Originally posted at Colorado Biz Today on January 30, 2008
By Carlotta Mast, STAFF WRITER
Women have made vast strides in almost every profession. So why do they make up barely 4 percent of tech entrepreneurs?
By Carlotta MastSue Kunz is used to people being surprised to find out she and her business partner, Char Devich, are the founders of Solidware Technologies Inc., an award-winning Boulder company that has created a new kind of platform for evaluating the quality of software code.
“We attend lots of conferences, and people tend to immediately go up to our CTO (Ahmad Zandi), thinking that he runs the company,” says Kunz, who left a senior management job at Sun Microsystems to launch Solidware with Devich in 2004. “At some point during these conversations, (Zandi) will casually mention that I am the CEO. It always cracks me up because the expectation is that it must be the man who founded and leads this company, not the women.”
Kunz doesn’t take such misperceptions personally — “I find it comical at this point in my career,” she says — in large part because even though women have made dramatic inroads in many other areas, including law and medicine, it is still uncommon for a fast-growing, venture capital-backed technology company such as Solidware to be started and run by women. In fact, less than 5 percent of technology companies are founded by women, according to the Boulder-based National Center for Women & Information Technology.
As the center’s CEO Lucy Sanders explains, the problem isn’t that women are not interested in entrepreneurship; more than half of all new businesses in the United States are started by women, she says. The issue is that few women decide to launch technology-related companies and gain access to the outside funding that often makes it possible to create and grow a successful technology firm.
The underrepresentation of women in technology has been present for a long time, but few people acknowledged it even as recently as five years ago, Sanders says: “If people knew about it, they weren’t acting.”
But now, thanks to organizations such as NCWIT and entrepreneurs such as Kunz, the spotlight is finally being focused on a problem that threatens to exacerbate Colorado’s looming IT-labor shortage, as well as deprive local technology companies of the benefits of a diverse management and workforce. “There is a growing energy and momentum,” Sanders says. “I see a lot of concern and the beginnings of new programs and initiatives aimed at solving this issue.”
Advantage for business
Colorado is home to several high-profile and burgeoning women-run technology companies, including Solidware, ViaWest, Warrior Solutions, Kerpoof and 509 Inc., to name a few — and their female founders and executives are paving the way for future women tech entrepreneurs. “I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful mentors throughout my life, so whenever I can reciprocate, I certainly try to do so,” says Kunz, who is currently advising five local women entrepreneurs.
Prior to founding Solidware Technologies, Kunz held marketing, business development and software development roles within large and small technology organizations in the United States and Europe. No matter where she has worked, however, Kunz says there have been times when her gender has set her apart. “I have been on teams where there were 300 men and me,” she says.
Cate Lawrence, founder, president and chief executive officer of Warrior Solutions, maker of mobile technology products for the U.S. military, knows what it is like to stand out in an industry dominated by men. “I go to marketing conferences and hang out with defense contractors, 95 percent of whom are men,” she says. “I don’t wear camouflage and I’m not bald, so people tend to remember me.”
Lawrence says knowing as much as possible — and proving that she is at least as qualified as the men around her — has helped her succeed throughout her long career in technology. “I earned two technical certifications because it helped with my confidence,” Lawrence says. “I was often more qualified than the men I worked with, but no one could ever question my background or say I didn’t belong.”
Beyond some obvious advantages to being different from your co-workers, customers and competitors — “You’ve got shorter lines in the bathroom,” Kunz says — homogenous management and technical teams can curb creativity and limit the vision and perspectives shaping a product or company.
“The people who start and run technology companies have tremendous influence over the technology that gets invented and monetized,” NCWIT’s Sanders says. “If women are not present at the design table, their ideas won’t get substantiated. This isn’t to say that women are brighter than men or have better ideas. But they might have different ideas, and if those ideas are not heard, our businesses and technologies will not be as rich as they might be.”
