This post is for all the fact-loving, data-crunching guys who keep claiming that tech is a merit-based ecosystem where anyone with a good idea who is willing to bust their tail 80 hours a week will succeed.

If you are one of them you probably aren’t aware that March is Women’s History Month; a time to celebrate women’s accomplishments, especially in tech, since they are why you have a company/job.

How excited would you be if it took 10 years for your most important metric to double?

That’s what you see for founding teams with at least one woman — from 7.7% in 2006 to 17.5% today.

Whoopee.

It’s much worse for all-female founding teams — their funding dropped from 22.8 in 2014 percent to 18.9 percent now.

That totally sucks.

And it’s far worse when you add color to the equation.

What’s it going to take for this to change?

More female angels and VCs — happening very slowly.

More angels and VCs of color — a distant dream.

But more importantly, and hopefully sooner, more successful, entitled white guys will digest the numbers and decide it’s just plain wrong.

 Are you/will you be one of them?

BTW
Happy St Paddy’s Day to all my Irish and Irish wannabe readers!

Image credit: TechCrunch/flickr and Free-extras

I do brand outreach for my long-term associate NTR Lab, which includes working with Yana (always a pleasure) on its blog. Today’s post originally appeared there on January 28.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and investor Bill Gurley, among many others, believe that 2016 is the year that many unicorns will morph into unicorpses as valuations tumble amidst tightening money.

So does that make 2016 a bad year to start your company? No, in fact, just the opposite.

According to Jason Calacanis, angel investor and founder of Inside.com “Great companies are like great captains; they make take advantage of smooth sailing times like now, but are not afraid of rough seas that eventually show up.”

Jeff Grabow, EY Americas venture capital leader says, “If you talk to venture capitalists, they’ll all tell you the best time to start a company is in a downturn.”

And Mike Abbott, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, made a great point when he said, “We’ll stop seeing particular folks starting a company for the sake of starting a company, because they see it as this romantic endeavor.”

But it was CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal who said it best, “While it’s ‘fun’ in a schadenfreud’y way to claim some absurd number of unicorns will falter in 2016, it misses out on the fact that 2016’s climate may force many of these unicorns to become RABBITs.”

Rabbit? Who wants to be a rabbit? You should. Being a rabbit is much like Andrew Wilkinson’s horse that we mentioned last week.

Image credit CB Insights via Business Insider

 The biggest difference going forward means that your valuation will be based on real revenue as opposed to funding rounds — more like Apple / less like Uber.

You’ll learn to do more with less and will stretch not only your dollars, but also your pennies. And your team will learn along with you.

For those of you who haven’t experienced a tighter economy or worked through a real downturn the actual experience can be off-putting, if not downright frightening.

Click for a cornucopia of ideas and resources to do more with less.

Image credit CB Insights via Business Insider

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Since 1996 founder/CEO Kevin Plank built Under Armour into a real billion dollar company that went in 2005.

Real because that billion dollars is revenue, i.e., money paid to the company in return for its products.

In other words, sales, as opposed to a great story told to investors so they will fund yet another round raising valuation, but not value.

During his talk at the iConic conference, Plank cited two serious misconceptions rampant among today’s founders.

1. Raising money at high valuations is equivalent to a successful business

2. Going public is a way for founders to cash out and ease up on intensity

His thoughts echo what Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the Fortune Global Forum.

“They are being drawn in by these venture capitalists and private equity to take these huge amounts of money at these huge valuations. They cash out early, they buy these penthouses in the sky and then all of a sudden they’re trapped. They can’t go public because their last valuation would be higher than their public valuation.”

And Benihof sees value in an IPO that has nothing to do with losing intensity.

“Public markets are great for CEOs. You have to answer to the public market. You have to listen. You have to pay attention.”

Plank also offers a solution for cheap capital to fund growth.

“I think that the cheapest capital in the world is probably sitting in your inventory racks or the product you are trying to sell because, No. 1, it doesn’t require a board seat and doesn’t have an opinion to weigh in on what you are trying to do with your business. So use that as your capital. Go sell what you have, and go raise money.”

