Gotham Gal

Caren Maio, Nestio, Woman Entrepreneur

My first experience as a mentor at Techstars was a great one.  I sat down the first day and met with a handful of companies.  On the first go round it really is about the people.  I loved Caren and her partners.  They all clicked so well together, they were friends and it was obvious that they spent a lot of time together before creating a company.  I felt like I was sitting down with some new friends myself...so needless to say I stayed connected and ended up being one of their mentors. 

Nestio makes it easier to find an apartment.  Simple to use, efficient and organized.  Timing in life is big as people have attempted to do this before but based on their traction and the other opportunities out there, the timing appears to be right on. 

Caren grew up in Monmouth County, NJ.  No surprises, her father was an entrepreneur.  He has a business in management waste, recycling.  Caren is the oldest of three kids.  After graduating from high school she jumped across the river and went to college at NYU.  She was accepted into the Gallatin School of NYU where you get to really plan your own curriculum, aka an entrepreneurial education.  Caren took full advantage.  She always knew she wanted to own her own business so she took as many courses as she could that would help her lay the foundation for her own biz.   Although she was writing pitch decks at 18, her parents said, graduate from college first and then we can talk.

She had majored in brand building and publishing and after graduating college decided to take a job at Nike doing corporate sales and marketing thinking about understanding brand building and wanting to learn more before going out on her own.  After a year she left.  Wasn't what she wanted to do.  Next stop was into publishing at the Wall Street Journal in sales.  Her father said, and I totally agree with him, learning sales is key as it will help you in a variety of other ways as you grow your own business.  She was selling to large financial companies such as Barclays, Morgan Stanely and the NY Stock Exchange.  She continued to get promoted up the ladder eventually doing sales in luxury tech in Latin America and Europe but she kept thinking that she had to start her own business.

Personally she kept moving a lot.  She was frustrated by the real estate market as we all are.  There had to be a better way.  She had met Matt, one of her partners about four years back and over the years they kept talking about businesses that they could build together.  Caren finally figured out what she thought she wanted to build which was a company originally called Urban Apartment and asked Matt if he wanted to join.  He had worked building brands such as Red Bull, Nike, Esquire and Lexus.  He said yes and introduced Caren to Matt who was the tech guy who worked with him doing the back end.  Perfect partners, a back end tech person, a front end product person and Caren the biz person.

In the summer of 2010 they closed all their legal documents with no funding and began to build out the company.  They decided to apply to Techstars and got in.  The first day they looked around and thought to themselves, boy are we lucky we got in to this.  Your game improves, your ideas improve, your businesses improve when you spend every day for 3 months with other smart entrepreneurs...doesn't hurt to have the tech community checking in on you every day either.

Their tech is clean and simple.  Caren is sharp as a tack and I love her team.  She was named one of the 15 women to watch in tech from Inc magazine.  The needs of real estate are scattered and Nest.io is moving them to one simple place.  An old school business that finally woke up and is taking the real world online.  There is tons of data there to be used but that is part of the evoling story....and btw, I am investor.

Corie Hardee, Little Borrowed Dress, Woman Entrepreneur

I met Corrie over a year ago as she had literally just gone into business.  I have been following her progress for a year.  She has learned a lot, as all entrepreneurs do, and she has persevered in a way that not all entrepreneurs do. 

Her business is called LIttle Borrowed Dress.  It is a simple.  You rent a dress instead of buying a dress for a wedding that you are going to.  It really works for the bridesmaid dresses.  Most weddings are done around color.  A bride wants all her bridesmaids to wear lavender.  Corie has dresses that are simple and basically look good on anyone who is size 2 or size 18.  The 100% silk fabric drapes just right and you can rent the dress and return it and never have to see it in your closet again because let's be honest....you don't want to.  

From a business angle, these dresses actually can be rented out again and again and Corie has done that.  What is also interesting is that she has provided the dresses for weddings that are trying to do it on a shoe string budget and others that have no expense to spare.  The start-up is the tough part because the majority of people spend eighteen months preparing for a wedding making a long sales cycle.  Corie has a list of 600 people waiting to pull the trigger on their time line.  What she has also learned is that people want to try these dresses on.  So perhaps a type of Avon model makes sense down the road instead of shipping dresses back and forth around the country...but that is all about the evolution of the business. 

Corie grew up in an entrepreneurial household in Olympia Washington.  Her Mom was a computer programmer and her Dad was an engineer.  Between the two of them they boot strapped a company in their living room while their daughters watched them make it worth after ten years of sweat and equity to build it and five years to get to profitability.  They built a product design company that built software for moving liquids.  Perfect back end product for a commercial business.  Being entrepreneurs made an impact on all the girls.