When technology companies are run without the balanced input or leadership of women, they also run the risk of misaligning with their customer base. “You should never build a company that doesn’t represent the demographics you are selling to,” Kunz says. “We sell to men and women and young and old. We sell to anyone who creates software, so our company needs to reflect that diversity.”
As Kunz notes, the diversity that both women and men bring to a project or company goes well beyond their gender. Case in point: Solidware Co-founder and Vice President of Business Operations Char Devich is a woman, and she’s African American. But she’s also the oldest of 12 children, and Kunz says she believes the experiences Devich had growing up in a large family make her particularly valuable to a technology startup. Devich “is calm and collected and can manage anything,” Kunz says. “That is crucial in a startup environment where you have a gazillion balls in the air at once.”
The pipeline problem
Kunz says Solidware would like to add more talented women to its technical rosters, but over the last two years the company has received resumes from two women, and neither was qualified. “I would never hire someone specifically because of their gender; I hire people because they have the right qualifications,” Kunz says. “Still, I would like to see more women in the pipeline. The pipeline is not good.”
In Colorado, where the number of high-tech startups is once again growing, women remain woefully underrepresented among the armies of computer scientists and software engineers who provide the technical talent necessary to fuel these organizations. “Fewer women are working in technology in Colorado, we know that for sure,” says Su Hawk, president of the Colorado Software and Internet Association.
Of course, the problem goes well beyond this state. NCWIT data shows that although women hold more than half of all the professional positions in the U.S. workforce, they made up only 26 percent of IT professionals in 2006 — a 3 percent drop from 2004.
The dearth of women in technology is evident at networking and business events for local technologists and entrepreneurs. “Whenever I attend events such as Colorado Software and Internet Association meetings, the men always far outnumber the women,” Warrior Solutions’ Lawrence says. “I’m always surprised that things haven’t changed.”
David Cohen, co-founder of the much-hyped TechStars program in Boulder, experienced this “pipeline problem” last year when he was fielding applications for the summer boot camp program, which provides 10 startup teams with seed money, office space and other resources to get their technology companies off the ground. Cohen was hoping to include an all-woman team among the inaugural TechStars participants, but only about 2 percent of the more than 300 teams that applied included even one female co-founder. In the end, several women, including Kunz and Sanders, served as mentors for the program, but all 26 participants were men.
“We’re networking like crazy (with) the major women’s networking associations across the country to get the word out” for the 2008 summer program, Cohen says. “There’s an imbalance between the creators of startups and the users of startups. Encouraging women to become entrepreneurs is a no-brainer for this and many other reasons.”
Nancy Phillips, co-founder and chief operations officer of ViaWest, a Denver-based company that provides co-location and Web hosting services to small- and medium-sized businesses, says the current scarcity of IT talent in Colorado and other parts of the United States is a main reason why it’s important to get more women interested in and pursuing technology.
“Colorado has a serious shortage of skilled IT professionals,” Phillips says. “If we can’t tap half of our population, we’re going to face a real crisis in the future.”
Where are the girls?
When Krista Marks, co-founder and CEO of Boulder-based Kerpoof, was in high school in the 1980s, she excelled at math and physics. Yet, like many young girls, she didn’t consider pursuing a career in engineering or computer science.
“At that point, my highest aspiration was to be a math teacher,” says Marks, who ended up earning an electrical engineering degree from the University of South Carolina before embarking on a career as an engineer, manager and now leader of a high-tech startup aimed at changing the way children interact with computers. “When I was young, I found that talented young women were encouraged to be teachers, lawyers, doctors or nurses — not engineers.”
According to CSIA’s Hawk, today’s “influencers” — who include teachers, school counselors, parents and other family members — are still more likely to guide boys than girls toward math, science and technology.
This lack of early encouragement may help explain why girls continue to make up a very small percentage — only 21 percent in 2006 — of the students who receive undergraduate computer science degrees, according to NCWIT, and why girls, along with their male counterparts, are turning their backs on engineering and other technology-related pursuits at a frightening pace.
