trendpreneur

Just a quick note to say I’ll be at Informatics Ventures’ Engage, Invest, Exploit exhibition tomorrow. The fun kicks off at 2.30pm in the Informatics Forum – the shiny new building on Crichton St.

Looks to be a great event, with Guy Kawasaki talking (twice!). Might even be able to tweet the talk a little. See you there!

Sometimes I wish people would just shut up about the whole women in technology thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire that people notice a gender imbalance, and spot that it causes women to feel uncomfortable because they’re so much a minority, and try to address it either with hot air and bias or with sensible, practical ideas.

But I fundamentally disagree with the concept that talking a lot about women in tech is going to change things. I’ve watched the Women in Games movement unfold ever since I attended the WiG conference, sponsored by Microsoft, in 2006. I’ve been something of an activist myself, organising WiG events at university, taking part in Women in Computer Science outreach events, being a leader in the all-girl PMS Clan, and you know what? Nothing’s really changed.

At PMS our mission was to create a safe place online where girls could get their game on without the 12-year-olds on Xbox Live telling us to get back in the kitchen. Yes, female players got treated badly if they owned up to it, but to be honest, most of us didn’t use particularly giveaway names – nor did we speak, and even if we did, people thought we were boys. The real advantage of PMS was a group of girls to gossip with, to talk games without any preconceptions or uphill struggles. The only thing that disappoints me is the way PMS gamers were often hired out as ‘booth babes who actually like games’, making female gamers more visible on some levels and more of a rarity on others.

You see, and this applies to technology, startups and gaming all, I’m just fed up of being told I’m special.

Whether it’s women-in-X panels, conferences, articles or movements, the very existence of something that says “Women in technology are rare and precious beasts!” seems to make it harder for me to get on with actually being one of them. Everyone(TM) knows that women programmers are rare, therefore nobody assumes I’m a programmer. Everyone(TM) thinks women don’t play games, so they’re happy to believe I just dabble in MMOs and won’t concede that I could beat them at Halo or CS any day.

I am fed up, fed up fed up fed up of having to explain myself, having to beat it into people’s heads that I happen to be just as intelligent, qualified and able (if not more so) than the guy standing next to me, and –  in my experience — all the movements telling these people that women in tech are rare only makes it harder for me to convince people I’m one of them.

Don’t treat me like a three-headed monkey, and maybe other people will cotton on and stop doing so as well.

On a more practical note – yes, ‘we’ need role models, mentoring, better awareness in schools and to make technological subjects at university more accessible. But we need to do things, not talk about them. I’m going to be discussing an idea for SIcamp to encourage women in tech, but not overtly, in line with my three-headed-monkey philosophy: watch this space.

The idea of spending a week divided equally between Silicon Valley, London and various international airports might not sound exotic to some people, but for me the last seven days have been quite an adventure.

This time last week was April’s NESTA session, including exercises on blueprint planning (how to visualise/mindmap the path from where you are now to a specific goal), product positioning (are you unique or mass-market? are you cheap or premium?) and a little on cashflow, with a delightfully complicated spreadsheet to complete in our own time.

I then spent Thursday travelling to Palo Alto — despite having visited San Francisco before, this was my first trip to The Valley. Immediately enmeshed in startup culture due to staying at Hacker House, kind of like a frat house for coders (well, not really, but that’s the best one-line description I could come up with) it was already a far cry from Edinburgh’s misty morns.

Friday saw me fulfilling a wonderful stereotype and coding away in a coffee house in Mountain View — which has to be my favourite place ever due to the ubiquitous wifi — as well as discovering that even in the US I have freakish feet. Apparently size 10.5 isn’t something many places stock. Tsk. With cofounder in tow, we got ready for our YC interview the following lunchtime, surrounded by others who had been through it or were about to face it as well.

After the interview (which I’ll write about separately) I had a great time at the Computer History Museum. It’s weird to see stuff in my parents’ attic enshrined in a museum, but nostalgia is fun. We even saw a working PDP-1 with an amazing story behind it; a MIT undergrad, hacking on the machine at night, created a music synthesiser. When restoring the PDP-1 at the museum, they unearthed a box of tapes which turned out to be the music input for this program, but the program itself was long gone… fortunately, the original programmer was involved in the project! 40 years later, he rewrote it and we saw the machine play music. The creator of Spacewar! was also there demonstrating the game. Amazing stuff.

The last big event in the Valley for me was the HN/YC BBQ where a ton of local entrepreneurs, hackers, coders and assorted miscellany turned up and partied the night away. It was pretty nerve-wracking for those of us waiting on a decision from YC, but definitely a great atmosphere in which to be.

I would say that it was a novel, unique type of social event, one where the first question wasn’t “So, what do you do?” but “What does your startup do?”, but let’s fastforward through planes, trains, taxis, shuttles and the Tube to yesterday and Geek’n'Rolla, which had very much the same feel to it.

(We got a no from YC, by the way; but an incredibly valuable experience nonetheless.)

Geek’n'Rolla was an amazing event – both a celebration of startups and a quick-fire crash course in various aspects of making them successful, from user experience to tools to funding. Having just come back from the US, it was also interesting to see the various comments on whether one should launch in the US, how best to do so, etc.

I spoke to at least one young entrepreneur who planned to jump over to Silicon Valley and start a business there, and while I entirely sympathise with the — perhaps somewhat romanticised — notion that going to a place where everyone lives and breathes tech startups is a good idea, I also wouldn’t discount the UK just yet. Events like yesterday’s really give me the same feeling of camaraderie and startup spirit that I got the other side of the pond, and I’ll cheerfully point out programmes like EPIS and the various Governmental initiatives that try to make it easier to get started over here. (Even with all their flaws, at least they exist.)

As of this morning I’m back in Edinburgh, collecting my thoughts, preparing to write more about Geek’n'Rolla — especially a few thoughts on the women panel! — the YC experience and so forth, as well as getting ready to pitch at the Guy Kawasaki event next week. Thanks to everyone who offered comments on my pitch yesterday; I met some fantastic people and it’s definitely made me realise I need to spend more time in London.

Oh joy. More planes.

One of the pieces of homework from the first NESTA session was this: create fake evidence to motivate yourself.

If you were to become supremely successful and achieve everything you’ve ever dreamt of, what would it look like in terms of physical evidence?

Would you be on the cover of Business Week? Frontpaged on TechCrunch, TechMeme and Digg? Interviewed by Jeremy Paxman? Speaking at TED? Would your designs be in London Fashion Week or perhaps someone might wear your scarves on Gossip Girl?

I was going to use my Photoshop ninja skills to mock up the TIME, Business Week, Wired and Vogue covers with myself on, but sadly I have too much to do. However, the idea of creating these imaginary success stories is a really enticing one, once I got past my initial scepticism and started really visualising what success might mean to me.

Even if you’re not being forced to do it for homework, why not spend a few minutes at least thinking on the subject — you might even find yourself smiling!

Some productivity (or lack-thereof) lists for you today.

Lifehacker’s “Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions (2009 Edition)” is a post of genius. Rather than deny them pageviews and relist the extensions here, hop over and check the post out. I’ve got pretty much all of them installed (though I’m not so sure about AutoCopy; highlighting text to make a link, the link I had ready in the clipboard got replaced by the would-be anchor text..).

Secondly, a list of 20 must-read blogs for online entrepreneurs that made frontpage on Hacker News twice, so it must be good. On a serious note, I read most of these and they’re great. So, some nice Easter reading there – enjoy!