Mashups, Markets and Motherhood: XX Combinator

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Mashups, Markets and Motherhood: XX Combinator

Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it.

I have never heard it articulated this way, but this quote rings absolutely true to me. I have long felt like I need to get experience first. I want to know what I’m doing before I jump in. It has taken me years of watching people (men and women) who know a lot less execute on a lot more, before I made the mind shift to realize that I should just assume I can do it. Just do it first, worry about the rest later. Even then, I still prefer to know what I’m doing.

As an admirer of the Y! Combinator program, I love Tereza’s proposal for an XX Combinator.

The XX Combinator program would provide women who know their target market extremely well, based on personal and professional experience. They’d have a huge innovative idea in a huge market and a clever idea about how to crack it. The program would help define their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to get to market. Benevolent hackers would work side-by-side with them to build it, for equity and possibly paid salaries by sponsors and can convert into CTO positions.

It got me thinking about the kind of companies women tend to start. When I come across startups with women founders, the companies tend to be lifestyle oriented companies. See LearnVest or SavvyAuntie. I think they’re both great companies and wish them every success. The world could use more of these lifestyle companies that men are less likely to start. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking, I want to see more women start straight-up tech companies, like Optimizely (A/B testing! what a brilliant idea). Or if straight-up tech is a stretch in the near term because we don’t have enough women with comp sci degrees, how about more social media and social networking type companies? I don’t see a clear male advantage in those areas.

Recently, I heard a female co-founder say that one of her biggest struggles is communicating with the dev guys because she doesn’t understand the technical side of the business. She impressed me in many other ways, but that one comment made me think of that old Barbie quote, “Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!” On the one hand, I’m glad that her lack of technical knowledge has not prevented her from jumping into the startup game. On the other hand, I wish it was more not-ok for her to not understand tech, the way it’s not-ok for women to just write off math. We don’t all have to be able to code, but if you’re going to do a tech startup, you should have some kind of fundamental understanding or intuition for the technical side.

Just as there are too few women in tech, there are definitely too few women in VC. I don’t think about it very much, but there was an odd moment at a recent women in tech event when all the women entrepreneurs talked about how hard it is to find women VCs. They are always pitching to men. I suddenly felt really motivated to do a very, very good job for as long as I get to be in this VC seat.