Corie graduated from high school and went to the University of Washington but realized she would possibly stay in Seattle so she transferred to University of Arizona for a totally different experience.  After graduating she moved to NYC to go work for Deloitte in their operation consulting division. 

She thought she should go to graduate school.  Ended up in London at business school and after one year decided it wasn't for her.  She returned home and came up with the idea of Little Borrowed Dress returning to NYC to launch.  

Corie has even enlisted her parents to help her out.  Got her Dad to put on a tuxedo at a wedding trade show in Seattle. BTW, it worked.

If you are engaged and working on the wedding.  Check out Cories pop-up shop in Soho starting February 19th, by appointment only.  Trust me, the dresses are great and your bridesmaids will love them.

 

 

Fatma Yalcin, Curisma, Woman Entrepreneur

Either the entrepreneurs are getting younger or I am just getting older.  Truth is the key to Curisma is having a smart, focused, trend spotter, gadget geek at the head of this company.  I first met Fatma at an event that matched entrepreneurs with angel investors.  The concept of the company peaked my interest and I went home and played around with the site.  You can get a little addicted discovering new products. 

Fatma grew up in Southern Turkey.  She had only been to the US once before going to summer camp in middle school so coming to the US for college was a bit of a culture shock.  She went to Grinnell College in Iowa where the town has a population of under 10,000.  She had no idea what small town meant as to her Cambridge, MA is a small town.  She loved the school so she stuck it is out majoring in econonics and spending her summers home in Turkey.  Fatma took her junior year abroad at the London School of Economics in a year long program which included the summer months.  It was a nice balance between the small town of Grinnell and the cosmopolitan city of London. 

After graduating college Fatma took a job in Chicago working for an economic consulting group.  She stayed for a year and returned to Turkey.  The company she worked for in Turkey was located in Istanbul and they did freight forwarding.  Her job was about international logistics, in essence an import/export company.  She knew that she wanted to go to graduate school and got into MIT for their two year MBA program. 

It was at MIT where she met her co-founder Eugene Gorelik at the Web 3.0 class.  He is a computer scientist from Latvia who moved to the US at 17 working in a few start-ups as a developer and is now finishing his masters in system design at MIT. 

Fatma admits that the idea came in to her head at the beginning of her second semester at MIT as she spent a lot of time on the web shopping for new products.  She started a blog about discovering new products but found it frustrating to find the latest and greatest products that were not mass produced.  She had to really dig down to find cool geeky products that nobody knew about.  It was her network of friends who helped her find the best new gadgets.  She launched Curisma with the concept of a way to discover cool stuff through other people.  Crowd sourcing new technology products.  You can follow people and users will have access to data and tools.  A very targeting marketing platform. 

Within 3 months of releasing the beta they have over 15000 users.  They launched in October 2011.  Get on Curisma and give it a try.  I love that Fatma went from Turkey to Grinnell to London and Cambridge after just two years in the working world to pursue her own ideas as an entrepreneur. 

Susan Kroll, Rare Culture, Woman Entrepreneur

I am surprised that Susan and I have never crossed paths before.  We worked in the garment world for years almost at the same time.  Her experience with it just made us both laugh as we know it all too well.  I had met someone a few months ago who was working with Susan on her company Rare Culture. I introduced them to a jeweler I know and they hit it off so I figured it was time to meet Susan in person.  So very glad I did. 

Susan started her life in Chicago moving to a suburb of Michigan when she was ten.  She admits that she was a wild child growing up with access to Detroit where she would go to small clubs and see the early musicians of the Motown explosion.  Her passion was fashion.  At 16, Susan worked her way in to Affiliated Models in Detroit never telling them her real age.  She started doing fashion shows for them all over the area and was spotted by Hudson's, a retail store in Detroit, to come and work as their fashion coordinator.  She worked for an amazing woman who was from NYC.  After working there four years, her boss literally made her apply to FIT.  She told Susan, you have to go to NYC and you have to go to FIT...and so she did. 

At FIT, at least then, they give you credit for all the work you have done in your career so in essence she could get a degree without even taking a class because she had so much work experience.  It was became of all that experience that she was still driven by working so she took classes in the evening and worked during the day.  She worked for a company called Rosewood Fabrics.  The best thing that came out of that was she met her husband there.

After graduating, Hudsons begged her to come back.  Her boss wouldn't let her.  She said if you go back to Detroit you will never leave.  Instead Susan goes on an interview on the 42nd floor of the Empire State Building.  She walks in to the room and there is a very large man with a cast up to his hip, sitting at his desk doing card tricks.  She notices that there is a huge hole in the window of the room.  They have a wonderful meeting and he hires Susan on the spot to start on Monday as the supposed assistant designer.  She arrives on Monday to find out that she is the designer.  The designer had been having an affair with the owner and they had gone skiing where he fell down and had this accident, they have a huge fight and she had thrown his crutches and other related shit out the window before Susan got to the interview.  Welcome to the world of shmata. 

