Should Very Young and Older Entrepreneurs Curb Their Enthusiasm?

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Adela Rogers

J. D. Harrison writes: During an event last week about entrepreneurship, William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, played devil’s advocate.

Not surprisingly, a movement has emerged over the last couple years to support entrepreneurship specifically among older individuals.

Karen Mills, the former head of the Small Business Administration, spearheaded the push with new programs tailored for what she called “encore entrepreneurs.” Congress has introduced legislation called the Empowering Encore Entrepreneurs Act, calling for more support for business owners over the age of 50. Even AARP has joined the party, partnering with the federal government to develop training programs for older individuals interested in starting a company.

“Boomers have been, and will continue to be, an entrepreneurial generation,” researchers from the Kauffman Foundation, an entrepreneurship research and advocacy group, wrote in a report released last week. “As they work longer and live longer, boomers also will be entrepreneurs for longer.”

But is that really such a good idea?

Galston noted that many boomers’ savings were hit hard by the recession, and today, the average American household now has only around $25,000 in savings and investments (excluding home and pension benefits), as shown in research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. American households comprised of individuals in their 50s and 60s now have markedly smaller net worth on average than similar households in the 1980s.

It stands to reason that older entrepreneurs have a shorter window in which to bounce back financially from a failed business venture. In part, Galston said, it’s that limited recovery time that has resulted in most business owners making the leap while in their 30’s and 40’s.

Galston said: “It is rational to take risks when you are younger. It is less rational to take those same risks when you’re older.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Haw.),raised another important concern about the underlying priorities – rather than the economic implications – of older entrepreneurs starting businesses.

Galston warned that the aging boomer generation may further clog the engine. He noted that, with the retirement of the boomers, the size of the U.S. labor force will shrink over the coming decades, potentially slowing economic output. At the same time, their increased dependency on services like Medicare and Social Security will pose additional problems for the country, further threatening the economy.

Galston argued that baby boomers can play a potentially vital role in the country’s economic and entrepreneurship recoveries – but as investors, not start-up founders and business owners.

Women in High Tech US 1946

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Andi Howe

ENIAC PROGRAMMERS PROJECT

In 1946 six brilliant young women programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret World War II project. They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory—a differential calculus equation—in seconds! Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced; they remained invisible.

The ENIAC Programmers Project has been devoted for nearly two decades to researching their work, recording their stories, and seeking honors for the ENIAC Six—the great women of ENIAC.

The Computers which premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 24, 2014 and details their story.

Featuring Movietone footage of the 1940s and never-before-seen interviews with the ENIAC Programmers, this inspiring story will make students believe that programming careers lie within their grasp, and adults cheer. This is a story lost for almost 70 years about the founding of technologies we cannot live without—by six incredible young women everyone should know!

The ENIAC girls were trained to understand the internal wiring diagrams of the ENIAC machine, and … could diagnose troubles almost down to the individual vacuum tube. Since [they] knew the application and the machine, [they] learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than, the engineer. In a few cases, the local craft knowledge that these female programmers accumulated significantly affected the design of the ENIAC and subsequent computers. ENIAC programmer Betty Holberton recalled one particularly significant episode when she convinced John von Neumann to include a ‘stop instruction’ in the machine: Although initially dismissive, von Neumann eventually recognized the programmer’s legitimate need for such an instruction.

Invest in Women

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Sarah Ruhr writes: “The best thing women in tech can do is to invest in other women,” 500 Startups managing partner Christine Tsai told me. That’s exactly what the early-stage investment firm has been trying to do over the last five years, and it seems to be succeeding.

Its commitment starts with the makeup of the organization itself, but extends into the portfolio companies that 500 backs. Half the managing partners and staff at 500 Startups are women, and at least one-third of the investing team are women. More than a quarter of the companies in the 500 portfolio are led by female CEOs, according to the firm.

It’s also been working to create programs that invest in female-led companies and include more women in the conversation. The firm introduced its 500 Women Angels syndicatei list last fall and pledged to invest $1 million in 10 female-led companies in the portfolio.

Tsai says she is well aware of the sexism and discrimination that often plagues Silicon Valley. She’s witnessed the occasional remark about a female VC’s breasts and heard the stories of pregnant female founders being questioned about how serious they are about their careers by potential investors.

But rather than talk about the problem, Tsai says we need to put our money where our mouth is.

“There is a problem but we need to focus on the positive by getting more women in VC and investment roles and invest in the women,” she says.

Other accelerators such as Y Combinator have pledged to include more women and diversity in its ranks. Nearly 20 percent of all YC-funded startups have a woman on the founding team. Four of the full-time partners are also women.

500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure says he’s already been working on recognizing women in tech for the last five years and will continue to do so.

“We are committed to working with women. We are investing in women because we want to make money and we feel they have been overlooked. Others have been touting it, but we haven’t really been publicizing it,” he told me. “Is this self-promotional? Sure as hell is. But the numbers speak for themselves.”

Baidu Competes with Alibaba in China

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, doesn’t have to worry about Google. Google gave up the Chinese market when they ran into censorship issues.

