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The “Kirtsy Girls” – Gabrielle Blair, Laura Mayes, Laurie Sandwick and Sarah Bryden-Brown – led an inspiring live Talk in The Motherhood on the BEST of the Alt Design Summit, the premier conference for design and lifestyle bloggers. Here are the top “Aha Moments” from Alt Summit from the Talk:

“For me, it was listening to Pinterest founder, Ben Silbermann’s, keynote address, and realizing just how much work and thought went into Pinterest. The AHA! was just me accepting the fact that really cool things require really hard work.” – Gabrielle Blair

“Some bloggers said Pinterest is their #1 driver of traffic.” – mkofoed, member of The Motherhood

“People really thought hard about how to make an impression with their (business) cards, and it was so worth it. Not only are these cards memorable, but they give you a great jumping off point for conversation with someone you’ve just met. “Oh wow – I love your card!” We did a roundup of great cards on Kirtsy.” – Laurie Smithwick

“An awesome tip: Use Prezi for your presentations!” – Laura Mayes

“Collaboration. Original Content. Work Hard. Value Your Work. Be Smart about Legal Issues.” – Leslie, Lights and Letters

“I was amazed at how much of Alt was on Instagram. An iPhone is really a must-have accessory at Alt (and so many white ones!) and Instagram just does such a great job of making every photo look special.” – Laurie Smithwick

“Someone asked me once why people talked so much about what to wear to Alt Summit, and I told them I think it’s because that’s how design-y people honor each other — we pay attention to the details.” – Gabrielle Blair

“Alt makes me believe anything is possible because so many people are so passionate about what they want to achieve. The next big thing as I saw it was collaboration.” – Sarah Bryden-Brown

“Alt is ABSOLUTELY a breeding ground for ideas. I never come home from Alt without BIG plans for BIG new things in my life. As Sarah said last year, if Alt were a city, I would give anything to live there all the time. There would be no end to the creating, and to do so surrounded by love and support, would be incredible.” – Laurie Smithwick

“It’s really inspirational. So no matter what you’re working on …. in any profession, you can be inspired. In one session, I sat next to a gentleman who was probably in his 70s…he’s never blogged….he’s an architect who comes every year for creative inspiration and discussions.” – Laura Mayes.

Thank you fabulous Kirtsy girls and The Motherhood for a GREAT conversation! We’re off to do some creating!

Visit our wonderful panelists here:

Kirtsy

Gabrielle – Design Mom

Laura – Blog con Queso

Laurie – Leap Design

Sarah – Blogstar

The Women Entrepreneurs Festival 2012 this week was a huge high. Founded by the incredible Joanne Wilson, Gotham Gal and Nancy Hechinger, NYU Interactive Telecommunication Program, the WE Festival brought together 300 women, all entrepreneurs, entrepreneur hopefuls or investors.

Talk about inspiring. I met the most astounding women with ideas ranging from creating circuit breaker toys for kids, to crowd-sourcing the weather to making beautifully designed products for people with disabilities.

Some of the commentary and themes that stood out for me:

Co-founder Joanne Wilson gave rousing remarks to kick off the Festival. Here’s a quote from a Gotham Gal post that gets to some of the points she made:

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 … [And] 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.

Caren Maio of Nestio got the room laughing when she said, “The definition of entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down.”

Joanne Lang of About One said that fundraising shifted for her when she equated finding investors with finding a husband. Instead of hoping to convince investors to put their money in her company, she interviewed them to find investors who would ‘love me forever and support me.’ She took control of whom she wanted as partners and the investors started lining up.

Also on the subject of investing, the Investors panel talked about how women need to ‘lean forward into’ their pitches to investors and how women can tend to want affirmation and approval from their investors while men are more likely to present their plans, hear the investor feedback and then run their businesses as they see fit. They said the latter is preferable.

Arianna Huffington told us we need to get enough sleep and take care of ourselves. She said that men tend to brag about how they can get by on so little sleep, which she finds ridiculous, and how after hearing from a dinner partner at an event how he got by on so little sleep, she thought, “Well maybe if you got five more hours of sleep a night, you’d be more interesting.”

Arianna also talked about the many ways that women’s interests are leading coverage on the Huffington Post, including mindful living, divorce (“marriages come and go, but divorce is forever” and the newly launched Global Motherhood initiative (see Cooper’s post from yesterday).

Mary Schmidt Campbell, Dean of the Tisch School of Arts at NYU, talked about how men’s careers more often follow a straight line. Women tend to stitch together their varied experiences and parts of themselves, all the bits of fabric of their lives, to create a beautiful tapestry, and it’s only down the road that we can look back and see all the pieces coming together into a whole that makes sense for us.

On my panel, Amanda Hesser of Food52 talked about branding and how she and Merrill deliberately didn’t want to go down the ‘easy chicken’ road – that they never wanted to choose recipe categories that would get the quick bumps in search traffic, but create interesting, valuable, new foods for themselves and their communities. Our fellow panelists, Barbara Pantuso, Hey Neighbor, Tereza Nemessanyi, Honesty Now, and Allison Floam, The Fix, each shared their unique, interesting takes on building online communities. Here’s the WE Festival’s overview of our Community Makers Panel.

Lastly, an important stat: By 2018, women entrepreneurs will be responsible for creating 5 million new jobs nationwide, according to according to new data projections from The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute. That’s more than half of the 9.7 million new jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects small businesses to create.   Rock on, women!!

Nancy Hechinger closed the Festival with an inspiring summary of the highlights and Red Burns, founder of the ITP program at New York University, read this poem:

Appolinaire said:

Come to the edge.

It’s too high.

Come to the edge.

We might fall.

Come to the edge.

And he pushed them, and they flew.