Susan stayed there for seven years eventually running the business.  After that she left going into a partnership with two other people to build a bit of a better business than she was in before.  Selling to places like Victoria Secret, Spiegel Catalog and the Limited doing private label.  Things began to go sour in the end for a variety of reasons and those golden handcuffs started to come off.  It was time to leave again.

Another company had been courting Susan and she decided to go work with them.  She ran a division for them for 5 years before they sold out to a publicly traded company.  She was part of the partnership and did not want to sell but everyone else did.  After a year they ran the business into the wall and a year later the publicly traded company went belly up too. Next.

VP of Design for Coldwater Creek.  A great experience running the design team and opening up their brick and mortar businesses from 2004-2007.  Then it was just time to pack it in. 

Susan had spent her career traveling the globe.  Sourcing from Russia, China, India, Turkey and other areas depending on what project.  She would meet these amazing artisans who had no idea how to monetize their businesses.  The world was becoming more homogeneous and she wanted to figure out how to change that.  It was if design was being flat-lined. Her friend who was a photographer was seeing the same thing so they decided to create a coffee table book that would sell the wares of artisans around the world.  It was through this project that she started to think about what she wanted to do next. 

Susan found herself at a party talking to Edie Weiner, a futurist on technology and design, and she loved the concept.  She told Susan that she would be on her advisory board and she had to get other amazing people to get involved  The original idea was a semi-annual coffee table book that was a compilation of photographers, writers and artists.  The concept was that this book would be like going on a journey somewhere.  If you went to India what would you want to see, buy, and read. 

It was late 2008 when they started to talk to people about their business plan and the world imploded.  People were no longer writing checks they wanted to see something built first.  The book was first, the website would be second and the partnerships between retailers would be third.  They took 30 artisans and launched the site in December 2010 very quietly.  They did a small friends and family round showing the product at small events for UJA and the Berkshire Theater Festival. They had great feedback.

Now they are up to 52 artisans in 15 countries.  The platform gives artisans the ability to sell their products globally.  Most of these products are geared towarded a high end market with prices starting at $200 up to thousands of dollars.  Susan is also helping mentor the artists.  She wants to see their worked placed in the right hands including hotels and a like. 

I really like what she has created because RareCulture is something that Susan is passionate about and passion is a big part about being a successful entrepreneur.  She has a great eye for design.  I agree with her that at one point the world starting to become homogeneous.  We are seeing that change through places like MouthFoods and Etsy.  People want to buy things are that are not mass produced and connect with who they are.  Susan has created something special.  Check out RareCulture.  Overtime I expect to see the site grow into an incredible rare global market place. 

Amanda Eilian, Talk Market, Woman Entrepreneur

I was recently at a dinner that was put together by Victoria Song at Flybridge Capital.  She invited entrepreneurs and angel investors.  I rarely go to these things but for some reason Victoria sparked my interest.  I ended up talking to a bunch of people including people I knew and new people that I was meeting for the first time that evening.  Amanda Eilian was one of the new people and she just struck me as someone I wanted to continue talking with after we parted ways. And, so we did.

Amanda grew up in rural Vermont, really rural Vermont.  She was always interested in media growing up and figured out how to get an internship at a local radio station at the young age of 14 creating a yard sale roundup.  She would go on the radio to tell people about the sellers of tractors and live stock to match up with the buyers of their wares. In many ways with her latest company The Talk Market she has returned to her original roots.  Also during high school Amanda campaigned for Bernie Sanders and spent a summer in his congressional offices.  So it made sense that she left Vermont to attend the foreign service school at Georgetown University.  In her junior year she was awarded a Truman Scholar as she believed she was commited to a career in government or something in public service.  She started out with that idea.

Amanda interned in the media affairs department of the White House in college one summer.  She spent  her junior year abroad in Venezuela and Spain taking courses in economics during the time that Chavez was trying to get elected.  An interesting time to be there.  She had also spent a summer in NYC interning at Merrill Lynch.  After graduating from Georgetown she went directly to NYC taking a job with Merrill Lynch as she decided finance was more up her alley than Government. 

At Merrill Lynch where she began in mergers and acquisitions and ended up moving into the private equity division.  She then left Merrill to work at Falcoln Head where she began analyzing commerce for their companies who were interested in expanding to online shopping distribution channels.  While she was there she hired Matt Singer to do some freelance work for her, he happened to be married to her best friend.  Matt had been selling products at QVC in the hundreds of thousands and understood the power of online commerce. 