In part because people are sarching via apps on smartphones instead of computers, and also because Alibaba and Tencent are nipping at their heels Baidu is spreading its wings.

Already it has devised an excellent voice-recognition system for Mandarin. It has invented smart chopsticks which can detect food that’s gone bad. They have their own version of Google’s smart spectacles. Baidu recently opened a research center in SIlicon Valley headed by Andrew Ng, a pioneer in artificial intelligence.

They are also investing in outsdie innovators. They have put money in Pixeillot, a firm that makes software to enhance online videos. Baidu ust put money in a Finnish firm that does enhanced mapping.

And they have invested in Uber. Despite its troubles in various countries, Uber is entering China as an upper end provider with big, comfortbale cars. Alibaba and Tencent have a duopoly on taxi-hailing apps.

Baidu chairman is close to the government and may have been assured that Uber is not at risk of being shut down in China.

The Gates’ Bet on the Future of the Globe

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Fifteen years ago, Bill and Melinda Gates made a bet that by backing innovative projects in health and education they could dramatically decrease inequity. They have made progress and continue to bet on the future. Here is there annual letter, which describes the projects and their prospects.

The Gates Big Bet

Win Win Gender Diversity in Silicon Valley?

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Kristin V. Brown writes: As criticisms of Silicon Valley’s largely white male ranks came to a boil last spring, Nicole Sanchez was in the midst of launching a company of her own — a consultancy to help companies’ diversity.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The month Vaya Consulting opened, Google released its lackluster employee diversity data to the public. At Vaya, the calls came pouring in. One company’s public relations nightmare, it turns out, is another woman’s startup.

Vaya is one of a host of upstarts seeking to turn Silicon Valley’s diversity problem into profit — helping tech companies find, recruit and retain a diverse workforce, usually for a hefty fee. Still other companies have recently added diversity services to those already offered.

In tech, diversity is now for sale.

Sanchez and her team helps clients like Pinterest with tasks such as restructuring recruitment and organizing bias training.

At Pinterest, a scrapbooking social network that has a majority of female users, the numbers are a bit better than elsewhere in tech. Overall, 92 percent of its staff is either white or Asian, but 40 percent of the more than 300 employees are women.

But Pinterest suspected that lurking in its hiring and recruiting strategies might be practices that made it harder for female, black, Latino and Native American candidates to make the cut. The company signed deals last week with Vaya, and another startup, Paradigm, to revamp the way it phrases job postings and interview questions.

Gap Jumpers, another diversity startup, sells software that helps tech companies evaluate job candidates based on talent alone.

Sound company Dolby Labs, one of Gap Jumpers’ clients, said it recently hired an engineering intern who probably would have otherwise been passed over due to a lack of experience and academic pedigree.

Gap Jumpers was started in June, and already has eight paying clients and six more testing its product. Its customers pay an annual fee of $2,000 for each hiring manager using the software.

Textio is a new company whose software detects patterns in job postings that might turn off candidates who aren’t white and male.

Entelo, a recruiting software company, added a feature in May that allows hiring managers to run searches for diverse job candidates with specific skills, such as a female software developer with expertise in JavaScript. Annual subscriptions start at $10,000.

Piazza, which makes software that college students use to communicate with professors, introduced a product last fall that lets technology companies find women taking computer science classes. The cost of that service starts at $100,000 a year.

Likewise, Sanchez, of Vaya Consulting, said she has been turning business away — too many companies seem to think hiring her will be a quick solution to a complicated problem.

China: Online Shopping and Drone Delivery

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Andi Howe

The CHinese are shopping on line and leaving malls empty. The online revolution promises to boost productivity and could create 46 million new jobs in China by 2025, many of them higher-skilled, according to a report by New York-based McKinsey & Co. in July. The losers will be as many as 31 million traditional roles, the equivalent of the entire employed population in Britain.

Asia’s largest Internet company is partnering with Shanghai YTO Express Logistics Co. to deliver ginger tea packets to 450 Chinese customers who volunteered for the one-time drone tests, according to an e-mailed statement from Alibaba. Remote-controlled helicopters are expected to distribute 50 parcels from Alibaba’s Taobabo Marketplace in Beijing Wednesday, before moving to Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The flights, if successful and uncontested by authorities, would give the budding commercial drone industry a boost in China, where the military allots only a fifth of the airspace to civilian use. Amazon — the largest Internet retailer by sales – – has begun testing remote deliveries abroad after asking the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to speed approvals for drones tests in Washington state.

Alibaba and YTO said they have notified Chinese aviation authorities about the flights as required by regulation and believed that the deliveries complied with all existing rules.

At least one of the drones was expected to fly from YTO’s warehouse in the eastern outskirts of Beijing and reach the 330 meter (1,100 feet) China World Trade Center in less than an hour. A deliveryman will await the parcel’s arrival on the ground floor and carry it to customer, Jia Yun, a Taobao spokeswoman, said by phone from Beijing.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued regulations to 2009, requiring operators of drones to be identified when applying to use such devices, according to a posting on the agency’s website. Chinese regulators are considering license requirements for drone operators, a step the FAA is also discussing for unmanned commercial flights.

