So You Wanna Start a Startup? November 18, 2008

Presenting the first Women 2.0 event on the UC Berkeley campus!

Join us on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008, from 7pm to 9pm, at UC Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building in the East Madrone room (5th floor).

* Learn from six women entrepreneurs in various industries and hear how they transformed a few simple ideas into remarkable businesses!
* Get students excited about your company or project with a short 1 min introductions.
* Meet enthusiastic Berkeley students and potentially leave with a new co-founder or intern for your team!

Looking for an intern or new hires? Interested in sharing your entrepreneurial experiences with students? Looking to get more connected with the Berkeley startup community?

Join us on Tuesday night! Register at http://women2cal.eventbrite.com.

Speaker Bios

Annie Chang (Co-Founder, LOLapps)
Annie is Co-Founder of LOLapps, provider of custom applications spanning pop culture, entertainment, and a variety of special interests for Facebook and other social networking platforms. Headquartered in San Francisco, LOLapps raised $4.5 million in venture funding earlier this year. Annie started her career as a computer scientist at Adobe and then moved over to product management and product design at BitTorrent. In her spare time, she enjoys bike riding in Marin and daydreaming about scuba diving in Thailand. Annie's been helping to promote women in technology since her college days, where she managed communications for the Society of Women Engineers at Cal. Annie holds a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley.

Mythili Sankaran (CEO, Koollage)
Mythili is the tech junkie steering the ship. Known for plunging into hazardous waters – e.g. cricket while in labor and grand canyon hiking in winter – her family is certainly happy to have her heading Koollage, a dramatically "safer" venture. Having worked on many firsts like video-on-demand chips, digital answering machines, and Palm's wireless OS, Mythili is a whole lot of everything – 100% executive, 100% mom, 100% cook (her record is food for 350 right from her stove), and 200% Koollager! With an unreasonable addiction to Indian junk food, she has graced the halls of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent, and Palm – passing on her junk food addiction to Nobel Laureates along the way. Covering a spectrum from fundamental physics to cutting edge mobile internet technologies, she has certainly secured some koolness and has some to spare. Koollage won first place at the 2008 Women 2.0 Pitch Night - see coverage of the event here.

Edith Yeung (Founder, SFentrepreneur; Co-Founder, Clue Market, Inc.; Executive Producer, BizTechDay)
Edith founded SFentrepreneur to connect the entrepreneurship community across the greater Bay Area. She also co-founded Clue Market, a social networking and marketing company. Most recently, Edith was the executive producer of BiztechDay - a technology bootcamp for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Prior to starting all these fun projects, Edith spent 9 years in the software and consulting industry and built a successful career working with companies including AT&T Wireless, Cisco Systems, Ariba, American Management Systems, Siebel, Oracle Symantec, Telstra Australia, Matav Hungary Telecom, Autodesk, Taiwan Semi-conductor just to name a few. Check out Edith's BiztechDay interview on Comcast/CNN.

Donielle Buie (Founding Partner, Gutsy Partners)
Donielle founded Gutsy Partners because of her passion for entrepreneurship and her belief in the power of the entrepreneur to change society. She saw that many people had the motivation and skills to start a business but unfortunately had gotten "stuck" in the planning, start-up, and growth process because they were trying to do it all by themselves. She has recently taught two 8-week entrepreneurship courses at Abundant Life Christian Fellowship and has hosted workshops, including Leadership at the Start of Your Business. Donielle holds a BS in Biomechanical Engineering and an MA in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies from Stanford University. At Stanford, Donielle was selected for the prestigious Mayfield Fellows Program focusing on high technology entrepreneurship. Through the program, she worked at Evant, a San Francisco based software startup. This experience sparked her passion for entrepreneurship!

Hazel Grace Dircksen (Founder, Socialbees Strategy)
A consultant and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, Hazel Grace helps companies leverage social networking tools to reach new audiences. Her most recent company Socialbees Strategy has already crafted Facebook business pages and ads for more than twenty companies in its pre-launch stage. Prior to Socialbees, Hazel Grace was an award-winning fashion designer and launched FashionIV, a social fashion site that was a Facebook Developer Platform launch partner at F8 '07 through the San Francisco Ladies Who Launch Incubator. She went on to become the Ladies Who Launch Silicon Valley leader and San Francisco co-leader where she helps female entrepreneurs grow businesses. When she's not working on a project for one of her many clients, you can find Hazel Grace on MySpace (member at the 500,000 mark), Yelp (Elite member for the past three years), Facebook (first GEO network user – ask about her top secret Facebook account!), and Twitter, just to name a few.

Alison Covarrubias (Owner, Business Legs; Director, San Francisco Chapter of Ladies Who Launch)
After working in technology sales for several years, Alison discovered that the corporate life was not her calling and made the decision to embark on her entrepreneurial career. She launched herself and her business when she joined Ladies Who Launch as the leader and director for the San Francisco chapter. Ladies Who Launch is a national organization of women who embrace creativity and entrepreneurism as a lifestyle and support each other both on-line and in-person. Her own business, Business Legs, offers start up consulting services with an emphasis on strategic planning and marketing confidence for women entrepreneurs. She is passionate about helping women live their entrepreneurial dreams and will stop at nothing to spread the entrepreneurial bug to anyone and everyone considering starting a business. Alison holds a BA in Speech Communication from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Official Website: http://www.women2.org