Granted, it’s a mundane solution, with no glitz and is unlikely to garner headlines in techland, but it works.

Kind of like getting your medical or law degree without student loans.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Wally Bock recently compared high flying CEOs to Icarus and provided three classic examples.

In case you’ve forgotten, Icarus’ wings melted when he flew too near the sun.

Icarus’s father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea’s dampness would not clog his wings or the sun’s heat melt them.

Unfortunately, both traits often find a home in founder MAP.

Hubris: extreme pride or self-confidence… Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence, accomplishments or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power.

Sound like anyone you know or have read about lately?

Complacency seems more unlikely in a hard charging founder.

While Wikipedia considers it synonymous with contentment, Merriam-Webster provides a more accurate and commonly accepted definition.

Complacency: self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies; an instance of usually unaware or uninformed self-satisfaction

That probably brings a number of people to mind.

The synonyms listed will surely clarify any questions you have, but what’s most interesting are the antonyms: humbleness, humility, modesty.

But here’s the real kicker. A new study finds that the most effective leaders by several different measures are those exhibiting the antonyms.

As you might expect, leaders who overestimated their own competence were the least effective. But the surprising finding was that leaders who underestimated their own competence were the most effective. Likewise, leaders who underestimated themselves had the most engaged employees.

Now you not only have a choice, you have enough information for it to be an informed choice.

Flickr image credit: Dan Moyle

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

How would you respond to what works best?

Do you agree with Carlos Brito, Brazilian chief of Anheuser-Busch InBev NV?

“If you want the best out of people you have to put pressure on them all the time.”

Or are you more like Shamsheer Vayalil, founder and managing director of VPS Healthcare, founded in 2007; today it has 650 physicians and 7,500 employees and serves some 2 million patients a year?

I was a good listener. I would listen to people. I would accept that I didn’t have any experience. So I hired the best people on the job.

If you’ve read much of what I write you’ll know I support Shamsheer’s attitude far more than Brito.

As do Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos.

Different approaches, both yielding success.

Either way the message is clear: the best CEOs in the world listen more, whether it’s to customers, employees, or business partners — and doing so can go a long way.

Yet another reason to make sure you know yourself.

Flickr Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

When tech people talk about philanthropic role models these days they focus on people like Bill Gates and his foundation or Mark Zukerberg’s donation to schools where he grew up, which, obviously, are very important.

Sometimes they talk about a few million donated to San Francisco to off-set the anger directed at commute buses and general tech arrogance — which we all know is no more than a rounding error to companies like Google.

Marc Benioff has a different take on what companies owe to the cities that host them.

We have done a phenomenal job creating value for the world through our technology, but we are not really an industry known for giving that wealth back.

Benioff’s attitude isn’t a reactive to the current anger at tech; he instilled philanthropy in the company’s culture when he founded it in 1999.

He called it the 1-1-1 model of corporate philanthropy, in which the company would send 1 percent of its stock, products, and employees’ working time to the company foundation.

His approach inspired companies like Yelp, NetSuite, and Google to develop their own variations.

“Marc has been pounding the table getting everyone to pay attention and come up with their own philanthropic strategy,” says Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO.

Benioff has a new initiative called SF Gives (run by nonprofit Tipping Point Community) to change things.

SF Gives to raise $10 million for regional antipoverty programs. Benioff got on the phone himself and successfully pushed executives at Box, Google, Jawbone, Zynga, and 15 other tech companies to join.

His goal is to add another 85 companies in 2015 and I have no doubt he’ll succeed.

In short, Benioff is a true proponent of doing well by doing good and sees it as a substantial competitive advantage and recruiting tool for Salesforce.

Embedding your own version of Benioff’s 1-1-1 in your startup’s culture and joining SF Gives at the earliest opportunity may not guarantee you the same success as Salesforce, but it will certainly garner you good press, important connections and a significant competitive advantage, which won’t hurt your chances.

Image credit: HikingArtist