Rapportive is one of my favorite tools to use for business development, but can be used for any role where you need to reach out to external contacts. Technically, Rapportive is a tool to manage and connect with your email contacts. It’s a free extension you can add on top of Gmail, which will show you the social networks that a contact is connected to. I happen to use Rapportive in reverse – to find out the email addresses of the people who I want to contact, but can’t through my normal routes like introductions.

Here’s how:

Step 1) I think of every format a potential contact’s email address might be, such as:

• jsmith@companyname.com
• johnsmith@companyname.com
• john.smith@companyname.com
• john_smith@companyname.com
• john@companyname.com
• smith@@companyname.com
• js@@companyname.com

Step 2) I try out each of those email addresses by typing them into the To: field in Gmail and wait for Rapportive to load the information it has on that email address.

3) When a real profile (with either a profile photo, twitter account, facebook account or linkedin account attached to it) shows up, you know you’ve got the right one. Use that email address to contact your person of interest.

It’s very straightforward and I know a few folks who use Rapportive in the same way. While this does get you in the door, there is no guarantee that someone will respond to you. I’ll leave that up to another blog post…

I’ve always hated the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. It makes me think of all those new folks joining the gym who start off the year strong in 2012, but disappear come February. A lot of these resolutions suffer from

1. Impossible Goals – If you make plans to go to the gym EVERY day – once you inevitably miss one day, you’ll miss the next and soon a month goes by and you’re paying a $100 gym tax each month.
2. Goals Without Reasoning – If you make a resolution to eat healthier, but don’t have a reason why (“because I feel like I should”), there isn’t a strong enough incentive to complete it.
3. Goals Involving Things Never Been Done Before – It’s much harder to start doing things you have never done before. You need to learn how to do something and then do it consistently.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would write down a few of my resolutions goals for 2012:

• Write at least once every 2 weeks. I would consider myself a fairly creative person (I paint, sculpt – have done photography etc.), but I haven’t done anything like that in about 3 years. I wish I did it more, but I think writing is a great low-touch way to get that same feeling without stuffing my home full of art supplies.
• Do yoga at least once a week. I run quite a bit, but it has made my muscles tighten up a bit and I’d like to fix that. I also need to put some lulu lemon gear to good use.
• Organize more group-outings. Because hanging out in groups is fun and it’s not that hard to be the one that organizes outings.
• Move to a place that is either a) more fun or b) more convenient. I want to move to either downtown Palo Alto (to be closer to work, the gym and more people) or San Francisco (to be closer to more fun things). My lease is up in June, so I’ve got 6 months to get going.

Do you have goals for 2012? What are they?

What is this? Mad Men?

Penelope Trunk wrote another ridiculously egregious article yesterday on VentureBeat about the “Woman Problem” in tech startups. She’s written similar posts on Techcrunch before:

Women Don’t Want to Run Tech Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children

Why Diversity is Bad for Startups

I’ve always wholeheartedly disagreed with her remarks about women in technology, but she’s continued to push her views as guest posts on several of the blogs I read. I’m actually surprised VentureBeat and Techcrunch have published her posts considering her rampant generalizations of women in tech, but unfortunately I think they find it intriguing because she’s a woman herself. Thankfully, for the women who push themselves each day as founders or early startup employees, she is utterly wrong.

Her first assumption is “If diversity was really a problem, VCs would be solving it”

As Charles Hudson, a venture partner at SoftTechVC said yesterday on BloombergTV, investors feel safer making inherently risky bets on entrepreneurs who remind them of themselves. When the vast majority of venture firms are led by men, that’s where the money is going. Despite this, women are getting funded more often than ever before. They’re founding profitable companies which will have or have had successful exits.

She goes on to state that “Women don’t want to do startups because women want children”. She says startups are risky, require more time and women just don’t care about things like that.

Men want children just as much as women want children. This doesn’t seem to affect their career choices. As women are having children later and later in life, they have the opportunity to spend their twenties founding a startup. Even when they have children, if they have a partner who is willing to parent equally, they have the opportunity to spend their time founding a startup. Startups do require more time and risk, but women are just as free to take these chances. As more women are getting funding, the risk decreases as they can have a normal salary, benefits and many of the securities of working for a larger company.

She states that women in their twenties outearn men, so surely they can do whatever they want in their careers. Startups just aren’t for them.

Women often hit a glass ceiling in their late twenties/early thirties that their male peers don’t seem to hit. This, and not children alone, contributes to women leaving the workforce entirely or only working part time. When women don’t feel they are rewarded for their hard work – they leave. This is a problem that can and should be fixed. It is not a problem that is caused by women not caring about the work they do.

Trunk gives three ideas for what can be done to increase the  number of women who do startups.

1) Give them more money. Women like nice clothes and a house.

Women don’t need any more money than their male peers. They need security, which is a concern for many founders and employees. This isn’t an equation that can be solved by money alone – it’s a feeling that can be fostered by mentorship and a strategic vision.

2) VCs need to accept that women are slower than men.

This is egregious. Men can found companies and be attentive fathers and husbands. This does not change for women. When both women and men should accept that both parents must give equally to their children, you’ll see many more female founders. This has absolutely nothing to do with VCs.

