21–30 of 121 posts
I'll simply point out that this is Penelope Trunk, who previous wrote about how she had two abortions for her career. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connectio...
Age 25 - met her future husband
Age 26 - got married
Age 27 - Child #1
Age 27 - graduated law school
Age 29 - Child #2
Age 33 - Child #3
Age 35 - Child #4
Age 39 - Child #5
Age 46 - Child #6
Now - runs a minor league baseball team
This model of doing business is broken. It can be fixed.
Exactly. Working smarter/slower at first, and focusing on a well thought out minimal viable product, then scaling up makes more sense than working insane hours to bang out something fast then burn out. I figure I have about 60-80 good hours of applied, useful thought a week (not all of which is spent on work related items).
The former case, one needs repeated iteration and trial and error to discover/create a new market. You will deviate several degrees from your original direction within the first 2-3 years.
In the later case, you have no choice to grow "smart" if you have something viral. You don't choose your scale or the speed of your growth once a few people discover you. You will end up working insane hours just to keep the infrastructure alive. (this is strictly for software businesses, btw. but I can think of an instance of D.C. hole in the wall sandwitch joint that got reviewed on NPR. Nothing like a flesh-DoS, and you can't tell that guy he doesn't need to put in insane hours.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It assumes that all women want to have children Headlines omit qualifiers. If you read the headline as " Fewer women than men want to run startups because many of them would rather have children", I think it's entirely accurate. Sure, there are women who don't want children, just like there are men who want nothing more than to be stay-at-home dads -- but they're the exception, not the rule.
I know tons of successful women who run businesses who are fine without having children; I also know quite a few who have children and are still able to run a business. This whole argument goes back to the beginning of the feminist movement and people not being willing to hire women because they should be making some man sandwiches and popping out babies. The trend is leaning towards more women having fewer children,…
I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk. Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that: - Men are more likely to do riskier jobs; - Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally); - Women tend to choose that are closer to home. Basically…
The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties.
Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk. Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that: - Men are more likely to do riskier jobs; - Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally); - Women tend to choose that are closer to home. Basically…
The author points out that women who want to have kids can't wait very long, generally don't have time to do a startup first, and that you'd have to be crazy to try to do a startup and raise young kids at the same time. I'm not sure that I believe her arguments about men, though: For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle…
What I CANNOT feel comfortable with however, is still toiling away 10 years from now, still trying to get my first break.
As men, we have a longer runway to start a family which certainly has an impact on the numbers of women in this endeavor.
There is just something about women and product businesses that's weird. I recently put on a conference about bootstrapping paying products only, and I looked for ages to find a single woman bootstrapper like myself. They can't be found.
There are uncountable zillions of women freelancers, women running agencies, women coding, women designing, women writing, women coaching.
There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping.
I can name 5 to 7 female founders with VC off the top of my head -- to my mind, they have better brand name recognition than male founders (the only men I can think of by name, I know personally).
But, after days and days of searching and mining my (RL) social networks, I was able to identify only ONE single fellow bootstrapper (and she's "only" part of a 4-person team). And she's not from The Land of Opportunity, if you know what I mean.
Outside of tech, there are lots of women who've gotten loans or other capital to make ands sell physical goods, of all the risky-ass things they could do. Or restaurants, shops and cafes.
So, obviously there are many women who are not afraid of entrepreneurship and not really risk-averse. Selling specialty shoes or front-end web dev is much, much riskier than creating a paying digital product, and less remunerative than doing a startup with funding. (And most of those funded startups are "social long shots" -- not product businesses.)
I don't have the answer, but there is something weird going on there. But I don't think it's an external thing. Nobody is keeping those other women down.
That said, I'm a married woman in my mid-20s. I married when I was 24 and launched my product business right after. If I ever wanted to have kids (which I do not), I would definitely wait, because the "have it all" thing is definitely a myth. You end up either shortchanging your kids or your work, unless you're totally unstoppable (and who is?).