2. Women Tech Entrepreneurs a Minority In 2009, 40% of private companies in U.S. were majority-owned by women But… Estimates of the percentage of start-ups majority-owned by women hover around 8%.

3. Women Tech Entrepreneurs a Minority, but Successful Women have co-founded high-tech companies with less funding and fewer failures than average. Firms with at least some female senior managers outperform those without women leaders. At smaller, newer venture capital firms in IT, the percentage of women in managing-director and general-partner positions is higher than among the 50 most active firms overall.

4. Female and Male Company Founders Share Similar Characteristics

5. Women Entrepreneurs May Have Different Financial Bases than Men Two different findings: Finding #1: High-tech firms’ assets, revenues, and profits differ by gender of founder. Finding #2: Successful men and women IT entrepreneurs had similar funding sources, except: women’s business partners were a main source more often than were men’s.

6. Fund, or undertake, research into female tech entrepreneurship. Draw attention to successful women IT entrepreneurs Get tips on tech entrepreneurship www.ncwit.org/heroes www.ncwit.org/heroes

7. Not Too Late to Start Elaine Wherry had a full-ride music scholarship for college. Freshmen year, she took her first computer science course out of frustration at being unable to program a graphic calculator to play tic-tac-toe. 4 years later, she had a CS degree and landed a great IT job. She quit her job to launch meebo.com before she had a functional product, an audience, or funding.meebo.com Late-blooming techie women can launch a successful start-up. Browser-based instant messaging wasn’t possible until Elaine co-founded meebo.com in 2005.meebo.com

8. How Did She Do It? Step 1. Found good team members. Step 2. Built the product, then gathered feedback. Step 3. Focused on the business plan. Step 4. Established excellent hiring practices. “It’s more important just to get the product out … and get that feedback so you understand how it’s going to be used.”