Then Amanda decided that as interesting as this was that she wanted to go to business school because she wanted to do something entrepreneurial.  She attended Harvard Business School and graduated there in 2006.  For her, what she learned there was invaluable.  HBS was a place where you had to defend your ideas by discussing them daily.  It wasn't something she was comfortable doing.  It forced her to speak comfortably about her views by putting her on the stand every day for two years. Amanda was given a Baker Scholar award when graduating which is given to the top 5% of the graduating class of HBS.  Impressive. 

After graduation she became one of the founding partners of Capital Acquisition.  She worked on SPACS where you take a publically traded shell and convert it into another company through an acquisition.  She led a $260 million offering by putting a team of people who were investing in mortgages together as a public vehicle.  It was very successful and Citigroup underwrote the whole thing. 

Amanda continued to talk with Matt as he is married to her best friend.  They decided it was time to start a company and so they launched The Talk Market, aka Videolicious  They understood the power of company likes QVC and HSN yet there wasn't a way to create huge volumes of video for retailers.  On a side note, years ago I sold to HSN and QVC.  It was at the very beginnings when HSN, located in Clearwater, Florida just launched.  The guy behind it literally sold some type of gadget out of the back of his car after announcing it on an ad on the local radio.  Tons of people showed up to the parking lot where he was stationed and he sold out of every item and the idea for HSN was born.  It was an incredible place.  We'd get these huge orders and they would put it on the show and the items would sell out in minutes. Back to the story. 

Their idea was that they wanted to create turn key solutions in video for retailers, large and small.  They started out with 300 small retailers to understand the market and flush out what they had built.  They realized they were on to something when they started cold calling large companies and they were ushered in the door immediately.  These videos are created by each individual company and they tailor each of the products to the needs of their client.  Recently they just launched their first mobile app with Martha Stewart and Conde Nast.  Their product was working with the Fortune 500 companies that allowed them to quickly scale.  They have made over ten and thousands of online video to date.

The real market that is of interest in helping everyone else in ecommerce be able to make video, aka the smaller companies.  They have been scrappy, smart and lean.  There was eight employees to date in the company.  I love what Amanda is doing.  To me, this is just touching the surface of what video is going to be able to do online in the years to come.   Hence, that is why I am thrilled to be an investor in Videolicious. 

 

Lynn Perkins, Urban Sitter, Woman Entrepreneur

Sometimes you wonder why someone didn't turn the idea of Urban Sitter into a business a long time ago.  Technology has given entrepreneurs a platform to take ideas that might have been around for a while the ability to actually build them.   So what is the idea?  Creating an army of babysitters for parents through direct connections, references and friends.  If you have kids and need to find a babysitter for Saturday night, sign up now. 

Lynn grew up in San Diego with two parents that were entrepreneurs.  Her Father is a real estate developer and her Mom is a child psychologist who built a line of stress management tools for adults.  Lynn moved north to go to Stanford for college.  She majored in urban studies.  In her junior year she took off for a program in Florence, Italy.  She lived in Florence the summer before school learning Italian so she was able to take courses at the Stanford campus and the University of Florence where the classes were in Italian.  The University of Florence was on strike half the time she was there and she ended up connecting with a group of women who were on the soccer team.  She had played field hockey and soccer in high school so she tried out and before she knew it Lynn was making 99 lira a week and traveling around Italy playing womens soccer for the University.  It was the best way to learn Italian even though her team was a bit dysfunctional smoking cigarettes at half time.  She took off a short period of time from school to finish off the season. 

Back to Stanford where she finished up her degree, on time.  After graduating Lynn moved to Chicago to work for LaSalle Partners.  A small private real estate development company where she worked in the analyst department.  It was 1996.  On the side, Lynn found herself spending a fair amount of time doing research helping friends who were graduating to find the right job for them.  This was before Hot Jobs and Monster.com came on to the scene.  Her roommate in Chicago told her about two people in San Francisco who had just launched a company called Bridgepath that was focused on finding jobs for recent graduates.  Maybe she should go work with them?  She left Chicago and moved to SF and began to work at Bridgepath.  It was a great experience working in a true start-up out of the back of a computer store.  She stayed a few years before starting her own company. 

Lynn started a company around commerce.  She wanted to launch something give emerging designers a presence.  It was a great idea way before its time.  It was too expensive to launch those brands.  The company was called Xuni.com  She had raised money to grow the business but after two years she walked away.  

She went to work for the Gap thinking that it might make sense to go into something a bit more stable.  At the Gap Lynn worked in the real estate acquision division.  Things were really changing at the Gap then and not only did they open stores, they closed some too.  They were looking at the placement of stores like Old Navy being down the street from the Gap.  In the end, although an interesting job, working in a large company environment was not a long term career move. 

