i/o ventures, founded in January 2010, is a San Francisco startup incubator and mentor similar to Y-Combinator. I/O Ventures has partnered up with Arianna Huffington, Donna Karan and Sarah Brown to put together the first Women In Engineering Prize, and will announce the winner at the 1st WIE Symposium on September 20, 2010.
I/O Ventures mentors and provides a small amount of seed capital to founders of technology startups to help them develop, launch and commercialize their product or service I/O Ventures works closely with the entrepreneurs to develop sustainable and scalable business models, improve execution and accelerate time-to-market. Entrepreneurs chosen by I/O undergo four months of mentorship and given an opportunity to pitch investor's at I/O Ventures' Demo. I/O Ventures cafe and incubator is located at 780 Valencia and 19th Street in San Francisco's Mission district. Their new facilities offers a relaxed and casual environment for mentors and entrepreneurs to meet and exchange ideas.
I/O Ventures cafe incubator located at 780 Valencia St and 19th Streets in San Francisco's Mission district under construction in January 2010
Paul Bragiel at I/O Ventures cafe and incubator still under construction
Layout of I/O Ventures cafe and incubator facilities and seating areas located in San Francisco's Mission District
I/O Ventures team includes Aber Whitcomb, former CTO and co-founder of MySpace; Ashwin Navin, former President and co-founder of BitTorrent and a veteran of Yahoo's corporate development team; Jim Young, CEO and CTO and co-founder of HotorNot.com, a web service for users of Linux, MySQL and PHP at large scale; Paul Bragiel, a co-founder of Lefora, a product used in operating forums, and co-founded Meetro, the first location-based social network.
The deadline for hopeful female founders to apply is Sept 10th, and the lucky and hard working winner will receive 25k in investment, become part of the i/o program, get free office space for a month as well as a trip to New York to attend the conference. i/o’s Paul Bragiel and Ashwin Navin initially put the award together because they noticed a lack of women applying for incubator funding at i/o, and was wondering if this was possibly because women lacked clear cut mentors in Silicon Valley. This wasn’t unique to i/o either. Bragiel said, “I’ve talked to various other incubators and there were very few females there, so we figured we’d market directly to women and make it clear that there were opportunities specifically for them.”
The WIE award will target young female startup founders looking for exposure and access to the i/o incubator, which mentors founders from product launch through the next stage of company development, sharing what has proven to work for product scaling, revenue growth and fund raising. Bragiel holds that the competition and prize are the first of their kind, “The goal in our collaboration is to help more companies founded by women get exposure they need to the best investors and mentors both in the valley and world wide.” Female entrepreneurs should also consider this an open call to go mentor at i/o. Aspiring WIE Prize winners can apply here.
COMMENTARY: I don't know how I/O Ventures escaped me, but they launched right after the Holiday's and it probably fell through the cracks, coming right after all those NCAA football championship games. There simply are not enough startup incubators or mentor's. Y-Combinator gets most of the press, so it is refreshing to read about I/O Ventures.
This post comes a bit late, but very timely, as I recently posted an article about the lack of female founders of technology startups. I/O's WIE Symposium is a great opportunity for women with technical and engineering backgrounds to showcase their entrepreneurial talents and startup ideas, and win an opportunity to participate in the I/O mentorship program, receive some seed capital and launch their new startups.
I just reviewed the WIE Symposium program and in addition to Arianna Huffington, Donna Karan and Sarah Brown (Wife of Gordon Brown, U.K. prime minister), there is quite a list of other impressive female speakers including Gina Bianchini (co-founder NING), Tamara Mellong (co-founder Jimmy Choo Shoes), Katarina Fake (founder of Flickr), Dee Dee Myers (White House press secretary) and many other accomplished women.
Tickets for the WIE Symposium range from $200 to $500 depending on the number events attended. My major beef about the WIE Symposium is that it is being held in The Big Apple. I was thinking that a more appropriate location should've been Silicon Valley, the technology Mecca.
The WIE Symposium winner receives $25,000 in seed capital and has an opportunity to be mentored by Kim Polese, former CEO SpikeSource, Inc., co-founder of Marimba and served as a Java product manager at Sun Microsystems for seven years; Chris Shipley, analyst, entrepreneur and CEO, Guidewire Group, Inc.; Theresa Gouw Ranzetta, Accel Partners, who headed investments for numerous technology startups; and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO, Polyvore and former Accel Partners CEO-in-residence.
Courtesy of an article dated August 11, 2010 appearing in NonStopTechNews
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