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Mena Trott (Internet RockStar) |
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 Before Tumblr and David Karp, there was Mena Trott. Credited for
starting the blogging boom, Trott was an avid blogger with a personal blog way
back in 2001.
Dissatisfied with existing blogging tools, she and her
husband Ben developed
Moveable Type out of their spare bedroom.
Since then, the Trotts have
also been responsible for TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox, all highly
popular, mainstream blogging software for the masses, some of which they
developed and some of which they acquired.
The blogging platforms now
exist under Six Apart, the company Mena and her husband started in 2002
and of which she is co-founder and president. The blogging phenomenon
doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon, and neither is Mena
Trott.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Jory Des Jardins (Internet RockStar) |
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 Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual
conferences, BlogHer
is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate
their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential
customers.
The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its
articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are
syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.
It has
empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and
Jen Yates from CakeWrecks,
to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the
company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog
post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.
"I’m excited
to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only
because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my
daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a
little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling
all over this great country."
What's most impressive about the
enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and
Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three
rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million.
They're expecting to turn a profit this year.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Elisa Camahort Page (Internet RockStar) |
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 Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual
conferences, BlogHer
is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate
their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential
customers.
The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its
articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are
syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.
It has
empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and
Jen Yates from CakeWrecks,
to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the
company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog
post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.
"I’m excited
to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only
because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my
daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a
little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling
all over this great country."
What's most impressive about the
enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and
Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three
rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million.
They're expecting to turn a profit this year.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Lisa Stone (Internet RockStar) |
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 Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual
conferences, BlogHer
is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate
their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential
customers.
The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its
articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are
syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.
It has
empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and
Jen Yates from CakeWrecks,
to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the
company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog
post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.
"I’m excited
to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only
because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my
daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a
little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling
all over this great country."
What's most impressive about the
enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and
Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three
rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million.
They're expecting to turn a profit this year.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Heather Harde (Internet RockStar) |
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 Ever since Heather Harde transitioned
from Fox Interactive Media to CEO of TechCrunch in 2007, industry
pundits have kept a close eye on her.
The wildly successful and
profitable tech blogs of TechCrunch, started by Michael Arrington, track
the minutiae of the tech business, covering everything from products to
startups. (In a coup in 2006, TechCrunch broke news of Google's
acquisition of YouTube.)
Harde was recruited by Arrington to grow
TechCrunch from a blog to a media company, making her a major influencer
among venture capitalists and technology companies. She’s used to
dealing with big transactions; at Fox, she oversaw a $2 billion budget
for mergers and acquisitions.
In 2007, Harde and her blog empire hosted
the Crunchies, recognizing key leaders in technology and innovation. She
also recently helped organize TC Disrupt, a competition and conference
to hook up New York startups with investors—an event for which they struggled
to get a woman-led team to attend.
For Harde, the move from a media
company to TechCrunch was a perfect hybrid of her longtime interest
in technology's impact on media. "I really do think blogs are going to
be the future medial channel," Harde
said in 2008, "because of the type of news that blogs are
breaking."
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Rashmi Sinha (Internet RockStar) |
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 Rashmi Sinha made the jump from life as an academic to the Web when she
got bored of working in a lab. She started by dipping her foot into the
tech arena when she cofounded Uzanto Consulting, a company that provided
user research for technology products to companies like Microsoft and
Yahoo!
That enterprise eventually helped launch SlideShare in 2006,
where Sinha is co-founder and CEO. SlideShare is like YouTube for
PowerPoint or KeyNote, creating a social network of sorts for
presentations. Want feedback on your product or service?
Float it out
there by uploading to SlideShare, where community members can then add
to, comment, and share with others. Among Sinha's notable accolades are
being named to Fast Company's Most Influential Women in Web 2.0, not to
mention making it onto Playboy's list of America's
sexiest CEOs.
"Women can have a different leadership style and if
you don’t understand that style, it can be a blocker in funding women,"
Sinha writes
about her own experience when seeking financial backing for SlideShare.
"I don’t think they were against women CEOs, rather it was the
particular leadership style they did not want to fund."
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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Elaine Wherry (Internet RockStar) |
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 Meebo.com
is already defying expectations for its against-stereotype leadership
team. Of the company's three co-founders, it's the two women who bring
the engineering chops.
Sandy Jen and Elaine Wherry, with degrees in
computer science and symbolic systems respectively, teamed up with
fellow Stanford alum Seth Sternberg (MBA) to start Meebo, a
browser-based, all-in-one instant-messaging service.
In 2005, Jen was
frustrated with having to remember all 13 screen names for her various
instant-messaging accounts, and after fiddling around for a few months
with Wherry and Sternberg (and leasing server space with their personal
credit cards), Meebo was born.
These days, Meebo claims 140 million
users and has been valued
in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nielsen/NetRating has named it
the fastest
growing instant-messaging destination in the U.S., ahead of Google
Talk and Skype Messenger. "We think about the Internet as an ecosystem,
not a loose collection of sites," says Jen. "There is so much you can do
once you are able to connect users in ways they want and need."
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
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