

As a new year turns, it’s time to go through that silly (but actually necessary) exercise of pausing to reflect. In a world of endless e-mail and distractions, it’s hard to remember where we came from, or where we are collectively going. For better and worse, Silicon Valley suffers from a perpetual loss of memory.

I have three simple stories about reinvention, that hopefully present a historical arc of this place. They belong to my family. For three generations, we have come here — before the orchards were cut down for silicon chip factories, before the chip makers left for Asia, before the dot-com era transformed warehouses into startup offices and before drones and Bitcoin.

1930s-1960s: Hard Sciences

Even though the “Silicon Valley” moniker only came into existence in the 1970s, this place’s history as a technology hub is about a century old. The establishment of Stanford and the University of California system along with generous federal research funding formed an initial pool of talent in the 1930s through 50s.

After escaping Russian pogroms as persecuted Jews during the turn of the 20th century, my great-grandparents managed to make it to Ellis Island. To make ends meet during the Great Depression, they ran a grocery and Jewish deli in Los Angeles. My grandfather used to tell me stories of 5-cent hamburgers and being cast as a Liszt-piano playing extra in the Frank Sinatra film “Anchors Aweigh” when he was a teenager.

They never had much, so my grandfather ran out of money after four quarters of college and had to drop out of Stanford. He left to join a small electronics company back in Los Angeles to work on frequency meters and to help the family out with money.

It took him about nine years to come back and finish. It was a setback, but along the way he met my grandmother. He didn’t get his bachelor’s degree until he was 30 — an age that some people might be written off in this forever youth-obsessed industry.

View the Original article

Silicon Valley Hustle: Former Motionloft CEO Accused Of Defrauding Investors

Advertisement

Thanks to a series of high-profile exits and a generally frothy financing environment, it’s not unusual to see startup founders spending money lavishly these days. But the story of Motionloft and its founder Jon Mills could serve as a cautionary tale, especially for unsavvy investors drawn to a big payout.

On the surface, Mills seemed like a successful entrepreneur. His company, Motionloft, provided real-world analytics for store and property owners who needed to analyze pedestrian and vehicle traffic that passed by their respective establishments.

Mills was a first-time entrepreneur, but he had received backing from high-profile investors like Mark Cuban, and according to the Motionloft website, the company had secured clients like CVS, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Cushman & Wakefield.

Several former friends say Mills was also fun to be around and generous about inviting them to party with him at various music festivals and in places like Las Vegas.

All of which is why, when Mills started asking friends if they wanted to invest in his company, a few of them jumped at the opportunity.

They say Mills cashed checks that altogether were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, promising them a small percentage of the company. Later, when he told them an acquisition was imminent, they felt confident they had made the right decision.

Mills is no longer part of Motionloft, and the validity of the investments his friends made while he was there is being called into question by earlier investors. As a result, after months of waiting, those friends now believe that not only was there no acquisition, but that it is possible they won’t get any of their money back.

We’ve spoken with Mills, and the former CEO admits to leaving the company in November. But he also says that all money he took as investment from friends was legitimate and used for company expenses, and he denies telling friends the company was going to be acquired.

New Investors

It all started in early 2013. Around the time of the Super Bowl, sources say Mills told some friends he had a couple of Motionloft “advisor points” he could use at will, enabling them to buy a small percentage of the company. For some, he also dangled the possibility of an acquisition that would make the investment pay off.

“He told me, ‘Mark Cuban said to pick two good friends who could afford

View the Original article