3) VCs should raise funds with the idea that their portfolio companies started by women will be slower.

Good luck with that. How about a VC firm tells their LPs that they’re going to invest in the most talented teams – and we all accept that those are teams started by men and women. Let’s not tell them that the teams are any different – because they’re not.

In writing this, I can only hope that Trunk begins to stop stereotyping women based on her own choices and insecurities. Even though I sincerely doubt that will happen, I hope blogs will stop giving her a platform for her misogynistic views of her own gender.

For more, follow me on Twitter.

There is no doubt that the Airbnb vacation rental horror story has been a PR disaster for the company. As I’m sure this isn’t the first time an AirBnb renter has had property stolen or damaged while renting, I am surprised that this was not handled better. While some may be blaming this on the AirBnb PR team or lack thereof, this is not a “PR” issue. It’s a crisis management issue that is inevitable at many companies. While many were anticipating that this would happen to AirBnb sooner or later, it seems that there was no action plan from the leadership team. A few lessons can be learned from what happened:

1. Respond Immediately
Time is critical in these situations and something must be done immediately. The fact that the situation with EJ has not been fully taken care of for over a month is ridiculous. The second this happened a community manager from the AirBnb team should have alerted the co-founders and they should have addressed it immediately with a plan of action. AirBnb attorneys and public relations staff should have been fully aware of the extent of the situation and the possible effects this may have on their community. San Francisco police and other regulators and associations for the city that might have been able to help should be consulted. They should have been proactive, responding to the victim publicly a month ago when her original blog was posted. They should have given the victim a consistent point of contact, seen her in person, put her up in a hotel, etc.

When the recent earthquake hit Japan, senior managers were told to stock up on food and supplies at their stores immediately. Corporate and retail employees were given immediate assistance and told they could sleep at their stores. The head of Apple International HR and of Japan Retail spent the night with their employees at the retail stores. No one could have predicted that catastrophe, but Apple leadership handled it impeccably.

2. Have a Long Term Response
The problem will not just go away. While AirBnb reported that they doubled their customer service staff, the lack of customer service reps did not cause this problem. Their response was also unclear – they could have had one customer service rep before this incident and upped it to two. This long-term response (a response a month after the incident) is neither clear nor helpful. Trying to improve security and institute some kind of insurance policy protection for renters will help future victims. They had no clear or concise long-term action plan in regards to the problem at hand.

3. How to Handle the Press
A “no comment” can only hurt you. The second a reader sees that a company refused to comment or did not comment in time, they will think that it has something to hide.

Do not lie. You must be absolutely truthful when speaking to the press, your users and investors. Anything but and you will lose their trust. In this case, we have the victim to fact-check AirBnb and it came back to bite them. Their poor management of their relationship with the victim (example: telling her to take down her blog) made her feel like she needed to speak out again.

How companies respond during a crises really makes you think about whether you want to do business with them. Hopefully AirBnb has learned their lesson this time around.

Reading Vivek Wadhwa’s post on how to encourage more minority women to join the tech industry, I immediately began to think of my own experiences as a minority (Hispanic) female in tech. Thankfully, I don’t have anything but good things to say about being a minority female in tech, but there are a few reasons I can think of personally that have pushed me away from it. I don’t think these experiences are unique to me and are more telling of why you don’t see many women like Raissa B. Nebie and Kimberly Dillion starting companies in Silicon Valley. While these are just a few reasons that affected me in my choice for a career, there are many more that affect minority women (and even more that affect disadvantaged minority women). Many of these reasons are cultural, take years to overcome and involve much more than just education.

• Minority women are taught to be risk averse. When I was growing up, I was told I had two options for my future career path: Doctor or Lawyer. My mother gave me these options because they were safe and respectable. Her grandchildren would be well taken care of if her daughter got a second degree and began a career making six figures. One friend told me she had to be a doctor because it was her parent’s dream and a way that she could guarantee providing for them when they got older and could no longer work. Growing up in a family that is financially insecure (as many minority women are), children are pushed to have a lifestyle with a steady income. The first careers that come to mind are not start-ups when financial security is the end goal.
• Failing is not an option for minority women. Many great entrepreneurs fail a few times before they succeed. In the valley, starting a company that fails is a rite of passage. The price of failure for minority women is high and not looked at positively. If the startup I work for failed tomorrow, you can bet my mother would tell me either a. You should have stayed at Google. and/or b. You better start applying for law school. Minority women don’t have the same safety nets that their white male counterparts do.
• Minority women by and large are not exposed to engineering and computer science. Many of my friends and co-workers who are engineers have parents who are engineers or went to high schools with a strong computer science curriculum. They grew up learning to code. My experience was vastly different. My high school “computer science” course was really focused on typing and learning how to operate a computer. I really had no clue what computer science was in high school and engineering always made me think of buildings and architecture. I ended up taking a few computer science courses at Stanford, but only in my junior and senior year when the fear of the unknown subsided. Many of the women I know in tech were only exposed to computer science in college which puts them far behind those who grew up working on projects of their own. Coming from families that are unaware of engineering as a career removes the exposure to tech that is so frequently apparent in engineering grads of today.

