Hindsight : 1871 FEMtech

Showing posts with label 1871 FEMtech. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

NAWBO CHICAGO PRESIDENT EMILY SMITH'S VIDEO ABOUT 1871 FEMtech INCUBATOR

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

WILAB LOVES: YOUR WORK IS NOT YOUR LIFE

July 30, 2014 by womensilab

Very few things in our lives are absolute

Everything is measured by degree, from our attention to our patience to the range and intensity of our emotions.

At the same time, some things are absolute: You can’t be all things to all people; you can’t dance every dance; and, throughout your life, you’ve got to make hard choices, sacrifices, and compromises, and then you’ve got to live with them through thick and thin for a very long time.

We become the sum of the choices we make over time; those choices determine the kind of person we end up being–and how the world sees and values us.

What we become isn’t a necessary result of fate or destiny. It’s certainly not foretold or pre-ordained. Throughout our lives we remain a work in progress. Iteration isn’t just a business process; it’s also a strategy for a life well-lived. We can bend and shape outcomes to match our desires if we consciously, actively, and continually apply ourselves. But the good things we all hope for don’t happen by themselves; you’ve got to pay attention and make them happen.

Purpose, perspective, proportion

One of the most critical choices you’ll need to make when you start out in your career is exactly what kind of person you want to be. I think it’s somewhat back in fashion these days to be a workaholic. For some of us it never went out of style. Almost everyone today wants to be an entrepreneur, build a business, and be a big honking overnight success. But that’s only part of the story. Ultimately it’s not about making money, it’s about making a difference. It’s also about more than making a living: It’s about making a life. And the “you” that you become is a big part of the life you build outside the office, as well as within your business.

In the frenzy of the work and the world it’s really important that you don’t lose your sense of purpose, perspective, and proportion–and risk losing yourself in the process. Your business and your work will always be what you do. These things are not who you are. And it’s critical right from the start that you not confuse or conflate the two.

This isn’t as easy to manage as you may think

Today too many of us worship our work, work at our play (fitness uber alles), and play at what little worship we make a part of our lives. Where are the soul and the value in that? And (assuming that we want to) how exactly do we get ourselves back on top of things before they veer entirely out of control?

To handle the constant barrage of useful information, occasional insights, and useless chatter that increasingly assaults our senses and impedes our ability to get successfully through the day we need a new plan. You can drown in many ways today – in data, in documents, in deliberations, and in endless discussions. We all need to develop new skills for managing both the data and the people in our lives. It’s similar to the radical and rapid choices that drive the triage process in an emergency room. But there are many different kinds of choices in the mix.

At work, we tend automatically to focus on the fiercest fires and the highest flames

We let our attention be directed toward the newest crisis rather than remaining in some kind of control and attending to the critical things that really matter. Attention is as slippery as mercury, and as easily redirected. If no one is paying attention to the things that count, people just stop caring. Once you stop paying attention to the people in your business who are important, and they stop caring about you and your business, they’ll go someplace else, to someone who does pay attention and who does care. It’s just a matter of time.

But that’s on the business side of the equation. As the number of physical, mental, and emotional inputs we absorb each day continues to increase it becomes all too easy to apply the same systems, formulae, and checklists we use at work to our friends and families. This is where things can go very wrong very quickly.

That’s because some of the people decisions we confront every day aren’t mathematical or subject to standard rules and procedures–they’re choices about other people, about feelings, and about our relationships. These concerns are fundamentally different, non-mechanical, and far more complex. People aren’t products, positions, or policies–they’re our co-workers, friends, and family. There’s no fixed formula for getting these things right.

So it’s equally incumbent upon us to decide what’s truly important in these interpersonal situations, both in the moment and in the long run, and to devote to them the same passion and energy we apply to our business problems and concerns. It’s a given that there’s never enough time in the day (and that’s never going to change); there’s never enough of any one of us to go around (cloning may help, someday); and it’s way too easy to find an excuse rather than finding the time to deal with these issues.

But here’s the bottom line

Your family (when you have one) will be a much more important extension of yourself than any work you do. There’s always more work, but you only have one family. And, believe me, good friends are also few and far between. Friends are the family that you get to choose–they’re hard to find, even harder to leave, and impossible to forget. So, as you make ‘em, make a plan to hang on to them. They’re as important an investment over time as anything else.