Technology careers pay well and offer challenging problems to solve, particularly if you’re the founder of a successful tech startup. And there seems to be plenty of jobs for talented engineers, computer programmers and other tech-savvy individuals. Yet, according to NCWIT, the number of incoming freshman women choosing to major in computer science dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.
Fewer women pursuing technology-related degrees and careers also means there are fewer women with the ability and ambition to start their own technology-related companies down the road, Lawrence says: “I wouldn’t have been involved in founding Warrior Solutions if I hadn’t already had experience in high tech.”
Of course, women can and do become successful technology entrepreneurs without a computing or engineering degree or even technical work experience. Phillips, for example, studied economics in college and says she launched ViaWest not because she had a strong interest in the technical components driving the business but because she had a “burning desire to be an entrepreneur.”
The funding gap
A woman may not need a specific background to start an IT company, but she does need money. And research shows that women tend to start their companies with less money and secure significantly fewer outside investment dollars than male entrepreneurs.
Less than 4 percent of venture capital-funded companies were run by women CEOs in 2006, down from 7.5 percent in 2002, according to VentureOne, a San Francisco-based research organization. Women-owned ventures accounted for 12.9 percent of the companies that sought angel capital in 2006, reported the 2006 Angel Market Analysis released by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. Of these women-led companies, 21.5 percent received angel investment in 2006.
Women are also outnumbered by men in the VC community, and some people believe this lack of representation has made it more difficult for women to access VC funding. “Money can be a little harder to come by for women-founded companies, unless you go to women-specific funding sources,” says Elizabeth Coker, co-founder and COO of Boulder-based 509 Inc., which makes software that enables the extension of Web services to mobile devices.
A number of women-owned VC firms have popped up in recent years, including Ceres, which made an undisclosed investment in Solidware in 2006. Wealthy women made up 8 percent of the estimated 225,000 active angels who invested $23.1 billion in nearly 50,000 entrepreneurial deals, representing another largely unexploited funding source for women and men entrepreneurs alike, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
“Considering that women’s financial power and wealth has grown in the past 20 years — approaching half of the nation’s net worth — it appears women are underrepresented in this type of investing and that we are missing an opportunity for new investments and perspectives,” the foundation writes in its report, “Women and Angel Investing: An Untapped Pool of Equity for Entrepreneurs.”
As part of its four-part Entrepreneurial Series Report, NCWIT conducted a research literature review to determine why women entrepreneurs have less access to or make less use of financial capital than male entrepreneurs. The report concluded that gender differences exist mainly because women tend to open businesses in industries that attract fewer outside investors, such as retail and service areas. A lack of technical education and underrepresentation among investors may also play a role, the NCWIT report found.
In addition, the report noted that women entrepreneurs often start smaller companies than men and that more women tend to self finance their companies, at least in the early stages.
Sanders points to Kerpoof as an example of a woman-run company that has found a creative way to pay for its early growth. Rather than immediately seek outside investment, Marks and her co-founders simultaneously started a consulting company, Radix4 Consulting, to help fund the launch of Kerpoof in 2006. “All of us were willing to go without salaries for quite a while, but we didn’t have the deep pockets to cover operating expenses ourselves,” Marks says.
Bootstrapping was necessary for Kerpoof — not because investors are less likely to fund a company run by a woman but because they have raised the bar on what entrepreneurs must accomplish on their own prior to funding. “Because the costs of creating a company are so low now, investors are looking for significant milestones: Have you launched a beta? Do you have any traffic? Do you have any customers?” Marks says. “If you want to secure great investors, you have to find some way to get the initial work done, especially if you’re a first-time entrepreneur.”
An entrepreneur’s network — the people she knows and who know her — also affects her ability to gain access to outside capital, Sanders says: “Entrepreneurs who have established networks do better.”
Building a network, of course, means forging relationships with influential players, which, in the world of technology, includes other high-tech entrepreneurs and the people who fund them. “If most companies are being started by men, then women must learn how to network quite successfully in that world,” Sanders says.