Her next stop was working for a hotel hospitality group.  She was randomly reading an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this company and went on line to read about the CEO.  She saw that they were looking for someone who knew real estate and was entrepreneurial.  Perfect.  She built twenty hotels while she was there and what was fun is that every hotel was completely different based on where it was based.  So in Vence they brought in graffiti artists to create something interesting on the walls.  Each project had a different twist.  She was able to work with the creative, construction and finance people all at the same time.  Then the chain sold out and became a national brand so it was time to move on.

Lynn took a step back as she had two twin boys at home.  One day a friend asked her if she could ask her nanny to help her get a babysitter quickly.  She trusted Lynns nanny so she trusted that who ever she got to come would be good.  Of course trust is the key word here when you are leaving your child with someone.  That tiny transaction created the idea for Urban Sitter.

She built a site bringing in a tech partner, a media person and an operator.  The site started with forty parents and forty sitters in the SF area this past August.  They are now up to 1300 parents and 1200 sitters.  Think of Urban Sitter as an Open Table for sitters.  Most of the sitters are college age or just recently graduated and this is a great way for them to make money.  The sitters are tech saavy so they get the information through texts.  They put on the site the times that they are available.  Then they tell their friends to sign up to be sitters too.  Parents can see how the babysitters are connected to each other using affiliation programs and star ratings.  For instance parents can see a babysitter that is being used by other parents at their kids school which provides a trust and comfort level.  They also have a third party that does background checks but in essence it is the trust that other people have knowing that they have used a sitter and if they liked them then they would be willing to book their friends too. 

They are now focusing on Brooklyn and other areas already growing to 100 sitters after one week of launching.  They are also changing how the transactions are taking place.  Many of these sitters use that money for rent and other things.  So they would prefer it if the money back to them through an online transaction so cash isn't sitting in their pocket when they leave the job.  It also gets rid of the weird factor of being paid.  So many times parents end up coming home and looking at each other asking who has cash.  The credit card piece helps verify the parents for the sitters too.  Not surprising that 95% of their sitters have some type of online payment account they use.  People can get promoted within the site too for instance a sitter can say I am available every single Friday night.  Parents will eventually pay a transaction fee depending on if they booked the sitter weeks in advance or just the day before. 

Brilliant idea.  Makes absolute sense.  A win win for both the parents and the sitters.  Look to San Diego, Seattle, Denver, St. Louis and vacation spots for Urban Sitter soon.  Perfect for an urban saavy tech population.  I wish this was around when my kids were little. 

Tara Hunt, Buyosphere, Woman Entrepreneur

I kept seeing Taras name pop up on the listserv I am on.  Then I had the pleasure of meeting her face to face at a cocktail party.  I really wanted to hear her story so when she was in NYC we got together.  I am super excited for Tara because just this past week she closed a round of $325K for her company Buyosphere, where people help people shop.  

Tara grew up in Alberta, Canada on a farm where is gets to be 30 below quite often.  Her parents settled in that area of the world where her father put down roots as the local veternarian.  Her mother was an artist so she grew up in a household with two entrepreneurs.  She didn't go far from home after high school and went to college in Calgary studying communications and cultural studies. 

After graduating Tara got a job working for a gas company in the corporate communications department.  The company was in the midst of being acquired so she decided to move into the advertising space once the companies merged and she was given a financial package.  She always had an interest in the online world and had worked on flash, and web design development in college and those skills were rare in Calgary.  It was 1999 and a lot of advertising companies were expanding their interactive departments.  Tara joined an advertising company and did work for the Alberta Childrens Hospital and Big Rock Brewing company.  She stayed there for a year and was part of one of those mass exits where a huge group of people get up and leave.  Tara left and partnered with some of those people to create her own agency. 

She had a little bit of money from the her package when the gas company merged.  She had bought a condo and used the rest that she saved to start her own company.  Day one she had clients.  Big Rock Brewing came with her so that was a huge plus.  Tara grew up knowing that her father, who was dirt poor growing up, as the property that she grew up on housed the one room shanty that he had been raised in.  Seeing how her father had worked his way through college to create a good life for himself and his family she realized that she too could do something on her own. The power of an entrepreneur.

Her company grew and she opened up and office in Toronto three years later moving there herself.  It wasn't a good time.  SARRS hit and their biggest client pulled out of Ontario.  People were scared to go out so they had to cut back most of their marketing efforts especially the online stuff.  They had even won an award for their online/offline second life campaign.  She had built this campaign where there was a funky night club called cream soda night and bars would participate through their client Big Rock Brewing but they had pulled out.  The bars however still wanted in so Tara started promoting their bars and through that gained a whole group of local clients in Toronto. 

