Taking entrepreneurship up a step with Google.
By Shaherose Charania (Co-Founder & CEO, Women 2.0)
By now you’ve heard about Google for Entrepreneurs, with over 50 efforts in more than 30 countries. Pretty amazing for Google to make such a great commitment to innovation, not just side its doors but also outside. Read all about it here.
Google for Entrepreneurs is natural partnership for Women 2.0 and we are excited to work together to spread entrepreneurial culture in new emerging cities– with women a part of the innovation ecosystem at the START, rather than trying to retrofit women into ecosystems when men have already established majority shareholder positions.
What does this mean for you, the aspiring and current female founder? We will be leveraging Google technologies to better connect our community in the coming months. For Google, they get in front of YOU, the future innovators future partners, future employees, future acquisitions. You get to utilize Google’s resources to grow your network and build your high-growth company. All good news!
Truly, this is more than just a partnership for the Women 2.0 community. This partnership (and other partnerships like this) enable a bigger picture for the economy and entrepreneurs which include:
- More innovation diversification
- More disruptive innovation
More innovation diversification
We are already seeing cities with the capacity to innovate, begin to reinvent themselves in order to survive in the new economy. They take practices from Silicon Valley, couple them with their own local strengths (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) with the sincere intent to fostering a (new) culture of innovation, collaboration and risk taking. This has changed the monopoly of innovation that Silicon Valley once had, maybe a decade ago. More and more we are seeing startups sprouting out of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Singapore, London and more.
With Google, we will have the opportunity to enter even newer cities like Detroit, Louisiana, Moscow and Sao Paulo to bring in an entrepreneurial culture and more resources to begin the reinvention process. Some of these are cities you’d expect and others you wouldn’t. Either way, these cities are at the start of re-imagining their local markets and industries in order to survive in the long term. For these cities, entrepreneurship is about survival.
When talking with Google, they shared their interest in transforming these ecosystems into innovative, entrepreneurial ecosystems to get them back in the game of value creation in the local, national and global economy. This wasn’t at all about the success of the local Google office. I admire this effort from a company that has the capacity to impact large scale change. This commitment from Google is a clear extension of its open approach to technology and platforms.
More disruptive innovation
In this new economy, new jobs are critical. New jobs come from founders re-imagining and re-inventing current industries that have reached a plateau. As Jack Dorsey says – founders should pick a movement and create a revolution. This re-imagining, re-inventing, dare I say the word, disrupting, has already happened in many spaces:
- Social interaction: disrupted by social networking (Facebook).
- Traditional media: has been disrupted by social media (Twitter).
- Traditional advertising: disrupted by online advertising (Google).
- Traditional gaming: disrupted by social gaming (Zynga).
- Traditional mobile phones: disrupted by smartphones (the iPhone).
- Retail commerce: disrupted by e-commerce (Amazon).
- Garage sales: disrupted by online marketplaces (eBay).
- The list goes on.
These are just a few re-imagined industries that have created thousands of new jobs. There is room for more. In the Women 2.0 community, here are some industries being re-imagined by our founders:
- Hardware: creative consumer hardware ideas finding funding through platforms like Kickstarter.
- Healthcare: being re-imagined with iPhone apps to correct your posture to re-distributing health insurance.
- Education: being enabled with software inside the classroom and outside the classroom.
- Children’s entertainment: educational toys being found all over tablets.
- E-commerce: new forms of mobile commerce, tablet e-commerce and e-commerce.
Pretty exciting, huh? All women-founded! With Google, we hope to report on more disruption coming from female founders in the Women 2.0 community, and hopefully from outside Silicon Valley and from one of the many cities in which you can find Women 2.0.
All in all, we are excited to be a part of the global entrepreneurship movement in partnership with Google. Google for Entrepreneurs includes many more partnerships that will support you and your startup, so have a peek!
If you are interested in volunteering for Founder Friday in any of these cities or beyond, please email Sepideh Nasiri at [email protected].
Photo credit: Erica Kawamoto Hsu.
About the guest blogger: Shaherose Charania is the Co-Founder and CEO of Women 2.0. She leads Founder Labs, an early stage incubator focused on new mobile ideas. She is a part of Opinno and a mentor with 500Startups. At heart, she is a mobile and telephony junkie. Previously, she was at Ribbit (BT) and JAJAH (sold to Telefonica/O2). Shaherose holds a B.A. in Business Admin from The University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. Follow her on Twitter at @shaherose.