509 Inc.’s Coker says experience and expertise can also make or break a funding deal, whether you’re a man or a woman. “If you’re going for venture funding, the team is really important,” Coker says. “Investors want a ‘been there, done that’ team, and the reality is that fewer women have ‘been there and done that.’”
Working for change
A growing number of organizations, including NCWIT, Astia, Women 2.0 and the Anita Borg Institute, have been created over the last several years with the goal of increasing the number of women who have “been there and done that” within the technology arena. These groups sponsor educational programs and seminars for women interested in IT; host networking and mentoring events and online forums; and facilitate opportunities for women to pitch their business ideas to venture capitalists, angel investors and seasoned entrepreneurs.
“It is awfully hard to be young and the only one of something, whether it’s being the only woman in your computing class or on a startup team,” NCWIT’s Sanders says. “That doesn’t mean that women can’t or don’t want to do it, but sometimes they have to be encouraged more.”
Along with conducting research into why more women don’t pursue technology and shining the spotlight on current, successful women technology entrepreneurs, NCWIT is working to spread the word about opportunities such as the TechStars startup boot camp to more fledgling women entrepreneurs.
“I spoke to last summer’s TechStars group, and they were as concerned as we were” about the lack of female participation in the program, Sanders says. “Several of them committed to helping to recruit women in the future, and that might be one of the best ways to get the word out.”
In an effort to educate younger girls on the opportunities afforded by a technology education and career, NCWIT has joined forces with the BizWorld Foundation to create a nationwide curriculum aimed at teaching seventh-grade girls and boys how to become technology entrepreneurs. Kerpoof is helping with the effort by providing the technology that will enable these children to create their own animated Web greeting-card companies. “We’re hoping students will weave this work into their social lives or fun activities and all of a sudden get excited about computer science and IT,” Sanders says.
This alliance with BizWorld and NCWIT fits perfectly with Kerpoof’s overall ambition of making technology more interesting and relevant to kids, Marks says. “We want kids to have fun, but we also want to make them think and engage their creativity.”
While Kerpoof wants to change the way all children view technology, if the company’s Web products and work with schools can specifically push more girls into the technology pipeline and encourage them to one day launch their own tech companies, well, “that would be nirvana,” Marks says. “What we’re doing is not the whole answer, but I think it is a piece.”
It was a desire to prove to young girls — including her three daughters — that they can excel at math, science and technology that spurred Solidware’s Kunz to become a coach for the girls’ robotics team at her youngest daughter’s elementary school this year.
“There is nothing more fulfilling than watching these girls compete. They get so excited about the technology because it is relevant and real,” Kunz says. “The more we can do to inspire these girls at a young age, the better.”
Of course, the problem goes well beyond this state. NCWIT data shows that although women hold more than half of all the professional positions in the U.S. workforce, they made up only 26 percent of IT professionals in 2006 — a 3 percent drop from 2004.
The dearth of women in technology is evident at networking and business events for local technologists and entrepreneurs. “Whenever I attend events such as Colorado Software and Internet Association meetings, the men always far outnumber the women,” Warrior Solutions’ Lawrence says. “I’m always surprised that things haven’t changed.”
David Cohen, co-founder of the much-hyped TechStars program in Boulder, experienced this “pipeline problem” last year when he was fielding applications for the summer boot camp program, which provides 10 startup teams with seed money, office space and other resources to get their technology companies off the ground. Cohen was hoping to include an all-woman team among the inaugural TechStars participants, but only about 2 percent of the more than 300 teams that applied included even one female co-founder. In the end, several women, including Kunz and Sanders, served as mentors for the program, but all 26 participants were men.
“We’re networking like crazy (with) the major women’s networking associations across the country to get the word out” for the 2008 summer program, Cohen says. “There’s an imbalance between the creators of startups and the users of startups. Encouraging women to become entrepreneurs is a no-brainer for this and many other reasons.”
Nancy Phillips, co-founder and chief operations officer of ViaWest, a Denver-based company that provides co-location and Web hosting services to small- and medium-sized businesses, says the current scarcity of IT talent in Colorado and other parts of the United States is a main reason why it’s important to get more women interested in and pursuing technology.