It was 2003 and Tara started a blog called HorsePigCow.  Then around 2005, Shel Israel, a PR guy who wrote the book Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the way Businesses talk with Customers with Robert Scoble contacted Tara about one of his clients who was writing a blog and wanted to hire someone to do community in his start-up and this client was interested in a Canadian to do it...would she be interested.  Ten days later she was in San Francisco working at the start-up called Like.com

That was life changing.  When she got to SF she felt like she had finally found her people.  Like.com was funded and it was 2005.  Tara started to work on building out community marketing.  She spent all day on her computer buidling out relationships with people.  Tara finally launched what she was working on  and within 24 hours there were over a million photos uploaded and 20 million registered users.  Tara was the only non-engineer on the staff and the only woman too. 

What she created is something people wanted to know about so she started taking gigs as a public speaker about the power of community and how to create it.  She eventually had to get an agent as she has now spoken at over 115 conferences around the world.  She was eventually approached by a literary agent to write a book which she called the Whuffie Factor, Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business.  The term whuffie is from a science fiction novel where whuffie is is the currency you get for being nice and social.  It was published in 2009 and is now published in eight different languages. 

It was 2006 when Tara started thinking about Buyosphere.  She was looking for a black skirt on line and was overwhelmed with what was available but there was nothing she wanted.  How can you have so much choice but nothing worth while?  She knew there had to be a way to filter the information coming at you.  She pitched the idea in 2009 but nobody was interested in ecommerce then.  She returned to Montreal because getting a green card was impossible and launched Buyosphere in 2011 after finding the right co-founders.  They were able to boot strap this through friends and her speaking engagements. 

Originally the idea was a place where you could organize your buying history.  Very data driven.  It was like something between a Pinterest and Svpply.  There was still too much choice and not enough clarity.  Then she met David Rose, an investor, who asked her "did you ever find your black skirt"?  It was then that she realized that it made more sense to leverage the power of collective knowledge to find that black skirt.  Once she figured that out raising money came quickly.  It essentially came back to building community which she understands better than anybody.  Crowd sourcing a community to find you the perfect black skirt.  Ask the right people and you get the right answer. 

The product is still evolving as brands can buy into courting the leaders who go to the top of the leader board.  Her story is interesting and as always the dots connect to get her to where she is today.  Just another small tidbit is that Tara is a single Mom.  She had her son while she was at University and he was six when she started her first business.  Tara never talked about that part of her life with me until we emailed after our conversation.  Granted I was a bit crazed that morning as I usually get all the details but our conversation was about business and that is what we talked about.  Quite impressive.  Check out Buyosphere, now that they have been funded I am sure that we will see a lot of interesting growth on that site. 

 

Elena Silenok, Clothia, Woman Entrepreneur

In the last year the amount of fashion sites has exploded from tools to save your purchases in to discovery and ecommerce while sharing with your friends.  Some of succeeded while others have not and many are still in question.  What is going to separate all these sites from each other?  We will see but after meeting with Elena I was really intrigued with Clothia because she does have something that sets her apart from the rest.  The technology to put your body on line and then try on the clothes virtually.  You might have a much better idea on how each item will look on your before you press buy. 

Elena grew up in Russia near the Baltic Sea.  An only child of two mechanical engineers.  When she was 15, Elena won an academic scholarship that was sponsored by the US Government.  The concept is to promote international exchange in developing countries and put students in our school system for a year.  Elena spent a year in Yuba, California with a host family going to the local high school.  A huge public high school with a large Mexican and Sikh population.  There were 3 exchange students in her program.  The other two were from Mexico and Germany. 

After that experience she decided to apply to other schools in the states to remain here for her education.  She had a student visa and was able to continue through college and grad school with no problems.  After years in Russia all Elena could think about was warmth.  She was not really given any guidance besides her own desire to be warm.  She applieid to Florida Atlantic University, got in and got a free ride.  The most important thing at that point was being on a beach.  She would go home in the summers and winter breaks to see her family in Russia and her parents totally understood the need for Elena to stay in the states, it was safe and there were opportunities. 

After graduating she went to work for the University of California San Diego, while going to graduate school, in their network security program.  They had a network telescope where they could study reconnaissance activity on hackers.  At the same time Elena was applying for military grants to stay in the states.  What was amazing was how difficult it was for her to get a green card.  Our country paid for Elena to get a degree in computer science and she was figuring out for the US Government how hackers hack our systems and they wanted to sent her back to Russia. She eventually figured out how to go from a student visa to a work visa to a green card.  Elena is the type of citizens we want staying in the US. 

