Sophia Perl of Wisdom

SF New Tech’s Big (Endless) Summer Social

Last Friday night, I attended an SF New Tech event for the first time.  I don’t normally pay a high ticket price, but I happen to know the owner of the house where the event was taking place.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I took the plunge.  The nice thing about the event was that food and drinks were included. Photos from others can be found here and here and here.

When I first arrived, the event was not ready yet.  Note to self, don’t arrive when the event starts.  I wandered around and attacked the Motorola photo booth (I <3 photo booths!).  They had a bunch of out of space toy props so naturally I picked the mechanical robot arm.  About 30 minutes later, I found out that the same Motorola booth was giving out Droid X phones for free.  All that I had to do was do a 30 second video on what interesting thing that I do outside of work.  I hunted down the one guy who was recording the videos, did my pitch and voila!  Phone!  It was the highlight of my night.  Thank you Motorola (@motomobile)!

Some other booths that were there include Dorsey & Whitney LLP law firm and CalInnovates.org.  The Dorsey booth as far as I could tell was unmanned all evening.  I being a sucker for free schwag raided the booth anyways and got some bottom-lit plastic shot glasses and blinking light keychains.  Not sure what the correlation is with party gear and a law firm, but the schwag were cute trinkets.  The CalInnovates.org gave away free iPhone skins of the California state flag (it’s on my iPhone now) and a free t-shirt, womens if I may add.  They asked how I felt about California legislature affecting high-tech companies.  I just commented that California government is doing what the housing real estate market is doing.  There is a high demand to live in certain areas (e.g, SF, LA, near the beach), so hike up the house price until buyers stop buying aka companies stop coming to California.

The description of the event described it as a mover and shaker type of event with VCs and entrepreneurs and enthusiasts (like me).  It was not apparent to me that there were a lot of VCs at the event.  I did notice a bunch of entrepreneurs which was fun to hear their war stories.  The number of people were on the lower end from what I expected although I did talk to people longer AND met more of the attendees (higher percentage).  Not a total lost cause.

In case you were wondering about the food and drinks.  They had Cass winery, Magners Irish Cider, Kicks ice cream sandwiches, a Mexican taco truck, and an Indian/Mexican food truck.  There were plenty of food and drinks.

Question, would I go again?  If the location is cool, then yes otherwise I’ll pass next time.

Things that I learned

• when working with potential cofounders: 1)  before starting, agree to high level plans of the role that person could play and what contribution translate to what equity %, 2) work on small projects and see if working relationship and quality of work are good before moving forward
• you don’t need to be techie to work on a tech idea, in a previous posting, I mentioned the same thing.  as a non-techie, you can do mockups (check out MockApps) to show to your potential cofounder or contractors
• money can come from your extended network.  i met a founder who got some odd millions of dollars (think $5M) from a shared connection with his company’s lawyer
• demo like a salesperson.  one demo booth was uninteresting.  they had 4 youngsters hanging out and when i walked up, asked if i wanted to see a demo instead of just pitching and demoing.  amateurs! j/k
• don’t eat anything messy because you’ll get dirty and people will talk about “that guy” or “that girl” who spilled all over the place.  there was one guy, so I heard, that ate some mexican food and spilled it all over the front of his shirt.

People whom I met:

• Director at Silicon Valley Bank
• Founder of Appfeeds
• Founder of a medical management software system
• Director at Woodside Capital
• Founder of a digital media company
• A lawyer focused on startups
• Founder of SF MusicTech
• Marketing person at a stealth B2C/B2B payment company
• Founder of Chic Meets Geek events

Calling online fashionistas at Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #6

One of my other favorite organizations in the bay area is Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner (I’ll call it baggd for the sake of laziness).  A few weeks ago, I attended baggd #6 at the Computer History Museum hosted by Polyvore, an online fashion dressing room where you create clothing sets and share them.  This was my 2nd baggd event.  It’s so interesting to see the type of women who attend these events based on the topic du jour (or topic du event?).  I can definitely tell you that there were a bunch of stylish women, but not so sure how many of them were geeks.  So I am a geek and I love fashion so this event was a perfect match for me.

The evening started off with some nibbles and drinks.  Then they had a 4-5 person panel about online fashion.  The food was good, but it was gone soon after I arrived.   Women love to eat.  They also had a fun photo booth with props in the lobby.  This is the second time that I’ve seen a photo booth at an event.  It’s becoming quite popular.

Now the panel, it was okay.  It went a little long and  the focus more on fashion than on geeky topics.  It would have been good to get a balance of the two topics.  The CEO of Polyvore did the moderation with folks from Polyvore (of course), Chictopia, Moxie, and eBay.

I did ask two questions: 1) since this is girl geek dinner, who makes the technical decisions at your company? and 2) are you profitable?  I didn’t get a straight answer, but eBay said that a woman (not her) makes the technical decisions.  Yeah!  For the profitable one, the Polyvore CEO said that they are and commented by saying profitability is not a good measure of success.  Not sure why she said that because I did not infer that profitability a success factor or even the only success factor.  Hmm…  The CEO said that she didn’t want to be profitable so early in the company.  If she thinks profitability is a bad thing, then someone should let her investors know to pull the plug.  Hahaha.

My notes from the panel discussion:

• soft goods like fashion, jewelry is surpassing hard goods like tech, soft goods make up a small percentage of spend (eBay)
• users influence what designers they carry (Moxie)
• luxury brands want to control messaging like Twitter (Moxie)
• brands with prominent face for the brand like DVF (Diane Von Furstenberg) can leverage Twitter a lot better (Polyvore)
• luxury brands fear loss of control in the internet space (eBay)
• we use Ruby on rails, focus on core set of features/functions, get feedback from influencers to shape the product (Chictopia)
• eBay is good at search, need to be sure that users can find items, how can a user find more things to buy, leveraging image search to find products, open up the minds of users, users do 80% search 20% browse (eBay)
• start social media in public relations, don’t ignore social media (Moxie)

Aside from the event agenda, I really enjoyed networking with new and old friends.  You can count on baggd events to give you that opportunity.

Quick way to know whether you are a good leader

Scarce resources means that you have to be creative in getting people motivated to work for you.  Leadership is a big word.   So how can you gauge how effective you are as a leader.  Here are some quick ways.

It’s good to do a self assessment periodically so that you can stay on your A game.  Most people are better at it than others.  Me, I tend to pick up the clues that people give whether it be a joke or a feedback sit down session.  The feedback can be good or bad, it doesn’t really matter which because both are good to hear.  Just be prepared to listen for them in everyday conversation.

One question that you should ask yourself is this, If you had no money to pay employees, would people still want to work for you for free? Better yet, would you want to work for yourself?

Don’t ask me about how I think I am as a leader.