“Colorado has a serious shortage of skilled IT professionals,” Phillips says. “If we can’t tap half of our population, we’re going to face a real crisis in the future.”
Where are the girls?
When Krista Marks, co-founder and CEO of Boulder-based Kerpoof, was in high school in the 1980s, she excelled at math and physics. Yet, like many young girls, she didn’t consider pursuing a career in engineering or computer science.
“At that point, my highest aspiration was to be a math teacher,” says Marks, who ended up earning an electrical engineering degree from the University of South Carolina before embarking on a career as an engineer, manager and now leader of a high-tech startup aimed at changing the way children interact with computers. “When I was young, I found that talented young women were encouraged to be teachers, lawyers, doctors or nurses — not engineers.”
According to CSIA’s Hawk, today’s “influencers” — who include teachers, school counselors, parents and other family members — are still more likely to guide boys than girls toward math, science and technology.
This lack of early encouragement may help explain why girls continue to make up a very small percentage — only 21 percent in 2006 — of the students who receive undergraduate computer science degrees, according to NCWIT, and why girls, along with their male counterparts, are turning their backs on engineering and other technology-related pursuits at a frightening pace.
Technology careers pay well and offer challenging problems to solve, particularly if you’re the founder of a successful tech startup. And there seems to be plenty of jobs for talented engineers, computer programmers and other tech-savvy individuals. Yet, according to NCWIT, the number of incoming freshman women choosing to major in computer science dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.
Fewer women pursuing technology-related degrees and careers also means there are fewer women with the ability and ambition to start their own technology-related companies down the road, Lawrence says: “I wouldn’t have been involved in founding Warrior Solutions if I hadn’t already had experience in high tech.”
Of course, women can and do become successful technology entrepreneurs without a computing or engineering degree or even technical work experience. Phillips, for example, studied economics in college and says she launched ViaWest not because she had a strong interest in the technical components driving the business but because she had a “burning desire to be an entrepreneur.”
The funding gap
A woman may not need a specific background to start an IT company, but she does need money. And research shows that women tend to start their companies with less money and secure significantly fewer outside investment dollars than male entrepreneurs.
Less than 4 percent of venture capital-funded companies were run by women CEOs in 2006, down from 7.5 percent in 2002, according to VentureOne, a San Francisco-based research organization. Women-owned ventures accounted for 12.9 percent of the companies that sought angel capital in 2006, reported the 2006 Angel Market Analysis released by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. Of these women-led companies, 21.5 percent received angel investment in 2006.
Women are also outnumbered by men in the VC community, and some people believe this lack of representation has made it more difficult for women to access VC funding. “Money can be a little harder to come by for women-founded companies, unless you go to women-specific funding sources,” says Elizabeth Coker, co-founder and COO of Boulder-based 509 Inc., which makes software that enables the extension of Web services to mobile devices.
A number of women-owned VC firms have popped up in recent years, including Ceres, which made an undisclosed investment in Solidware in 2006. Wealthy women made up 8 percent of the estimated 225,000 active angels who invested $23.1 billion in nearly 50,000 entrepreneurial deals, representing another largely unexploited funding source for women and men entrepreneurs alike, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
“Considering that women’s financial power and wealth has grown in the past 20 years — approaching half of the nation’s net worth — it appears women are underrepresented in this type of investing and that we are missing an opportunity for new investments and perspectives,” the foundation writes in its report, “Women and Angel Investing: An Untapped Pool of Equity for Entrepreneurs.”
As part of its four-part Entrepreneurial Series Report, NCWIT conducted a research literature review to determine why women entrepreneurs have less access to or make less use of financial capital than male entrepreneurs. The report concluded that gender differences exist mainly because women tend to open businesses in industries that attract fewer outside investors, such as retail and service areas. A lack of technical education and underrepresentation among investors may also play a role, the NCWIT report found.
