Proving Women Can Get Venture Capital
from the can-anyone-get-venture-capital-right-now? dept
There have been plenty of stories about how much more difficult it is for women to get venture capital. Now a report has come out that tries to get rid of some of the myths about women entrepreneurs that may have hurt them in their attempts to raise money in the past. Of course, this only helps if the VCs read the report - and it's unclear if they will. It seems that part of the problem is simply that venture capitalists rely on their network of contacts to refer deals to them - and so it becomes an "old boys" network of sorts to find new deals. However, recently many efforts have been made to overcome this by setting up networking and other groups targeted at female entrepreneurs. Of course, right now, it's unclear that anyone can raise any venture capital no matter what combination of chromosones you have. Update: Somewhat related is an article about how women CEOs aren't being allowed to "fail quietly" with the example of Carly Fiorina at HP. Despite the fact that companies all over the place are failing, extra attention is being put on Fiorina (they claim) because she's a woman.
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I don't think she's getting more attention as a faltering CEO because she's a woman. She's getting attention because she's always gotten attention as the HP CEO. It's a double-edged sword. And besides, if she's forced out, she'll have once of those peachy severence packages that will guarantee she'll never have to work again.
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Not because she is a woman...
Fiorina is getting extra attention because she hogs the spotlight. First thing after getting that job she did a bunch of commercials starring herself. Now she runs around in the public eye rambling on like the HP/Compaq merger is her personal stroke of genius, and acts like she is about to reshape the entire industry. Unfortunately most people in the media realize that merging two floundering companies to cut 15,000 redundant jobs and merge dying product lines is a pretty bad idea.
Fiorina's problem is that she is trying to be the female Bill Gates by putting herself into the spotlight and hoping that a huge, stupid risk works out in her favor. What she needs to realize is that Bill Gates gets so much attention because he earned it by propelling a miniscule company into a successful giant, not by gaining control of an aging giant and making lots of noise.
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