U.S. moves to restrict commercial drones have frustrated Amazon’s plans to fly light packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. Drone use in the U.S. was dealt another setback last month after an operator lost control of a SZ DJI Technology Co.- built quadcopter and it crashed on White House grounds, according to the Secret Service.

Enigma: Women in Science Not Represented in Popular Art

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Adela Rogers

The Bechdel Tests requires a movie to have three basic elements to pass. A film must include: 1) two prominent female characters 2) who have a conversation 3) that is not about a man.

Why do relatively few women occupy high-profile science or technology positions? The problem may not be so much a lack of qualified women, but a question of representation instead.

Joan Clarke, the code-breaker depicted in the recent film The Imitation Game, was just one of numerous female mathematicians who worked at the U.K.’s World War II lab known as Bletchley Park. Women’s contributions to the development of the Mac were been scrubbed from the movie Jobs, and from the space mission in Apollo.

The upshot is that a perceived dearth of women in STEM professions can be partly addressed by ensuring the proper depiction of those who are already working in them.

Women in Silicon Valley?

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Adela Rogers

U.S. citizens create world-beating tech sites like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter — so why can’t agencies like the IRS or Veterans Affairs do the same? The White House’s chief technology officer, Megan Smith, suggested it’s possible, provided the government can attract enough people with a high TQ, or technology quotient, to work there.

Smith points to the emergence of “innovation labs” within agencies as evidence that the government can foster the same sort of skunkworks-style thinking found in Silicon Valley, where Smith made her name as a senior Google executive.

Echoing a mantra of executives at Google X, Smith wants to find ways for the government to exhibit the sort of technological prowess that normally occurs only in wartime. She also emphasized that she and her deputy, former Twitter lawyer Alex Macgillivray, want to reduce the sort of regulatory morass that can inhibit innovation.

But while Smith’s words will be welcome to the tech sector, where she and Macgillivray are held in very high regard, there is still the stubborn reality of government. Even as Smith cited issues like patents, copyright and net neutrality as top priorities, a visit to the websites for those topics feels like tumbling into an internet time warp. If the arrival of the smartest minds from Silicon Valley can’t help the Patent Office implement a rational search function, what hope is there of remaking the rest of the federal bureaucracy.

Women in Tech: Megan Smith is an entrepreneur, tech evangelist, engineer, and connector. At Google[x], Smith works on a range of projects including co-creating/hosting SolveForX. For nine years prior she led Google’s New Business Development team managing early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing for Google’s global engineering and product teams. She led the acquisitions of Keyhole (Google Earth), Where2Tech (Google Maps), and Picasa, and also led the Google.org team transition to add more engineering with Google Crisis Response, GoogleforNonprofits, Earth Outreach/Engine, and increased employee engagement. Prior to joining Google, Smith was CEO and, earlier, COO of PlanetOut, the leading LGBT online community, where the team broke through many barriers and partnered closely with AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and other major web players, and was early at General Magic and Apple Japan.

Small Bank Regulation in the US

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Andi Howe

Frank Keating, president and CEO of the American Banker’s Association: I constantly hear from hometown bankers that their examiners—the government officials who visit their banks every year to make sure they make safe loans and follow the rules—are recommending actions suited for banks many times their size. They call it “trickle-down regulation.”

Here’s an example: I recently heard from the CEO of a community bank with $1 billion in assets. His examiner urged him to conduct a “stress test” that is only required for banks with $10 billion or more in assets. On the one hand, a stress test is expensive and time-consuming to conduct—not to mention completely unnecessary for a hometown bank with a traditional business model. But on the other hand, if my friend rejects his examiner’s suggestion, he might risk getting a poor regulatory rating that could hurt his bank. In this context, the suggestion really isn’t a suggestion at all.

You may have a hard time getting worked up about the costs of trickle-down regulation on banks. That’s understandable, because it’s hard to see the costs of excessive regulation. Rules from Washington, D.C., don’t directly come with a price tag. But their cumulative weight requires banks to hire more staffers and consultants to understand and follow them—just as you might hire an accountant to help with your taxes if the IRS required you to pay at a higher bracket. These staff members don’t make loans or sell financial products that serve bank customers, but they often must be paid well because of their specialized expertise.

The result, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is that when a small hometown bank hires additional staff to follow extra regulations, that bank’s already-slim profits shrink by anywhere from 11 to 37 percent. Those shrinking profits have real-world consequences for the bank’s town and the people who live there: less lending for small businesses and entrepreneurs, fewer mortgage loans and fewer investments in the financial technologies of the future.

But beyond the shadow costs that trickle-down regulation imposes on everyday Americans is the basic unfairness of arbitrarily making people follow rules they’re not required to follow. You’d be furious if the DMV failed your daughter for not knowing how to drive an 18-wheeler, and you’d be steaming if the IRS charged you a tax rate for a higher bracket. Bank examiners shouldn’t be allowed to make up their own rules, either.

W-T-W.org

Women and Finance

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