Entrepreneurs! Speak up! It takes ages to get data from official reports. So getting back to the source of jobs creation, the entrepreneurs themselves, is Chris’s methodology. This is a crowdsourcing approach of sorts that is empowering entrepreneurs to speak up and brag about their ability to create jobs.

Spread the word: Last week, Chris broadcast her initiative via various social media channels, inviting entrepreneurs of any company in the US that is less than 5 years old and employs one or more people to stand up and be counted. The success of the initiative is predicated on people’s initiative to become known. So spread the message as much as you can!

Spread the word to startups of all kinds: We are in Silicon Valley, and we obsess with high tech. Make sure that you encourage all your friends, regardless of the company they are starting, to report their startup jobs counts.

Spread the word in your respective countries: The initiative started by Chris relates to jobs created in the US. So connect with her to start campaigning in your country. Entrepreneurship may be the most positive international virus – or to use a great phrase from my friend Sramana Mitra, it’s definitely the most efficient ”weapon of mass reconstruction.”

I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now its CTO, Jean-Luc Vaillant, on a panel on social media for business organized by the French-American Chamber of Commerce that I moderated. I had little to do, as I had remarkable panelists: Kelly Graham from Cisco, Ken Kaplan from Intel, William Gaultier from e-Storm and Harry McCraken from Technologizer. Jean-Luc was the tech guru of the group. Vibrant, crisp, and guess what? just as business-savvy as everybody else – for he is one of these die-hard engineers for whom building things that work for people is a must.

Although the phrase “social media” did not exist in 1996 (it was coined in 2004 by Chris Shipley), Jean-Luc’s Vaillant’s life in this country is all about social media and social networking. He came from France to the Silicon Valley thanks to a job posting on a newsgroup (comp.lang.c++.thread) that specialized in parallel programming in C++. Although job postings were unwelcome in this tiny world of hyper-techies, somebody from Fujitsu was desperate enough to find an engineer with a strong experience in Solaris, C++, parallel computing, and highly scalable system to take the risk of upsetting the community. This was Jean-Luc’s good fortune, as he was wondering how to come to the US, where he had only spent six months as an intern at Bell Labs. He was hired over the phone and obtained his visa. On November 1, 1996, a date that he still cherishes, he landed in San Francisco with his kids, his wife, and his luggage to join a fascinating project, WorldsAway, a new species of online service and one of the first virtual worlds, “part chat room, part adventure game, part puppet show, part simulation,” which Robert Rossney described extensively for a Wired June 1996 article called Metaworlds. A fabulous experience. “Who doesn’t dream of creating a whole new world?” he likes to say. This was also the beginning of a long-lasting relationship with Reid Hoffman, who was the general manager and product manager for WorldsAway. who left to start Socialnet.com during the Summer of 1997 – Jean-Luc joined him in May 1998.

“I came for a great project, WorldsAway. But the whole thing fizzled away. There was a big problem with the business model, and ultimately, it wasn’t my thing to work for an established company. As soon as I set foot in the Valley, I felt that I had to be part of what this place was really about, new entrepreneurial endeavors. So I joined Socialnet.com enthusiastically.” The company was eventually acquired by Match.com, but it expanded Jean-Luc’s experience in a big way. The focus wasn’t to be part of a newsgroup as he had been, nor was it about building a virtual community as in WorldsAway, it was about matching people to one another, facilitating their ability to connect. To this day he is still proud of the matching engine (”still the best dating matching system IMHO” he writes on his LinkedIn profile) that he built with his team. Incidentally, he also met three of the additional co-founders of LinkedIn, Allen Blue, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri.

“Once an engineer, always an engineer.” Jean-Luc continued to expand his understanding of the social Web. It was not enough to have people connect optimally, maybe they could also share objects. This took him to join Spotlife, which offered a stored video service within Yahoo Mail to bring personal video broadcasting to the masses, and ultimately Logitech (which acquired Spotlife). He became the technical manager for Quicksend, a photo sharing service and took charge of the IM Companion product, a P2P video application for instant messaging. But as extraordinary as Logitech had become under the guidance of Guerrino de Luca, the call for more entrepreneurship was stronger than job security, even if the family had welcomed a third child in 2000. So in 2002, after working for five companies in seven years at an unabated pace, he joined the gang of buddies that was to start LinkedIn.