After getting her masters at UCSD analyzing hackers for her thesis she came to NYC during her summers in grad school working for ATT where she fell in love with NYC.  At ATT she worked on specialized research on how routers talk to each other.  Not only was the job fun but so were the summers of art, music, ballet and good food.  Not surprising that after graduation Elena accepted at job at Abacus in NYC as a developer.  A company funded by Bessemer.  She stayed only for a year analyzing large scale data because she was able to land high paying consulting jobs.  She thought that having a full time job was more stable but after working in a start-up she realized that it wasn't so scary going out on your own. 

Elena took a bunch of jobs for large financial companies who paid her plenty to just figure out how to get the job done.  She did that by hiring people in Russia to get the jobs done at a much lower cost.  It was through those lucrative jobs that she was able to put money away and start her own company. 

Elena started to think alot about how clothing is paired together.  She became a student of streetwear watching how people had so much style on the street.  How could those people share their sense of style with others.  It was back in 2007 and Polyvore didn't even exist yet when she began to think about this.  In 2010 she finally got her green card and Elena decided to quit all of her consulting gigs and start her own business.  The market had matured and she felt it was time.

Elena created Clothia.  A virtual closet where you can upload items from your own closet and from the web.  You can try on clothes through augmented reality.  She wanted people to have the same experience that they would have at a clothing store or in their own closet.  You can literally scan your body into the computer and begin.  There is always a look and fit issue in the dressing room and if you can do it online that is a game changer.  You can look and interact with yourself. 

It is not a full virtual experience it is technology.  It is the beginnings of something interesting.  Certainly the uses of this platform are beyond the closet and that will be part of the evolution of the company as they figure out the revenue model.  That is what I like about Clothia.  Elena has set Clothia up as a completely different platform.  Keeping your own clothes in an online closet so when you go shopping for something else online you can literally put on your favorite black pants and try on a jacket with it from a store to make sure it works before clicking buy. Takes the concept of mix and match to a whole other level. 

You can check out the demo here.  A computer science major from Russia becomes a start-up Woman entrepreneur because she won the opportunity when she was 15 to come and study in the states.  Great story. 

 

 

 

Women Entrepreneurs

Up to this point I have written about 55 women entrepreneurs.  It has truly been an honor to meet so many women who are marking their own territory. Each of their individual stories is inspiring.  This week I decided not to write about a specific woman entrepreneur but about women entrepreneurs in general.

From my birds eye view, this has been a year of change for women.  When Nancy Hechinger and I put on the Womens Entrepreneur Festival a year ago we did so because we wanted to celebrate women.  Celebrating how many women are starting their own companies, making a difference in the world and are influencing the way we live our lives is much more empowering than conversations around topics such as there aren't enough women in a particular field or enough women sitting on public trading boards or enough women running companies.  All of that might be true but if one hundred women start a business next week that thrives then there are more women CEO's and more women running companies.  The game can be changed. We need to support those women.  I am seeing that game change every week.   

Positive change is taking place as women are champions and mentors of each other.  I see more women creating businesses that give them the independence that they are looking for.  Through networking, connections and sheer intelligence they are succeeding in a very different way than they were twenty years ago.  We are collaborating with our peers and that is not something we did so easily in the past.  We are looking to make changes from outside not from within and that is the only way change will take place.  

Women listen, analyze, communicate and perceive things contrary to their male counterparts.  The women that are succeeding at being entrepreneurs are focused on success and that success means a lot of different things.  Success in their own personal lives as well as their careers, success in being independent and being able to get it all done and particularly success in a work environment that works for them. 

2012 is going to be a big year for women.  There are a few things that I'd personally like to see happen.  I'd like women to stop apologizing and to never utter the word I am sorry for the decisions that they have made in their careers.  I'd like women to stop starting their sentences with I think.  Just get in there and speak your mind.  Truth is women have the ability to do it all.  We can decide to go to work, we can decide to stay home, we can decide to work part-time, we can decide to start our own companies, we have so many choices.  We need to stop judging each other for the choices each of us have made and instead start applauding each other for who we are.  We are all individuals with different sensibilities when it comes to our own priorities, our own sense of style and our own ways of living our individual lives.  We are all unique women who bring a tremendous amount to the table.

I am looking forward to the next year as I get the opportunity to talk to more women entrepreneurs who are creating companies, communities and their own identities as role models for every woman regardless of age.  All 55 of the women I spoke to this past year ( or so ) have shown all of us that being an entrepreneur is certainly hard work but the upside of owning who you are is empowering on so many levels that we should all think about no matter what career you have chosen, be it an entrepreneur or not, how do you make your career your own.  That kind of thinking is the key for more women to have ownership of the career paths that they take.  

