AdvancingWomen’com‘s Gretchen Glasscock

Share your story!  That’s how we learn from each other.  I’ll start.  As I was looking over these personal and pivotal entrepreneur tales from Startup Stories #1 from Scott Allen’s Entrepreneur Blog I had sudden flashes from my own entrepreneurial past and I suspect you will, too.

If you are a woman in business, take a look at ” Inside the Green Room - Internet marketer extraordinaire Donna Fox shares her experience as the only woman (not counting staff and spouses) at a conference of 100 top internet marketers.”

I can easily equal that.  In 1995, I was at an Internet conference in Tampa Florida, when the newly Netscape browser enabled Internet was in its infancy.  There were presentations on how to name your web page: beginning with a letter near the first of the alphabet was recommended so you’d come up first in lists of what was then pre-Google search.  There were dramatic videos featuring the metaphor du jour for the Internet, intergalactical spinning of planets, full throttle Star Wars type background music and strobe lights, indicating an out of this world, reaching for the stars future for all of us.

The conference, mostly patting the Internet’s creators on the back and imagining what the Net future might hold, boasted 5,000 attendees with a prospecting for gold mindset, about 5 of whom were women.  Tampa was sporting a brand new 600,000 square foot convention center, views of sparkling Tampa Bay, and huge, airy bath rooms of perhaps 50 stalls. For the very first time I could remember, you could enter the woman’s room and laugh in astonishment if you encountered another woman ( as the guys no doubt scrambled for space down the hall.)

And here were are today, with reports of women on the Net outnumbered 100 to 1.  Ladies, don’t wait to be invited to join the game.  Kick the doors in and come on in.  The Internet and particularly business on the Net is a very friendly place for women to be.  See:

Don’t Cry for Us, Silicon Valley
Yes, Some Blogs Are *Very* Profitable – And Some Of Them Are Women’s Blogs

The other story that struck me was Are We Products of Our Entrepreneurial Environments? – John Jantsch shares the story of his entrepreneurial upbringing.  This is really an excellent post and I highly recommend it. John notes:

“Many of the traits that make up the entrepreneur are ingrained as habits, I suspect, knowingly or unknowingly, by our well intentioned parents and caregivers.

Fear of failure is learned, fear of success is learned, fear over money and lack are learned, shame in tooting one’s own horn is taught, fear of being called different is acquired. Likewise, innovation can be an observed trait..”

My father, a fearless entrepreneur in a family of entrepreneurs taught us early on to take risks.  He taught us to play poker to learn the connection between the hand you held and the risk you were willing to take on it.  Since scientifically, if 1000 hands are dealt out to 4 people, they will all wind up with the same number of winning hands, the key was in the betting.  And knowing your competition.

If neither your father or your mother or any of your early mentors have been entrepreneurs, AdvancingWomen.com was created as a support system, an electronic mentor to help women succeed and prosper, to kick down those doors and put more cracks in that glass ceiling.

What have your experiences been as an entrepreneur?  Have you started a business?  Tell us about it.  Or tell us what you’d like to hear more about:  solopreneurs?  blogging?  You name it and we’ll discuss it or get one of you to come on as guest bloggers and tell us more.

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