embracing apparent contradictions, diversity and change
Best. Burn Night. Ever.
for D, September 2010
We didn’t go to Burning Man this year. Who knows, maybe next year. Instead we observed burn night in our own way, by having spaghetti, playing Arkham Horror, and drinking champagne. We lost three of five investigators but in the end Roland and Patrice barely took Ithaqua out in the final battle. What a great night.  And a fine weekend, too!
DRAFT! Work in progress, feedback welcome!
revised version intended as a two-part series on NWEN’s blog
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also cross-posted on Feminism 2.0
Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are…. Statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs.
Privileged much? *
The lastest firestorm about women and entrepeneurship got kicked off by Shira Ovide’s excellent Wall Street Journal article Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups.  Shira’s article has some fine quotes from Dina Kaplan, Yuli Ziv, and Fred Wilson, and this from Rachel Sklar of Change the Ratio:
Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it.
I thought it was a great read. But not everybody agreed.
Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.
Oh please. Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan.
Yes, it’s hard. Stop whining. Take some responsibility.
I eased back into things slowly after our vacation, visiting LA to see my brother and his family and then San Diego to meet a Facebook friend and hang out with D, who was launching PrivacyActivism’s graphic novel Networked: Carabella on the Run at ComiCon. How cool is that? By the end of July, it was back to full speed ahead. We’re making great progress on Tales from the Net, I’m really excited about the innovation work I’m doing volunteering with NWEN, and I’ve been meeting some incredibly interesting people online and off.
Sounds like a good time to psylebrate! It’s a birthday bash for Dr. Spook, so should be lots of fun.
And with the summer wrapping up and the year almost exactly 2/3 over, it’s a fine opportunity to see how I’m doing on my New Years’ Resolutions.
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From Jeff’s talk at pii2010.
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pii2010 (privacy identity innovation) got off to a fine start yesterday with a great opening reception and the Innovate 100 Seattle Pitch Slam. While a few of the participants were from the Bay Area, Seattle-area startups Optify, InternMatch, and Pathable took the top three spots, with Tweetajob and IdeaScale also representing well. Go Seattle!
And props to the Innovate 100 team and pii2010 for getting a more diverse group of participants than we often see in events like this. As well as good racial diversity, two of the speakers were women — quite a contrast to the all-male feel of TechStars, Y Combinator, or last spring’s NWEN First Look Forum.
Shameless plug: speaking of the First Look Forum, we’ve extended the application deadline for the fall event to August 23. If you’re an early-stage startup, please check it out! If you’re thinking of applying, there’s some tips here and here.
The pitch slam started with a one-minute “Quick Pitch” competition, with Secret123, Puzzazz, Open Mobile, aNEWSme, wishpot, and InternMatch competing for the last open spot in the finals. I was impressed by how well most of the presenters conveyed what they were doing in just 60 seconds. The crowd went wild after InternMatch’s dramatic reveal at the end of their minute: the person giving the presentation was actually an intern! Gotta love that.  So it wasn’t at all surprising that they moved on to the finals.
This is “Geek Week” in Seattle . Yeah, yeah, every week is geek week here, but this is especially geeky with pii2010, gnomedex, and a host of other events. Thea Chard’s got a good overview in XConomy.
I’ll be at a couple of events on Tuesday, August 17, and probably more later in the week. Please let me know if you’d like to sync up.
at 4:30 in the Bel Harbor conference center, it’s the pii2010 opening reception followed by the the Innovate 100 Seattle Pitch Slam is on August 17. Innovate 100 is run by Guidewire Group, which includes Chris Shipley (best known for DEMO); they’ve already done over a dozen in Eastern Europe, and this is just the second one in the US. Judges include Rebecca Lovell of NWEN and Fran Meier of TRUSTe. I don’t know details but it looks very interesting. It’s $40 to attend, and if you’re looking for an interesting window on innovation or a good networking opportunity, it could be a good deal.
at 8:30, pii2010 and NWEN and the CFP coference are having an impromptu tweetup somewhere in Belltown. We’re still finalizing the location; look for more info on the #nwen and #pii2010 hashtags on Twitter. It’s no cost to attend (in this context, “Tweetup” is code for “everybody buys their own drinks”), so if you’re a night owl, come join us.Speaking of NWEN, if you’ve been considering applying to the First Look Forum, we’ve pushed the deadline back to August 23 to better align with Geek Week. Rebecca Lovell’s Help us Help You: The Art of the One-Page App on the NWEN blog has some very helpful advice.
And speaking of pii2010 (privacy identity innovation), if you’re doing anything related to online identity, privacy, or the social web, by all means check it out.  It’s pii’s first year, and they’ve got a really exciting program. The pitch slam is one of several other things going on their, including a Startup BootCamp on Thursday at the space needle.  There’s a lot more information at http://pii2010.com/ … see you there, perhaps
jon
Update: the final deadline is August 23.
Rebecca Lovell’s The Art of the One-Page App has some very helpful advice
Don’t delay! Apply today!