As Rosie the Riveter, a symbol of womens economic power, said, "We can do it."

 

Noha Waibsnaider, Peeled Snacks, Woman Entrepreneur

In 2004 I read about Peeled Snacks and was intrigued because there were no preservatives.  I had a friend whose kid had severe food allergies and thought I'd check out the product.  You couldn't buy just one pack on line, you had to buy a box and so I did.  Back then some of the dried fruit bags came with nuts in a separate package inside the bag, that is no longer the case.  When I told Noha that I have been following the growth of her company since then it was great to hear the whole story from that box in 2004 to the present through her. 

Noha grew up in Jerusalem, Israel.  She left when she was four.  Her mother was from Argentina so she took her and her sister back home until she was seven and they returned to Jerusalem.  Stayed there only one year to get her life in order and then immigrated with two young girls in tow to the US landing in Baltimore, MD. 

After graduating high school Noha went to American University in DC.  She majored in Spanish and Latin American studies keeping her ties to Argentina spent a semester of junior year there.  She graduated in 1996 and took a job with NISBCO, a non-profit organzation focused on consciencious objects in Latin America. Keep in mind that during college she also spent a summer selling produce from a truck on the side of the road so perhaps fruit was always in her future.

She left NISBCO after six months and traveled with her boyfriend (now husband) through Mexico and Guatemala.  They decided that they wanted to get out of the DC area and 70 and sunny in San Diego seemed like a good place to hang their hat.  Noha took a job working for a childrens publishing company where she had the pleasure of reading childrens books all day and editing them.  One year in San Diego was all they could take.  They took some time and traveled again but this time to the Middle East, Europe and Greece eventually landing back in the DC area.

Noha took a job in a marketing firm but always had the desire to go to graduate school.  She got into Columbia University and others but decided NYC was the place for her.  While at Columbia Noha became one of the co-founders of the Global Social Venture Compeition.  An initiative promoting businesses with a social and environmental impact.  How to be a profital entrepreneur while making a social impact is so important.  After graduating in 2002 she went to work for Unilever in brand management.  Worked on the Ragu brand and in the health and wellness area of the company under the Lipton label. It was there that she realized how much people had the desire to buy healthy products.  The scientists at Unilever wouldn't eat the products that they were making and that sent her a sign.  The large companies really aren't agile enough to create new categories that are truly healthy products.  She stayed long enough to understand a product from idea to shelf. 

When she left Unilever her husband was just finishing his teaching fellows program and they decided it might be their last chance to really travel like they wanted to.  They took off for India and Thailand.  It was 2004 when they returned and the job opportunities in the food business were scarce.  She met with a friend who was in the Investor Circle and began to talk about how in Israel dried fruit is every where but not in the states.  Noha wrote a business plan on the concept of creating a company around dried fruit and submitted it to the Investors Circle.  It wasn't accepted but the plan started to develop a life of its own.

At first Noha thought she was too risk adverse to start a company on her own but her food interests became apparent to her and the concept she had just clicked.  She began to speak to scientists she knew in the food business, found a commodity broker in the fruit industry, dialed up some people she knew who were in the design business and Peeled Snacks was born. 

The original concept was peeled fruit and nuts but the nuts were in a separate bag in the fruit bag and because of the preservatives that wasn't working.  The shelf life was too short and the nuts were too high in calories (customer feedback).  Also the distributors did not want something that had that short of a shelf life.  She took out the nuts and did fruit only.  An evolution in the business model. 

It was now 2006 and her sales person left so her husband decided to come on board.   She raised some money from friends and family and really started to grow the business.  At first they were focused on healthy snacks on the go focusing on airports, gyms and grab and go locations.  In 2009 they were approached by Starbucks to be part of their healthy snack category with single servings.  That was a huge validaiton of her business model.

Between 2009 and now they have started to focus on grocery sized bags that are the right size for grocery shelves.  The new packaging is really beautiful.  Those products will run from $3.49 to $3.99.

The products are made in upstate NY and Colorado.  Noha sources products from family farms in developing countries...this is where her Spanish comes into play.  Peeled Snacks has actually helped sustainable farms with loans in order to help them grow and create the right products going back to her desire to build a company with a social mission. 

Not only has Noha been focused growing Peeled Snacks over the last seven years she also created a group called New York Foodies that has built into a community of over 400 people.  Did I mention that she also has a 3 1/2 year old and six month old.  Pretty impressive that she was able to have kids during the key growth of her business.  You can do it if you want. 

The business is now about to expand to another level.  Peeled Snacks was ranked as one of the fastest growing companies on Inc's list for 2011.  Pretty impressive...and the product...it tastes great.