For years, the question of why minority women were not represented in an industry (whether law, medicine or business) has been asked. Many of the problems in those industries were institutional, but many of the problems in tech result from cultural opposition to the failure and risk that thrives in the tech industry.

The recent launch of Color (and its massive $41M funding round) received quite a bit of backlash from the tech community. I had some harsh commentary for the app as well. When a product rolls out guns blazing with funding, it’s ripe for scrutiny – and plenty of people gave it out. The app lacks design, some functionality and when compared to other photo sharing applications, offers less to the user. Some told me to stop “hating” on the app, but it’s really not about the app at all. This is about what message funding this type of product (again and again and again) sends to the tech ecosystem. It bothers me that young entrepreneurs see this funding round and aspire to create the “NEXT BIG PHOTO SHARING APP” that takes over the Valley. These aspirations are depressingly low. Where are all the entrpreneurs trying to compete with Google over self-driving cars? How about competing with SunRun’s solar energy systems to power homes across the country? We need to stop encouraging thinking small and give financial backing and media attention to those who choose to aim higher and think bigger. We don’t need another photo sharing app.

Edit: Color has an All Star Team and many have noted that these applications likely have much more up their sleeves than just photo sharing. I completely agree – they wouldn’t have received that amount of funding otherwise – but the large majority of photo sharing apps have not proven themselves to be more than just that so far. Color’s marketing strategy has not emphasized the additional technology that might be under the hood or what’s coming in future updates. To consumers – it’s purely a photo sharing app at the moment.

Here’s the Mashable Twitter page in old Twitter. You can see Pete Cashmore uses Hootsuite

The same homepage above is seen again in new twitter below. On #newtwitter, the client attribution is completely removed and hidden in the details section, so users are unlikely see what platform their friends are using. Is this a move to shield users from knowing who is avoiding the webpage and experiencing Twitter entirely through another client? Likely.

Here’s the Mashable Twitter page in #newtwitter. Buh-Bye Hootsuite

Recently, Twitter has received some backlash from developers like Nelson Elhage. Additionally, #newtwitter has copied much of the functionality available on other clients to get users to return to Twitter on the web. Unfortunately, pretending like other clients don’t exist will just anger developers rather than remove them from the Twitter ecosystem.

A lot of things changed for me between the time I got my offer and when I started mid-July. I worked for two startups on products millions of users would see. I had three things I valued dearly: control over my work, impact on users and learning a wide range of skills. With control, I was able to learn fast, iterate and implement what I thought was necessary with little oversight. For my age and experience, that was empowering and I did not take my responsibilities lightly. I had a tangible impact on users and I loved it. I worked on different features and products and every day was exciting.

I left the startup world to be a ‘grown-up’ and work a regular job with a 401K, benefits and free food at a company that was making interesting products. Unfortunately, when I finally started my job at Google and knew what I would be doing day-to-day (If you’re curious, read this post), I found that I didn’t have the three things I valued most.

This is not some impassioned post about how big companies stink and start-ups rule – my former Google team is full of intelligent and kind people. My advice for young people just starting out is to go where you will learn the most – if that’s a startup or Microsoft, go for it. It is not about the money or the perks or even the people. I’ll work double my former hours at a startup as the second (or first if you count my time before Google – it’s debatable) employee and no matter the outcome, you can bet I’ll learn something.

“I think that people who place a value on privacy and trust would be willing to pay subscription fees in lieu of “free”, don’t you agree? Hence, what is to prevent someone from starting up a new business that is based on the same original fundamentals of Facebook (such as targeting alumni) but which has a small monthly fee which is paid to protect privacy and gain trust?”

While I agree that there are advocates out there who care about their privacy, the majority of people don’t care nearly as much as they should. This presents problem #1 for this kind of online social network. The majority of people either don’t know or don’t care. If you asked an average person who doesn’t read Techcrunch about data privacy, he would have no idea how to respond.

There are over 500 million monthly active Facebook users today. Facebook has taken over all segments of the population. My mother has a Facebook. My grandfather has a Facebook. Even after all the work I did proclaiming that Facebook was not a site to be trusted with my information, I still have a Facebook! I would love to use another online social network, but none are close to having the reach that Facebook does. This reach took years to build up and I would have to see quite a wide reach with a new social network before I even began thinking about giving up Facebook. The “build it and users will come” mantra that start-up enthusiasts love to shout from the rooftops is not a guarantee. A company can easily copy Facebook and throw some data protection on top and users will still likely say no.

Why? A new online social network will face this scenario. In fact, Twitter still does:
Average Person: “Why do I need this? I already have a Facebook.”
New Social Network Evangelist: “Because it offers X, Y & Z”
Average Person: “But all of my friends are already on Facebook.”

Will people PAY for the service on top of every other barrier it faces? I say no. In fact, a huge flaming NO! We currently live in a culture where people almost refuse to pay for things they cannot touch. An .mp3, a .mov, software etc. – users will go far and wide and suffer with reduced quality just so they won’t have to take out their wallets. A paid social network will likely never pull friends away from Facebook. Large scale social networking with hundreds of millions of users will never be a paid game.