In addition, the report noted that women entrepreneurs often start smaller companies than men and that more women tend to self finance their companies, at least in the early stages.
Sanders points to Kerpoof as an example of a woman-run company that has found a creative way to pay for its early growth. Rather than immediately seek outside investment, Marks and her co-founders simultaneously started a consulting company, Radix4 Consulting, to help fund the launch of Kerpoof in 2006. “All of us were willing to go without salaries for quite a while, but we didn’t have the deep pockets to cover operating expenses ourselves,” Marks says.
Bootstrapping was necessary for Kerpoof — not because investors are less likely to fund a company run by a woman but because they have raised the bar on what entrepreneurs must accomplish on their own prior to funding. “Because the costs of creating a company are so low now, investors are looking for significant milestones: Have you launched a beta? Do you have any traffic? Do you have any customers?” Marks says. “If you want to secure great investors, you have to find some way to get the initial work done, especially if you’re a first-time entrepreneur.”
An entrepreneur’s network — the people she knows and who know her — also affects her ability to gain access to outside capital, Sanders says: “Entrepreneurs who have established networks do better.”
Building a network, of course, means forging relationships with influential players, which, in the world of technology, includes other high-tech entrepreneurs and the people who fund them. “If most companies are being started by men, then women must learn how to network quite successfully in that world,” Sanders says.
509 Inc.’s Coker says experience and expertise can also make or break a funding deal, whether you’re a man or a woman. “If you’re going for venture funding, the team is really important,” Coker says. “Investors want a ‘been there, done that’ team, and the reality is that fewer women have ‘been there and done that.’”
Working for change
A growing number of organizations, including NCWIT, Astia, Women 2.0 and the Anita Borg Institute, have been created over the last several years with the goal of increasing the number of women who have “been there and done that” within the technology arena. These groups sponsor educational programs and seminars for women interested in IT; host networking and mentoring events and online forums; and facilitate opportunities for women to pitch their business ideas to venture capitalists, angel investors and seasoned entrepreneurs.
“It is awfully hard to be young and the only one of something, whether it’s being the only woman in your computing class or on a startup team,” NCWIT’s Sanders says. “That doesn’t mean that women can’t or don’t want to do it, but sometimes they have to be encouraged more.”
Along with conducting research into why more women don’t pursue technology and shining the spotlight on current, successful women technology entrepreneurs, NCWIT is working to spread the word about opportunities such as the TechStars startup boot camp to more fledgling women entrepreneurs.
“I spoke to last summer’s TechStars group, and they were as concerned as we were” about the lack of female participation in the program, Sanders says. “Several of them committed to helping to recruit women in the future, and that might be one of the best ways to get the word out.”
In an effort to educate younger girls on the opportunities afforded by a technology education and career, NCWIT has joined forces with the BizWorld Foundation to create a nationwide curriculum aimed at teaching seventh-grade girls and boys how to become technology entrepreneurs. Kerpoof is helping with the effort by providing the technology that will enable these children to create their own animated Web greeting-card companies. “We’re hoping students will weave this work into their social lives or fun activities and all of a sudden get excited about computer science and IT,” Sanders says.
This alliance with BizWorld and NCWIT fits perfectly with Kerpoof’s overall ambition of making technology more interesting and relevant to kids, Marks says. “We want kids to have fun, but we also want to make them think and engage their creativity.”
While Kerpoof wants to change the way all children view technology, if the company’s Web products and work with schools can specifically push more girls into the technology pipeline and encourage them to one day launch their own tech companies, well, “that would be nirvana,” Marks says. “What we’re doing is not the whole answer, but I think it is a piece.”
It was a desire to prove to young girls — including her three daughters — that they can excel at math, science and technology that spurred Solidware’s Kunz to become a coach for the girls’ robotics team at her youngest daughter’s elementary school this year.
“There is nothing more fulfilling than watching these girls compete. They get so excited about the technology because it is relevant and real,” Kunz says. “The more we can do to inspire these girls at a young age, the better.”