Russ: This is a BusinessMakers WebXtra, a continuation of the radio broadcast discusion with the co-founders of Women 2.0, Shaherose Charania and Angie Chang. This really sounds cool, I can feel the passion from both of you but how do you actually measure if you're being successful in this endeavor?

Shaherose: Our single measure of success is the number of co-founders we see being created through our programs.

Russ: New co-founders in –

Shaherose: New co-founders –

Russ: In technology businesses.

Shaherose: Primarily in web, mobile, clean tech, biotech and consumer retail. So if we're finding more and more women launching businesses, even if they fail, as long as they've tried, that means we've succeeded. We've taken someone who had an idea or had a passion and took that leap.

Russ: Right. So are you able to track this at all?

Shaherose: So we're working on tracking it. It's definitely not an easy thing. We act as a catalyst so we're never gonna be able to track every woman that starts a business but we're launching a research study at the end of this year that will help us better track our community. In the end, as long as someone's launched a company, we've done our job.

Russ: Okay. Well I would assume too that you're sorta getting on the radar of media like The BusinessMakers Show about trying to find out where there are some successful high-tech women startups.

Angie: We have a lot of conference organizers coming to us asking us for recommendations for women speakers. So we have a huge database within our network and friends and friends of friends that we can recommend awesome women who founded companies in the web shadow space in the mobile clean tech space as Shaherose said. Recently in the O'Reiley circle there has been complaints about not enough women speakers in the web 2.0 expo and so on. And we would like to be one of the people that can be able to generate speaker recommendations, make some introductions and we think that we're very valuable to the ecosystem by raising the status of women and by making them speakers for large events.

Russ: Okay. Well now there's no question that being out here in silicon valley that you sorta have a much broader group of people to draw from that are getting into technology in particular. In fact it makes me wonder, is this just a Silicon Valley only mission?

Shaherose: Absolutely not. While it is started here in Silicon Valley, the hub will be in Silicon Valley, no doubt because there is a culture of creation, a culture of innovation in Silicon Valley that we have not found anywhere else. However, there are passionate people, there are innovative people who do not live in Silicon Valley and we witnessed it. We've traveled around the U.S. I just recently got back from Spain. I've been to India. I've been to Dubois in Malaysia. I've been to a whole bunch of places around the world where I've met entrepreneurship ecosystems and the truth is it's everywhere.

Russ: Okay.

Shaherose: We'd love to be the hub here in Silicon Valley for high-tech innovation but our growth strategy is to reach other parts of the world. And we plan to do that through what we are trying, which is called startup weekend where you take the culture of building something, what you find in Silicon Valley so easily to other parts of the world. And in the end, connect all these people together in a way that catalyzes their innovation and they actually get to the point of launch.

Russ: Okay. What's an example of startup weekend, the agenda?

Angie: So startup weekend starts on Friday night. Everyone comes together. You have designers, developers, marketers, community managers, ideas people, even caretakers of children because a lot of women developers have children. So we watch out for their needs as well. And Friday night everyone comes together, they form teams, they solidify and they form teams around ideas and they build their product over Saturday and Sunday and on Sunday night they launch. And they pitch to the other teams at 6:00 PM and around 9:00 PM or so we have like maybe a dozen companies out there, applications, web sites. So and then months later some of these are still around. Some of them are succeeding and some of them are failing but the thing is that people come out of this event with passion. They know more people, they build things and it makes them more brave to do it again. That's what we found.

Russ: Okay. Out of curiosity, are there ever any males at any of these events?

Shaherose: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean most of our events are open to males. We give preference obviously to female attendees and in the end we always try to aim for a 50/50 split. We're not thinking that the world is made of just women right. So the world is made of males and females so our events for that reason are open to males and females.

Russ: Okay, okay. Now you sort of mentioned this startup weekend. And are you just gonna be rolling that out across the country and perhaps around the world?

Shaherose: It's something we're testing out. The way we work as an organization is very much like a web2.0 startup. You put something out there, you try it, you iterate and you come back. So we're happy to test out startup weekend. We're gonna test it out here in Silicon Valley and we're expecting to do another startup weekend in India at the end of the year, potentially Europe at some point. In fact, the women who we met in Spain, from Madrid will be joining us this weekend for startup weekend to learn what it's about so she can take it back and launch it in Spain. So startup weekend really in the end is our way to ignite entrepreneurship in new areas where we cannot physically be there, while supporting our mission of igniting more founders. In the end those founders who launch companies we hope will apply to our flagship event, which is a startup competition called Pitch where the winner of Pitch actually meets with an iconic investor. This year we did, the iconic investor was Michael Mart from Sequoia. You don't normally get a meeting with Michael Mart pretty easily.

Russ: Right.

Shaherose: So for us to arrange these types of opportunities for early stage companies is invaluable and we hope that by doing startup weekend around the world, it'll feed into Pitch and as it feeds into Pitch we've changed the stats again. There's more women starting companies and we've achieved our goal.

Russ: What was the company that won this last Pitch?

Shaherose: So this year the winner was a biotech company. The idea was they wanted to save the world by helping people detect skin cancer and it was called Lumamed, previously called Lumaderm and yeah, they were the winner this year and they met with Michael Mart. They go on and they're trying to raise money. And if you're interested in biotech let us know.

Russ: Okay, okay.

Shaherose: Every year we have a winner and it's been interesting to watch the evolution of the different startups come through our community. Over the three years we've had 300 early stage startups come through the startup competition and over 40, 50 venture capitalists and angels who evaluate these startups and give feedback. So our network grows on either side and in the end creates a really strong ecosystem for more and more growth.

Angie: We encourage women to participate in our Pitch competition because we believe that giving them a deadline and something to strive toward really brings together a team. Oftentimes we have women in startups going, "I wanna start a startup. I wanna start a startup." And we give them a reason and a deadline to do it by. And they had to submit an executive summary, a short business plan and a video pitch. So it basically makes it pretty easy and we just realized that setting a deadline for our women really makes them put something together.

Russ: Okay. I'm talking to two of the co-founders of Women 2.0, Shaherose Charania and Angie Chang. And before we wrap this up, what I would like to do is ask each of you to tell me, what's the perfect outcome, say 3, 4, 5 years down the road for Women 2.0? And let's start with you Angie.

Angie: My person goal is to create more visibility for women in technology. So if we can provide web 2.0 expo or the next TC50 TechCrunch event with a top-notch women entrepreneur co-founder and to have her on the cover of Fortune Magazine, Inc. Magazine, then that would be my dream.

Russ: Maybe even have her on the Businessmakers Radio Show.

Angie: Exactly. So my dream is to have more visible women technology to increase the status of women and to encourage younger women to go into programming to start more companies.

Russ: Cool, and you Shaherose?

Shaherose: To see the startups that we're supporting. We've seen them come through things like winning the FaceBook fund and winning other competitions. I want them to win bigger. I want them to exit. I want them to IPO, whatever makes sense for them. I want them to go from the stage where they're mostly at 5 to 10 people to a game changing business.

Russ: Real cool. I thank you both for sharing your story and some time with the Businessmakers Radio Show.

Shaherose: Thank you for having us.

Angie: Thank you.

Russ: And that wraps up this mornings WebXtra with Shaherose Charania and Angie Chang co-founders of Women 2.0 and you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.