If you’ve launched an innovative business with growth potential….
- And you’re looking for expert coaching and some exposure to the investment community….
- And you have not yet presented your plan to an angel group membership or VC partnership…
…then NWEN’s First Look Forum could be the perfect opportunity for you!
Indeed! Dog food, e-forks and other ideas in TechFlash, Software Vs. Medical Startups: Online Travel Is the Winner in XConomy , Why We’re Shouting “Thank You” from the Rooftops, and For the Love of the Craft on Qworky’s blog tell the story of April’s finals, where Mikal’s awesome 5-minute presentation got Qworky to the top five. We also participated last fall, when we made it to the round of 20 and got some great feedback, calibration, and connections. It’s a great event, and was really worth the time and energy we invested.
The next FLF is fast approaching, and the application deadline is August 18 has been extended to August 23. Submitting by the early-bird deadline of August 2 gives an extra round of feedback and a bonus shmoozing opportunity at the “Early-bird reception”. If you’re potentially seeking for angel funding in the next six months or so, it’s worth investing the time to put together a one-page executive summary. The application form and the full schedule are on NWEN’s site.
Event chair Rochelle Whelan and NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell asked me to be part of the volunteer organizing committee to represent the entrepeneurs’ perspective. My pleasure! And when I think back on my perspective back when Sally, Mikal, and I were first thinking about applying application, the word that springs to mind is “uncertain”: did it make sense for us to participate?  If we went for it, how to maximize the value we get from participating and our chances of doing well? Presumably others are in the same boat.
So I’d like to pass on some excellent advice we got from our advisors and a learning from our own experience. And if other past participants have suggestions, please drop them in the comments.
Our last real vacation had been in June 2007, also on the Big Island of Hawaii. Just a few weeks before we left Microsoft had told me that they planned to lay me off (although they didn’t give notice for three months) so I was somewhat stressed. Since then, well, by the end of 2007 I was too exhausted to go anywhere. 2008 was an activism year and I put my life on hold for CFP, Get FISA Right, and Voter Suppression Wiki. We had planned to climb Mount Kilimanjaro at the beginning of 2009, but didn’t manage to train for it and were busy with the remodeling so didn’t actually go anywhere. And then there was CFP. By last summer Qworky was in high gear: we decided to postpone our September vacation because we at a critical point if we were boing to get funding by the end of the year. Then didn’t go anywhere in January vacation because engineering was on a role and we needed to build on the momentum in order to ship and close funding. Then there was all the stuff related to my transitioning to an advisors role at Qworky — and CFP.
So by the time we got to Waikoloa on Hawaii at the end of June we were really really ready for a vacation.
It was great: sunsets, snorkeling, malasadas and Waimea tomotaos, driving around in a convertible listening to mix CDs, fireworks on the 4th, seeing John Keawe over dinner at Bamboo in Hawi, ziplining, being on a boat … what’s not to like? And I slept eight hours a night for the first time since 2003. Yay! Hmm, do you think the lack of stress might have something to do with it?
D’s organization Privacy Activism is going to be debuting the graphic novel Networked: Carabella on the Run at ComiCon … how cool is that? So I was making plane reservations for her. We usually fly Alaska Airlines up and down the west coast — after a decade of doing the two-city thing, we’re “MVP golds” which means that if necessary they’ll kick off the co-pilot to give us a seat. But since she needs to stop in San Francisco on the way it turned out to be a lot cheaper to do the SF/San Diego leg on another airline. So I turned to Expedia.
After filling everything out, I hit the “pay for booking now” button. It whirled around for quite a while and eventually told me
Drat. I hate software. I tried again; same result.  I switched to another credit card. No dice.  So I called it a night and went to sleep.
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Should we have to give up our freedom and privacy in to reap the benefits of a constant connection to friends and information? How do we take advantage of the power of computers to improve freedom and privacy online and off?
– From the CFP 2010 Call for Participation
Let’s find out, shall we?
I’ve got blog posts coming out today on the CFP blog, Pam’s House Blend, and hopefully Google’s Public Policy blog and a Microsoft blog as well … so I don’t have much to add to that. On a more personal level, here’s what I said a couple of years ago
If it seems like CFP means a lot to me, it does: I’ve been going there for over 10 years; my SO Deborah Pierce has been going even longer and chaired it in 2005. I’ve volunteered, asked questions, been on a panel, run a couple of BoFs, and taken photos of Deborah during the various sessions she’s appeared in or moderated. There are lots of friends and long-term acquaintances we only get to see in person at CFP — and every year we met a lot of new people.
Indeed.
Chairing a conference is a huge amount of work — even with all the help from co-chairs Sigurd Meldal and Dorothy Glancy, and the great work from the volunteers on the planning team and at San Jose State. Deborah and I were having dinner last night looking forward to getting our lives back.   Still, it’s worth it. It’s a great program and we’re webcasting a lot of the sessions. And who knows, but the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights (aka #BillOfRights) has a chance to take off. Exciting times.
See you at http://cfp2010.org!
jon
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