Emily Chang – Designer

We’ve now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded.

I was glad to see two interesting initiatives this week related to women and girls in technology. The first was Entrepreneurial Night by Girls’ Middle School in Mountain View and held at Google. Ten groups of seventh grade girls made their pitches to a room full of venture capitalists.

In his post at BusinessWeek, Rob Hof writes:

It was pretty amazing to see these young entrepreneurs slinging PowerPoint slides in front of a huge conference room screen in front of more than 400 people–including the VCs from whom they were asking for real investments of $100 and up. I’d be scared to death, but they all had their pitches down cold. They had been working on their businesses for months as part of the school’s Entrepreneurial Education program, now in its 10th year. And they had rather precise projections of their profits and the amount they’d return to their prospective investors. Judging from sales at the booths they had set up before their presentations, they were going to beat those projections handily.

Vivian Wu, a judge at the Girls’ Middle School (GMS) Entrepreneurial Night for the past three years writes about the experience at Techcrunch. She explains that the program is a full year course at GMS with volunteer business coaches helping the girls conceive of ideas, write a business plan, and prepare to present on the actual night. This level of commitment to teaching is really key to change: both encouraging and teaching applicable skills to kids. The other part of the project that resonated with me is the philanthropic angle.

Worth noting is the fact that the girls are all taught to develop profitable and philanthropic businesses. In May, they liquidate the businesses, return capital (and more) to investors, and each donate 5-20% of profits to charities like Greenpeace, SPCA, CARE and the school library! Several of the teams focused on recycled products as well, which Trae Vassalo from Kleiner particularly applauded when she funded Reuse, Recycle and Relax.

Concepts of social entrepreneurship and sustainability aren’t limited to any industry. Instead, they benefit the business, the world, and each of us in this connected ecosystem.

Women 2.0 Business Idea Competition

The second event is the Women 2.0 “Submit your business idea… on a paper napkin” contest. Women 2.0 is a branch of Entrepreneur27, and “connects like-minded, motivated young women in the Silicon Valley to swap energy, ideas, and experiences with each other.”

The competition requires that you submit a business idea on a paper napkin for a chance to pitch your plan to a judging panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I love the minimalism of condensing your idea to a 5 inch square napkin. It’s not just entrepreneurs that might sketch their most brilliant thought in a few line graphs or words, it’s also engineers, artists and writers who have revered paper napkins as medium for inspiration ;)

Women 2.0 is accepting business ideas that are in concept stage or in beta launch only. The deadline to submit ideas is Thursday, March 15. Afterwards, semi-finalists will be notified by March 20th and then need to email a 10 slide presentation by April 15th. Finalists will notified by April 20th with the presentations taking place at 7 pm at CNET in SF on April 25th. You can have a team of up to four individuals. At least half of the team must be female and at least half of the team must be under 27. Get all the details and requirements at the Women 2.0 site.

Last month I had the pleasure of hearing from Kaori Omoto, an editor at CNET Networks Japan. Today, eHub Interviews went live as a channel at the Japanese version of News.com.

CNET Japan will be translating eHub Interviews as they are released at featuring them at http://japan.cnet.com/column/ehub/

The first interview to go live is eHub Interviews Amiglia.

Japan has consistently been in top six countries for traffic to my site and I look forward to new readers. In the next few months, eHub Interviews will be expanding to interviews with more creators and companies outside of the United States. If you’re a web company anywhere else in the world and interested in an interview, please contact me or leave a comment as I hope to be doing reverse translations from other languages into English as well.
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Over on his blog, web.XpunktNull.de, Klaas Bollhoefer has an interview series that will interest eHub readers and Web 2.0 users, especially those that speak German. “Inspired by your interviews, which I love and read regularly, I started a german interview series on my blog with the people behind german Web 2.0 services” writes Klaas. Since April, he’s already interviewed twenty companies.

Read the 11Qs interviews, currently including with new ones added regularly. Keep up the great work, Klaas.

Email interviews with:
- Christoph Berger of studylounge.de
- 11Qs-Special with Peter Schink for the reader edition of the Netzeitung.de
-John Mishek Milah of blauarbeit.de
- Floyd Celluloyd of Largestonlinestadium
- Tobias Kobier of Woopy
- Enrico core of yigg.de
- Nico Wilfer of myblog.de, amiamo.de and watchmedoing.com
- Daniel “Tourist” van Moll von Bagook
- Marcus Rojas of Prangr
- Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload
- Claus Morell of DerWunsch.de
- Andreas Anthony of milles of Spreadshirt
- Michael Muehl of Valoony
- Gerrit van Aaken of loudblog
- Siegfried Hirsch of Seconds11
- Jan Miczaika of Hitflip
- Dr. Heiner wolf of webmobs.de
- Stephan Uhrenbacher of Qype
- Peter Schink von Laufrausch.net
- Ole Brandenburg von Pageflakes

Also see:
eHub Interviews
eHub Interviews in Japanese
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Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. In the post, “February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce. Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas’ initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million.

For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.

On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar. Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision. See “Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more.

The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers? On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out). On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.

The JP Morgan and Connector Group Showcase, “a unique forum for companies to introduce their leading-edge products and services to the Silicon Valley’s elite group of tastemakers and influencers ,” took place on Monday, January 30 at the JP Morgan offices here in SF.

The event offered a behind-the-scenes look into some of the innovative new products currently in development in terms of consumer electronics and online services. The Showcase was organized by Auren Hoffman and Patrick Flanders, co-founders of the Connector Group.

A cocktail reception preceded the presentations, with a chance to view various product displays by presenting companies. Each company then gave a quick, 5 minute presentation with visuals displayed on four large screens.
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Earlier today, I went to the E27 Technology Symposium at Stanford University. E27 is “a forum for young entrepreneurs to showcase their upcoming or new products to influential representatives from newspapers, popular blogs, progressive companies, universities, and venture capitalist firms.”
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I’m pleased to announce a new set of eHub Interviews (Netvibes, Codase, goowy, ColorBlender, Last.fm) has been translated into Japanese by the exceptional Ryutaro Kamitsu.

Please visit the links below for the Japanese versions, and as always, stay tuned for more!

eHub Interviews Netvibes

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051018/1129614139

eHub Interviews Codase

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051019/1129652023

eHub Interviews goowy

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051031/1130736366

eHub Interviews ColorBlender

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051101/1130840600

eHub Interviews Last.fm

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051102/113090100

eHub Interviews launches featuring four interviews with creators of web 2.0 applications, including Writely, Protopage, CommunityWalk, CentralDesktop.

New interviews will be launching daily at eHub Interviews. Stay tuned for interviews with Netvibes, last.fm, Kiko, Findory, Blinklist, Meta, Openomy, Prodigem, Fundable, Mappr, SiteVista, NetworthIQ, SWiK, eyeOS, Listal, LibraryThing, CommonTimes, Slawesome, CampaignMonitor, Filenice, voo2doo, Feedmarker, Delineate, MapStats, Jambase, Guten Tag, and many more.

eHub Interviews is a project by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Ideacodes.