Breaking the glass ceiling is an ambiguous metaphor, as glass debris may fall on your head. So don’t stay inside, get out the building, and look at the sky: that’s what “fearless” women entrepreneurs do!

Keep on relentlessly: Starting a company is risky. It would be reckless for women, just like for men, to be unafraid. Yet, do not let fear stop you. Pursue your goal and be relentless, i.e. stubborn with a purpose.

Define success for you: Thinking “too small” or thinking “big” aren’t what matters. Size your initiative based on what you feel comfortable with, execute on your vision, i.e. build, deliver, and grow.

Ask for help: We are used to doing things by ourselves and handling work overload just to show that we are able to do it. But this is not the only way, or the best. Delegate, delegate, delegate!

Be beautiful: Beauty comes in multiple forms, ranging from outside prettiness to sheer internal charisma. Off-putting or boring faces are do not have to be a business paradigm for women (neither is it for men). Doing business is the art of communicating. So smile!

Make it a personal duty to help other women: First generations of women entrepreneurs may be interesting because of what they sometimes endured, but they are inspiring only if they make it easier for other women to succeed. Change comes one person at a time.

Yes, there are a lot of women support groups, but there can’t be too many as long as the percentage of businesses started by women remains so low. Feel free to post this on your blog in part or in full.

Last Friday, Marian Scheuer Sofaer invited a few friends for a breakfast in Palo Alto, CA with Gloria Feldt, who presented her now famous book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power. A great intimate setting early in the morning that did not diminish Gloria’s energy and determination to fight for the cause of women: “Women today,” she said, “are in the midst of an unfinished revolution.” While it is true that women have come a long way (“maybe”), parity is still not here – women’s salaries are still lower than men’s, and as of September 2010, the United States ranks 73^rd among 186 countries in its percentage of women serving in national parliaments (not to mention the dismal percentage of women in the boardrooms, etc.). “Women need to lead their own way forward.”

Gloria Feldt states the problem unambiguously: “By far the most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers and with the intention sufficient to transform society’s major institutions once and for all.” The former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (who had given birth to three children by the age of 20), Gloria Feldt offers a relevant flashback on Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who opened a birth control clinic in 1916. Not only did she transform her convictions into actions, she did not ask for permission: she did it.

The book evolves around a very interesting analysis of the relationship of women to power. Most of the time, “power” boils down to being a demonstration of force, through attitudes, rhetorical means and the like; in other words, the word denotes a “power over” things, situations, or people. This is a vision of power with which women are traditionally uncomfortable, as it reeks of centuries of servitude and bullying. Implicitly getting back to the actual etymology of the word, Gloria Feldt exhorts women to understand the term as designating “the ability to,” and speaks of a “power to…” This means: the capacity to accomplish things, and before anything else, the faculty of ridding oneself from the fear of coming across in an unfeminine fashion or a sort of “bluestocking.” This latter is a term that ended up being used derisively to stigmatize educated women in the 18^th century, targeting the members of the Blue Stockings Society, an important educational and social movement created in England by Elizabeth Montegu (and to which the first woman-programmer in history, Ada Byron Lovelace belonged!)

“Power-to” is the new responsibility of women. They have the responsibility to take advantage of what the fight of other women has granted them over the course of the 20^th century and pursue the cause by resisting fear and speaking up — especially as results already speak for them. Catalyst, Ernst & Young, the World Bank and McKinsey have clearly acknowledged an improved efficiency in organizations including at least 30% of women at the top.

The book provides a wide range of tactical tools and ways for women to overcome recurring demons (such as the feeling of not being “quite ready” to apply to a given job, for example) and ends up with a forceful exhortation: “Don’t follow your dream — lead it.” While it may be true that women often do not have the same “track record” as men, often because the road has been more difficult for them, it’s also true that they can make up for time lost efficiently.

Many of the case studies are inspiring. Don’t try to tread a “fine line” or compromise indefinitely, as did Hillary Clinton in many respects. Lean forward. True, it’s hard for women CEO to take a long maternity leave, but at least we can decide to own our bodies, and we can decide to have kids on our own terms. It’s up to women to organize to make sure that if women retreat from the workforce temporarily, we help them come back. So let’s not conclude that parenthood and powerful careers are incompatible, or brazenly declare that “Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children.”

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