Take a little time now to decide how you’d like things to turn out when you look back in 50 years at your accomplishments, your family, and what you’ve built. It’s all right there before you. Everything is possible; ultimately, it’s all about what you make of it.

SOURCE: Inc.com, Your Work Is Not Your Life, July 2014

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HOWARD TULLMAN | Inc.com Columnist

Howard A. Tullman is the CEO of 1871 ? Where Digital Startups Get Their Start and the General Managing Partner of G2T3V, LLC and of Chicago High Tech Investment Partners. He is a member of the Chicago NEXT & Cultural Affairs Councils and the Illinois Innovation & Arts Councils; an adjunct professor at Kellogg; and an advisor to many start-ups. He is the former Chairman and CEO of Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy. Over the last 45 years, he has successfully founded more than a dozen high-tech companies. @tullman

Sunday, July 06, 2014

"I am woman, hear me code" - 1871 FEMtech in United Airlines Hemispheres

Tech

I am woman, hear me code

Even in the seemingly progressive world of high tech, women face outdated stereotypes. Female-friendly incubators are giving them a space to thrive.

Author Cristina Rouvalis Illustration Scotty Reifsnyder

When Elisa All launched iParenting Media back in 1996, she did so in almost total isolation, building her business at home with an infant. Eleven years later, she sold the online parenting publishing conglomerate to Disney for an undisclosed (but significant) sum, but that has done little to rid All of the sense that she remains on the margins of her chosen field.

“You feel like an anomaly,” she says of being a mother of two in the tech world. “It can be daunting.”

Only 10 to 15 percent of all entry-level jobs in tech are held by women, according to executive search firm Harvey Nash, and, barring a couple of colossal exceptions (COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer), female bosses are an even rarer occurence. As dispiriting as such statistics may be, says All, who’s currently working on video-streaming apps and a website for moms on the go, they don’t even begin to describe the difficulty female tech entrepreneurs encounter in trying to build their businesses. The networking events she attends usually resemble an old-boys club, she says, in which investors “throw money at the male tech superstars” and dismiss companies like hers as “fluffy women things.” But thanks to female-friendly incubators like the Chicago-based 1871, the 45-year-old All can talk to mentors, pitch investors and tap business resources in a way that was impossible before.

“You are plopped into a thriving community with other entrepreneurs,” she says. “I was accepted and welcomed here.”

Of the 240 startups at 1871, which investor and philanthropist J.B. Pritzker set up a couple of years ago, more than 25 percent include women among the founders, and this fall, the organization aims to boost those already impressive numbers with the launch of FEMtech, a program that will offer female entrepreneurs from around the world the financial and logistical support they’ll need to turn ideas into businesses.

A big part of the work FEMtech will do as it develops is help women with children balance work and family commitments. Networking events, for example, will be scheduled at midday rather than the conventional late-afternoon happy hour. “The end of the day is a horrible time if you are a parent,” says Howard Tullman, 1871’s CEO.

This family-friendly approach is a rarity in the “bro-gramming” world of Silicon Valley—where you are far more likely to encounter a foosball table than a nursery. In fact, even in this supposedly progressive milieu, caveman attitudes are rife. “This can be a very difficult place for women,” California-based employment attorney Kelly M. Dermody says of Silicon Valley. “They are often not given credit on work, are excluded from networking, are sexually harassed. Many leave.”

Women may be at a disadvantage in the tech field long before they set foot in the workplace. Studies show girls’ propensity to shy away from math and science begins in elementary school and continues through college. In 2012, for example, women received 57 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the U.S., but only 12 percent of the computer science degrees awarded by major research universities.

And yet, as Tullman puts it, the “dirty little secret of tech startups” is that you don’t necessarily need a computer science degree. “You don’t have to geek out,” he says. “No one is doing machine code. You need to devote resources to design and user interface. There is no reason why women cannot play a more significant role.” This is certainly true of All, who studied journalism in college and had a freelance writing and editing business before launching her startups.

For All, the beauty of FEMtech is that it will allow her to share her insights and experiences with women who face the same problems she has encountered since she entered the field 18 years ago. And one of the first messages she wants to impart is that hers is not so much a story of female empowerment as it is one of good business sense.

Cristina Rouvalis, a Pittsburgh-based writer, is considering learning how to code.