As he tells it: “We were brainstorming on what our next startup would be and around the Summer of 2002, Reid pinged me on a new idea. The idea was to create a company around the Internet consumer without having to get a crazy amount of funding to acquire members. At the time there were companies like Hot or Not with a traffic explosion, but they had no way to monetize. Between us all we had an amazing experience on all the aspects of viral marketing on Internet as well as the social networking power of the Web. So we created a prototype. In the beginning it was supposed to be a sort of week-end hobby. But very quickly, Reid felt that there were other companies in our space. We were faced with the risk that somebody would be first on the market. Ryze.com was founded late 2001 by Adrian Scott to help people leverage their business networks. Plaxo launched in November 2002. We had to get serious and we did. We all decided to leave our day job. The company was launched in December 2002 and by March 2003 the core team was in place.” The rest is history. LinkedIn is the most valuable business social network, and potentially, a critical platform for any consistent business-driven social media strategy. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc remains incredibly simple and I am impressed to see how open he was to the questions or suggestions of numerous budding entrepreneurs sitting in the room where I moderated my panel.

Social Media 101

With a title that contains “101,” you might think that the purpose is to provide basic, introductory information to social media. If this is what you are looking for, you may want to read Social Media Marketing for Dummies, a very insightful book by Shiv Singh published in October 2009. Here, the expression “101″ is used in a broader sense, referring more to what you may want to do or think about as you experience what it means to live in a social media world. For example, Chris Brogan gives you 50 blog topics that you may want to pick from if you are a marketer writing for your company. Or, if you are an artist-entrepreneur, a favorite topic of mine, read Brogan’s excellent three pages about how pianist Grace Nikae leverages social media to build up, and connect to, her audience. As a general rule, the book primarily addresses intermediate users, who have a smattering of knowledge about social media, but want to assess where they are at, and get an overall perspective of the landscape before they move further. The most efficient posts in this book focus on what I would call “traditional” social media, i.e. what was around when Chris Shipley created the expression in 2004 – blogs. I would also tend to agree that blogs are, in many respects, the 101 of Social Media, its foundational component.

Because it is a collection of posts, the book is not designed around any specific thesis, and instead, recounts the experiences of an author who states his opinions, casually, always avoiding controversy. Any debate is left to the readers to handle: “I ask you: “Who benefits from Facebook’s Social Graph data?” Brogan writes. In the same fashion, “customer service needs new channels… or does it?” In the end, most personal stands are tempered down quite oecumenically, which dissociates “personal branding” from any personal profession of faith. Yes, “social media” is, first and foremost, a social game (very nice section on Social Networks as Your Local Pubs), for which you want to develop effective “tactics and tips to develop your business online,” as the subtitle says. So why would you alienate existing or potential customers?

One of my favorite sentences in Trust Agents (which I discussed in an earlier post) was related to a quote from David Maister:  ‘‘A book is like a big, thick, impressive $25 business card,’’ that the authors (Chris Brogran had a co-author, Julien Smith) see as “old word credibility. We know that blogging and new media, while useful to us and to all the people we are in business with, just isn’t as creadible to the gatekeepers at the top of the hill.” In this book, I like this sentence: “For every 10 pundits, we should have an original thinker.”

This is a book that you will enjoy reading – much like you may enjoy Chris Brogan’s blog. There are a lot of useful references to all sorts of interesting blogs and people. Missing perhaps: a bibliography at the end of the book.

Lovely cover with a fifties touch (CSA Plastock/Getty Images). Social Media is a one-to-one connection to people, just as the old telephone, except that sounds can be indefinitely replicated. So don’t shout (lest you want to manage saturation). Smile.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.

I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.

While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.

Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).

Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.

Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.

To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

(1) Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Mattersby Scott Rosenberg, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,by Shel Israel and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do busines by Erik Qualman are three books that I discussed in earlier posts. 

(2) http://www.ruderfinn.com/rfrelate/intent/intent-index.html

(3) More about ObjectiveMarketer. The product will be presented at BlogWorld on the Alltop booth (October 15-17, http://www.blogworldexpo.com)

I already spoke twice about Sramana Mitra – the reality is that she writes a lot and here she is again with the third volume of Entrepreneur Journeys: Entrepreneur Journeys v.3: Positioning: How To Test, Validate, And Bring Your Idea To Market.

Sramana chooses four domains for this book: Going Vertical, Cloud Computing, Collaboration and Content Publishing. As usual, she illustrates each topic with case studies — more specifically, with interviews of entrepreneurs who recount how they approach their respective markets and address them adequately — responding to real expectations and trying to do it better than their competitors. What makes TheFind a more satisfactory experience than Like.com, for example? This is one of the topics that founder Siva Kumar had to think about. What are the secrets of Kosmix’s or Stardoll’s customer acquisition strategies, or of the integrated advertorial campaigns at Glam (headed by an old friend of mine, Samir Arora)?

Cloud computing under its various forms, Sofware-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or Data-as-a-service (DaaS), continues to re-architect the industry. Sramana warns her native country: “the cloud computing mega-trend plays against India’s tradition of answering all scaling problems with more bodies.”  Meanwhile, Ken Rudin (LucidEra) wants to shake up the somewhat stagnant business intelligence industry. To understand a successful roll-up strategy, read the story of Mike Cordano and Keyur Patel, the co-founders of Fabrik, acquired by Hitachi, earlier this year, and to optimally operate in overcrowded or difficult spaces, take a look at Ken Plunkett’s journey at Salary.com, Jim Heeger’s value proposition at PayCycle — or, in an entirely different world (gaming), at John Welch (PlayFirst).

These entrepreneurs may come from any country: Umberto Milletti (InsideView) was born in Italy; they may have started with traditional jobs: Steve Adams (Sabrix) used to teach English and Kevin Weiss (iUniverse) spent 17 years at IBM. They can even be a VC, such as Brian Jacobs from Emergence Capital! They all like challenges and do not hesitate to take on big players as does Sharat Sharan (ON24), D.D. Ganguly (DimDim), or to venture into bourgeoning markets where others are already staking claims as Jeff Housenbold (Shutterfly). In all cases, these entrepreneurs have a passion for what they do and are comfortable answering questions related to their value proposition, their competitive positioning and pricing. They are on top of the sales cycle and messaging. They know how to qualify leads and have clear execution roadmaps.

You will enjoy reading this book and will easily relate to the entrepreneurs that Sramana interviews. When you are done, take the time to try to respond to each of the questions listed in her “Appendix: Clarify your story.” This may be a grueling exercise — but do go out there before you have real answers! 

I like this book. I only regret one thing — the very small number of women entrepreneurs throughout this book series. Now wonder, though. As Chris Shipley wrote again a year ago “fewer than 10 percent of venture-based technology companies have a woman on the founding team.”(http://www.demo.com/community/?q=node/20448)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

My posts about the two first volumes of Entrepreneur Journeys:

http://delbourg-delphis.com/2009/05/sramana-mitra-bootstrapping-weapon-of-mass-reconstruction/

