Check out the latest edition of our weekly Women 2.0 reading guide and join the conversation.
By Betsy Mikel (Editor, Women 2.0)
- Read “MotherCoders Is A New Kind Of Mom’s Group: Make Friends While Hacking” to learn about Tina Lee who founded a coding bootcamp tailored for moms. Six moms have already participated in a six-week pilot. Now Lee is trying to raise $150,000 to create a bootcamp course for moms to teach basic coding skills.
- In “Why Weird People Are Often Creative,” learn about the science behind why genius and madness often come hand-in-hand. Creative people have less “latent inhibition,” which means they absorb more information that others would not consider beneficial. The more info that enters your conscious mind, the more correlations you can make between that info, and the more creative ideas you have.
- Last November, toy company GoldieBlox hit it big with their viral commercial featuring rewritten lyrics to popular Beastie Boys song “Girls.” It went something like this: Girls, to build a spaceship. Girls, to code a new app. To grow up knowing. That they can engineer that. But Beastie Boys wasn’t so thrilled about their music being used for commercial purposes. Beastie Boys sued. They just settled this week. GoldieBlox has “agreed to make annual payments of 1 percent of its gross revenue, until the total payments reached $1 million, to a charitable organization.”
- Endeavor CEO Linda Rottenberg has a new book coming out: “Crazy Is a Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags.” Watch her speak at Stanford University and discuss entrepreneurship for Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner.
- Take a peek inside the inner works of the Google X Team, the minds behind Project Loon — balloon-powered Internet that will be able to reach even the most remote areas or areas that have been destroyed by natural disaster.
- The founder and CEO behind ModCloth, the vintage-inspired women’s apparel websites, offers 5 lessons to her younger self. Our favorite of Susan Gregg Koger’s tips? “You’ll never figure it out.” Coming from a savvy entrepreneur who started her business at age 17 and now runs a company with 500 employees and $100 million in annual revenue, that’s great advice to hear.
- In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, James Surowieck discusses what makes startup founders successful and others a fail. It’s not risk taking, he say. He argues that overconfidence — or more specifically “an over-the-top, unreasonable, unrealistic belief in your ability to prevail” — is what gives successful entrepreneurs an edge. A follow-up in Inc. argues that for better or for worse, fewer women have this trait… and thus there are fewer female entrepreneurs: “As a society, we surely want to encourage entrepreneurship. Let’s just find a way to do it without encouraging insecure women to become blowhards, too.”
- Blast from the past: In an old issue of Fast Company, Louis C.K., who has two daughters, predicts the next Steve Jobs will be a woman. Here’s why: “Overall, I think it’s a good time to have a girl in the 21st century because things are changing, with more opportunities for women. But girls are still the underdog, which means they’ll work harder, and everybody loves an underdog. The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2 — and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something.
- In case you missed it: We’re launching our first East Coast City Meetup on June 26! RSVP today.
- One of our favorite Women 2.0 posts this week: In Mr. Tech Comes to Town, one writer discusses an experience working with an entire “Innovation Lab” of brogrammer, long before that word entered our vernacular.
Read anything interesting on the web this week? Let us know in the comments!
