Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too. Especially when every press outlet says we (female tech founders) are as rare as a mythical creature. So how about getting them answers straight from the source (female tech founders). If you belong to this group do a quick intro about yourself before answering questions. If you don't and want to learn more about the HN female tech entrepreneurs, feel free to ask as a reply.
My turn:
Name: Diana
Startup: http://DoerHub.com (dogfooding: http://www.doerhub.com/for/doerhub )
Role: Founder, wrote every non-open-source line of code (Rails, JS, D3, Neo4j, Node.js, MongoDB) on the site in a grad school dorm room.
In tech since: 1998 (Age 13). Haven't stopped since.
How did you start?: Started in rural Bulgaria and parents couldn't afford a computer so I volunteered at internet cafes to learn HTML and JS online after hours, then did graphics in flash, then Action Script, evolved to writing data mashups, custom JS libraries, rich visualizations for CNN during elections, CMS front-end architecture, full-stack web products from there.
Why did I start: had a pen-pal girl from Sweden who was a year older than me and had built her own website. Once I realized I can learn for free and the world could see my work I was addicted (lived in a censored country for a while so that mattered).
Proof of cred: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dianazink and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/SearchProcessor.js and http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/js/3.0/search/customSrchProcessor.js used by CNN, NBA, and some other sites.
Has your gender made any of this hard?: I'm not muscular, so building online stuff is actually easier on me than the "reputable" jobs my grandfather said I should do instead.
Ask away.
- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a cringe Justin Bieber /cringe fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.
- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ band.
- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.
- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the average worker in my country in a month.
- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet, really.
- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or model).
- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants ('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies of your choice because of the point above.
- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of literacy you will need to know eventually.
- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.