Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.
Aileen Lee
You have to get under the hood and spend some quality time with someone to understand what they're really good at.
If you're a digital startup, building and highlighting your social proof is the best way for new users to learn about you.
Seed stage is an investment area that is really important for early stage startups. It feels like there is a need for trusted, experienced people to work with and to guide startups at this level.
Immigrants play a huge role in the founding and value creation of today's tech companies. We wonder how much more value could be created if it were easier to get a work visa.
History suggests the 2010s will give rise to a super-unicorn or two that reflect the key tech wave of the decade, the mobile web.
Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.
We used to tie-dye T-shirts and sell them to classmates. We used to make egg rolls and sell them at street fairs. I worked at the mall. My parents probably spent more money on the gas driving me to different jobs than I made.
What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.
Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest growing, and most valuable consumer Internet and e-commerce companies.
When I go visit my mom in the retirement community where my parents live, she has a bunch of friends, and she will say, 'These neighbors I play bridge with have a son with an idea,' and it goes from there.
It's awesome that you have a female CFO and a female GC, but if you look at the investing partners, and it's 15 dudes, I do think those people are going to get left behind if they don't get with where the world is going.
Women are thought to be more social, more interested in relationships and connections, better at multi-tasking.
Starbucks did this magical thing where it took a product that people didn't really care that much about and made it this treat. It makes you feel better about your day and gives you a chance to reflect, makes you feel a little special.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web.
Male founders who come across as Type B are more likely to get the benefit of the doubt.
Sequoia is a firm that a lot of people across tech and the Valley look to, and I think they're setting an important example in adding new diversity to their team.
I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.
Super early-stage companies have a village that form around them for support.
Why do investors seem to care about 'billion dollar exits?' Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies.
My dad was a dentist; my mom managed his office.
I've learned that you really cannot judge a book by its cover.
I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.
Relative to all the start-ups out there, getting a valuation of $1 billion is rarely accomplished.
I think it's embarrassing for our industry that we have such low diversity across senior-level management at all of the mainstream, top-tier venture capital firms.
Women are going to be a huge force in developing Web and mobile companies.
Having been a venture-backed CEO, and having an established background in working with consumer-focused companies, I've built a strong network of entrepreneurs and people who can help startups.
Consider the social proof of a line of people standing behind a velvet rope, waiting to get into a club. The line makes most people walking by want to find out what's worth the wait. The digital equivalent of the velvet rope helped build viral growth for initially invite-only launches like Gmail, Gilt Groupe, Spotify, and Turntable.fm.
I have a tremendous network of friends and colleagues at other firms.
I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.
I'm a first-born child of a Chinese immigrant family, I grew up on the East Coast. And I have to admit, I did not grow up around technology.
There needs to be more deliberate effort on the part of folks at VC firms to bring in a more diverse team of talent. You have to make a more concerted effort to bring in people who are different and who may not be in your network.
Starting a company and being a founder is really hard, and most companies fail. You really have to have a deep commitment and belief in it and be willing to see it through many ups and downs.
There's an opportunity to make your board - and your company - smarter by adding diversity, especially of gender.
I grew up in New Jersey and played sports and rode my bike around. It was a really nice time - kids didn't have cellphones then - and you knew everyone in the town.
If a firm hasn't hired a single female partner in its history, I don't think it will finally happen by accident.
The role and importance of females in companies can make a big difference.
The question for Dropbox is whether, when they run out of private sources for funding, they will be able to maintain that valuation when they go to public sources for funding and their valuation is set on the public markets.
I appreciate the sacrifices my dad made. I went to a great public high school.
The reality is that in a tech environment that is 90 percent to 100 percent male, it's not super-encouraging for females to be successful. It's just a lot of things that contribute to that: things that people do or things that people say that they may not realize have unintended consequences.
A lot of the entrepreneurs and founders have big dreams and are on a mission to build things that the world has never seen before.
If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.
There is very little diversity among founders in the Unicorn Club.
You can't get into the trap of paying for customer acquisition.
Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns - companies that could change your life to work at or invest in if you're not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder.
What's the word to describe the thing that all of us are trying to do, which is to found or work for or invest in a company that is the winner of all winners?
Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.
Some investors may grumble about entrepreneurs wanting 'unicorn valuations.' But let's be honest: most investors want them, too, and are supporting the massive capitalization of these companies.
When companies are private, founders can share more about their future dreams with investors; report less; and the shares are illiquid, constraining short-term changes in valuation.