http://delbourg-delphis.com/2008/11/sramana-mitra-entrepreneur-journeys/

Each culture has its ideal cities, communities, phalanxes, religious, economic or political wonderlands as well as its Fata Morgana kingdoms. We have our own form of utopia, Twitterville. It could have been Twittertown, Twitterburg, Twitterborough or Twitterpolis. No, it’s Twitterville. Shel Israel prefers to use the French suffix ville, derived from the Latin “villa,” an estate on the outskirts of a city, with a ” homey, small-town feel.” Yet, the minute you enter the place, you find out that Twitterville is a kind of sprawling environment, “a global neighborhood” made of an infinity of the smaller neighborhoods that Twitterville citizens select to create for themselves, depending on their business or personal interests. They follow and/or are followed by other citizens from the most diverse vicinities in the comfort of their home. In a way, this Utopia is really what the word actually means: a no-place that is nowhere, but in anyone’s mind, unconstrained by geography. However, instead of emanating from a single thinker, à la Thomas Moore, it sprang out from a wave that Chris Shipley from the Guidewire Group called “social media” in 2004 [1] and “materialized” as it is by a software platform (Twitter), Twitterville is a fully crowdsourced utopia. 

Shel Israel takes us through Twitterville with the fervor of a proud resident and engaged storyteller — eventually adding autobiographical details to enliven his narrative. And here we have in one breath an archeology of Twitterville, the history of its first settlers, famous people, unknown entities or businesses of all sizes, and dozens of Twitter addresses for the reader to try. He takes us though a chronicle of local adventures and mishaps as well as successful interactions between users and notoriously unfriendly providers both on earth and in the skies – and we can only wonder what U-Haul can do to recover from its repeated blunders or Motrin from the headaches that the brand created for itself. For, in Twitterville, bad rap might last just as long as they did in old-time villages. Everybody talks in the megalopolis and news, good or bad, true or false, uncontrollably propagate. Twitterville is all about conversation, i.e. any talk from babble to debate, and as a result, conversational marketing as much about reputation as it is about content.

Twitterville is not simply a marketing manual and is often really entertaining: it is a collection of stories for whomever wants to have a feel of what it is like to live in Twitterville and experience its continuously morphing precincts and innumerable downtowns. The conversational marketing manifesto side of the book comes across as summary rules and principles by which twitterers abide to be part of the community. In many respects, Twitterville is a free-style sequel to Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, a book that Shel Israel wrote with Robert Scoble. However, while Naked Conversations discussed how to talk to people and customers through blogs, Twitterville is more about how to talk with people as you talk to them. “Spinning and targeting are outmoded,” and selling products is not the starting point of a conversation, only the symbol of an established social relationship. Basically Twitterville makes us rediscover the beautiful ambiguity and complexity of the definition of the word “commerce” which refers to 1) a “social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions, or sentiments”
 and 2) the “exchange or buying and selling of commodities on a large scale involving transportation from place to place.”[2]

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=105&STORY=/www/story/07-22-2004/0002215949

[2] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commerce

More about Shel Israel

http://www.redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/information.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Israel

A few days ago, I had lunch with Chris Shipley. I remember being impressed by her when Stewart Alsop introduced her to me when she became the Executive Producer of DEMO. Very few women were likely to hold such a highly visible position in the high-tech industry in 1996 (and there may not be too many today either). Thirteen years later, after watching thousands of products, helping hundreds of companies, she is really the same person: soft-spoken, matter-of-fact, quietly observant of everything around her and gently humorous. However secure she may be in her judgment, she remains incredibly humble. Of course, others are more than happy to speak up for her. As Marc Benioff told me, “Chris has been a provocateur and industry visionary that has driven all of us forward in important new ways.”

DEMO: Watching the entire High-Tech market… One of the most striking characteristics of Chris is her rare ability to master multiple areas of the high-tech industry and select companies for DEMO that represent a large range of technologies and applications and address multiple market sectors. While most analysts and pundits tend to focus on one main trend or try to seize “the” next big thing, Chris is more interested in finding the patterns that, at a given time, build up the overall industry landscape in its actual diversity, all the more so as most users have more than one need at a time. Whether she looks (or looked) at salesforce.com, VMware, Xfire, Glam, WebEx, Blurb, Six Apart, at an infrastructure play or a Web 2.0 application, she wants to find the products that will make a difference in the life of people, be they John Doe or IT folks. Alsop, “who always likes to take credit for hiring Chris to run DEMO,” as he told me, remembers that what went into his decision to select her (”one of the best decisions I ever made, obviously),” was primarily this: “Reading what Chris wrote about products, I always had the feeling that she had an intuitive sense about products and how customers would react to them. And that’s the critical element in putting DEMO together every year.”

