What If You Could Create a Startup?
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Panelists: Jessica Alter (Formative Labs), Connie Chan (Andreessen Horowitz), Liz Gannes (All Things Digital), Sandy Jen (Meebo), and Lucy Zhang (Facebook)
Abstract: Entrepreneurs are the catalyst to innovation and pushing change forward. Every idea is just an idea until someone creates a team and starts building a product. This panel discusses the steps you would take to create, iterate, and launch a startup. Some of the best entrepreneurs and advisors in the industry share their experiences and advise how to launch a successful product and iterate through different stages of a company.
Biographies:
Jessica Alter
Jessica Alter is the Founder & CEO of Formative Labs. Formative is using social and game mechanics to change real-world behaviors. Previously, Jessica led Business Development and was GM of Platforms at Bebo (Acquired by AOL). Prior to Bebo Jessica worked in business development at Hands-On Mobile. She is also Co-Founder of FouderDating, an organization that connects entrepreneurs of different backgrounds to start companies. She holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Connie Chan
Connie Chan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she focuses on finding great entrepreneurs with big ideas in consumer tech. Previously, Connie led business development and marketing efforts for HP Palm in China. At Palm, she also launched the App Catalog, developer portal and the Facebook application. Prior to HP Palm, she worked as a founding Senior Associate at Elevation Partners, a $1.8 billion media and entertainment private equity firm, where she fell in love with the consumer Internet and mobile space. Connie graduated from Stanford University with a Master’s degree in Management Science & Engineering, and a Bachelor’s in Economics.
Liz Gannes
Liz Gannes has been a Silicon Valley-based business technology reporter since 2004, where she started her career as a reporter at Red Herring. She was the second employee at the technology blog network GigaOM, where she covered the rise of the social Web. As part of GigaOM, in 2006, Ms. Gannes founded NewTeeVee, a site that became the preeminent source for news and analysis about Internet video and ultimately the intersection of entertainment and technology. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in linguistics.
Sandy Jen
Sandy Jen is Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Vice President of Engineering for Meebo, one of the Web’s fastest growing consumer Internet companies that enables over 170 million users to share and connect with their friends online. Jen leads Meebo’s engineering team and is responsible for the company’s backend technology and innovations. Jen began her engineering career at San Jose-based Xilinx—the first semiconductor company—as an enterprise software developer. She spent more than two years there with a fabless manufacturing model. She graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and is a recent recipient of the Founders Fund TechFellows Award in Engineering Leadership.
Lucy Zhang
Lucy Zhang is a software engineer at Facebook, where she focuses on building mobile messaging products. Prior to Facebook, Lucy was a co-founder of Beluga, a mobile group messaging company. Beluga caught the attention of tech influencers, received rave reviews, and was acquired by Facebook two months after launch. She previously worked as a software engineer at Google, where she worked on Google News and Docs, and she received a Founders’ Award for her work on the Ads Auto-Reviewer. Lucy holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Blog post by KarenT available here: Create a Startup.
