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.