The reality is that in 1996 when she started, there were significantly fewer products to look at, and fewer trends to follow, and one can only marvel at her capability to work around the clock, decipher the meaning and the value of some products despite the dismal presentations entrepreneurs sometimes make, and figure out potentially emerging trends through eventually half-baked concepts — while keeping away from fads or ephemeral flashy ideas. Having a nose for a few winning companies here and there is one thing that deserves lots of kudos. Exhibiting such prolonged leadership and perceptiveness as Chris has for so long at the helm of one of the most famous high-tech conferences in the world and whose choices are scrutinized and commented by hundreds of competent observers twice a year is a whole different game. Only a handful of extraordinarily insightful VCs have delivered a similar continuous performance.

“All-around startup enthusiast...” That’s how Chris describes herself. Chris will hand the DEMO baton over to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat in the Fall, and focus exclusively on her own startup, the Guidewire Group, that she co-founded with Mike Sigal in 2004. “DEMO is a great platform. Lots of companies. Lots of ideas,” she says. “Yet, DEMO only allows a certain level of engagement. With The Guidewire Group, I can go much further. I love working with young companies because with the right people and a right idea in an early market, it’s all discovery and invention and that’s intellectually very interesting. You can have a bigger impact.”

Chris definitely knows how to speak to entrepreneurs — mostly because her leadership starts with the ability to listen. While it is easy when you have such breadth and wealth of experience to become somewhat overwhelming, Chris is especially gifted in guiding them, starting from their own perspective to smoothly steer them towards a better assessment of where they are at and what they can do. I especially liked her speech at the closing of a recent French Tech Tour where she was inviting the audience to the Guidewire Group’s Innovate!Europe Showcase. While she could have dogmatically listed the Do’s and Dont’s when venturing to the United States, she presented a well thought-out slideshow of the Christopher Columbus enterprise. Yes, “It takes time,” she reminded the audience, “to become an ‘overnight success’”, but you will eventually manage it. “Isabel rejected Columbus three times before finally backing his venture.”

Originally from the East Coast, Chris is a Silicon Valley guru. Although the Valley is unambiguously the hotbed of entrepreneurship (with 52% of start-up companies created by immigrant founders), Chris doesn’t wait for all the entrepreneurs who might benefit from coming over here to just show up with their suitcases and their dreams. They need to have a better idea of what to expect — or simply be able to remotely benefit from the accumulated knowledge of the Valley’s unique ecosystem. So, she travels and reaches out for them in their own countries: “The Valley doesn’t have a lock on innovation,” she writes in her DEMOletter (http://www.demo.com/community/?q=node/285976). “Smart ideas are inspired by a range of experiences.” The Guidewire Group’s Going Global workshops for Innovate!Europe (http://www.innovate-events.com) are extremely successful. At the time of our lunch, she was getting ready to fly to Taipei. Chris is definitely open to the “rest of the world,” first because she is extremely cultivated, and secondly because she is curious. Incidentally, she seems to be an habitué of Dehillerin, Paris’s oldest and probably most famous cookware shop.

Chris is one of the most successful women in the high-tech industry, although “fewer than 10 percent of venture-based technology companies have a woman on the founding team.” I like the fact that this statistic doesn’t lead her to simply declare (http://www.demo.com/community/?q=node/20448) that it is because “venture is a male-dominated business dismissive, if not outright hostile, toward women [...] Women-founded startups are often, in my experience,” she states, “a different breed and have a different funding need. In fact, many young women benefit more from mentor capital than venture capital, at least in the earliest days of their young companies’ lives.” One thing is certain, though: “I do want to encourage young women to entrepreneurship of any type,” says Chris — who had been at the board of the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives (http://www.fweande.org) for almost ten years!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

More about Chris Shipley:

http://www.cshipley.com/

http://www.demo.com

http://www.guidewiregroup.com