Class V

Brilliant: Lorena Ochoa

Golf is not my thing.  At all.

So until this week, I had no idea who Lorena Ochoa was.

But as a female athlete, I am compelled to draw attention to this year's AP Female Athlete of the Year. 

Apparently, Ochoa took home every significant LPGA award this year, unseating Annika Sörenstam (I have heard of her) as the number one female golfer in the world.  Even as she failed to win her first major championship.  According to the experts, this is just a matter of time.

What I find particularly compelling about Ochoa's story is how proud she is of her nationality, as detailed in this quote from USA Today:

Intensely proud of her heritage, Ochoa reaches out to the Mexicans she sees at golf tournaments, many of them working on maintenance crews, all of them stopping to watch whenever she goes by.

"I'm very proud to be Mexican, and every time I see some Mexicans on the course, it could be the workers, or Mexicans that live here ... it gives me extra motivation," she said.  "It makes me want to do things better and play good for them."

Would have never picked golf to showcase ethnic minorities such as Tiger Woods (who, coincidentally was this year's AP Male Athlete of the Year) and now Lorena Ochoa front and center, but it's all good.

Not that any of this will ever compel me to pick up a driver.  Like I said, it's just not my thing.

Technorati Tags: Lorena Ochoa, golf

Return to BlogHer

The fabulous women behind BlogHer were very cool in allowing me the time I needed, before returning to my Contributing Editor responsibilities for their network.

My latest post is now up.

On a related note, earlier this month, BlogHer announced their intention to become an advertising network. I will not be participating in any ad sharing revenue from the network, so I do not believe there to be a conflict in promoting it here. In light of the recent NBCU acquisition of iVillage, my own opinion is that their timing couldn't be better, and I wish them the best of luck!

Technorati Tags: BlogHer, ad network

Gender-Blind Career Needs

Received an invitation the other day for a local event, the only invitees being alumnae of one of my alma maters. (To help protect the innocent, I will not reveal which alma mater.) The marketing message behind this invitation was that the audience would discuss the unique career and job search needs of alumnae.

I am a woman, I work full time, but I have yet to understand how my career or job search needs are fundamentally different from that of my male peers', simply because I am female. Although I receive all kinds of messages and signals that somehow, they should be.

The correct distinction to make here, perhaps, is to invite those alumni and alumnae who wish to pursue "non traditional" career paths for whatever reason ... maybe a male alumnus wishes to be a full time father while his wife fulfills the role of primary breadwinner, maybe a young alumna wishes to skip the traditional rat race and have the free time to pursue her dream of climbing Everest before the age of 40, etc.

If there is even one man among the local alumni base who would be interested in leaving the workforce for a year or ten to raise his children, I hate to think that he is being excluded from these kinds of events. I am going to guess that he would get much more out of them now, than I would, at least at this time in my life.

Technorati Tags: job search, fatherhood, working women

Philosophy Major Meets Geek

The official launch of my blog was back on my birthday on November 29. I had actually started blogging maybe a month before that, just so there would be some content there when the switch was flipped on.

Fast forward two months later. I am now one of two Contributing Editors of the Technology & Web section of the newly redesigned BlogHer community. Please go check it out: the beta launch of the new BlogHer site is today. Although I hesitate to put myself in the same league as many of the other outstanding BlogHer Contributing Editors, I am gratified that everyone there seems to think I have meaningful things to say about Technology.

Speaking of which, I will be the first to claim that I am not a technologist. No degree in electrical engineering or computer science here. (My undergraduate degree really was in Philosophy.) What I can say is that I spend a great deal of time thinking about the markets and business models that are created by emerging technologies. I applaud the fabulous women behind BlogHer for pairing me up with a more traditional technologist, Anne Zelenka of Anne 2.0. She and I will be able to look at many of the same topics in the blogosphere with very different lenses, and I look forward to the differences in our opinions.

Class V will still be my primary blog. It is my intention to create one or two entirely new entries per week for BlogHer, aiming to post something there every Wednesday or Thursday. As defined by BlogHer's mission, those posts will focus on female bloggers writing about Technology. Haven't decided yet if I will cross post between Class V and BlogHer, but I am grateful for having this problem in the first place. If anyone has any guidance regarding this cross posting issue, I'd love to hear it.

Best wishes to the BlogHer team for a successful beta launch, and kudos to Lisa Stone in particular for all the work she has done in driving BlogHer's new format.

Technorati Tag: BlogHer

Day Zero Birthday

Although I am not doing anything particularly significant to mark my birthday today, I figured, what better day to officially launch my blog?

As David Beisel wrote, we expect any company to understand who its customers are, which of those customers' problems the company intends to address, and how the company solves that particular problem.

So who are this blog's readers? About what specifically, do I intend to write? And why should anyone care?

Initially, I believe that many readers will include my immediate circle of family, friends, and professional acquaintances. That demographic is for the most part male, born between 1965 - 1980, located in the United States, highly educated and reasonably technology savvy. Most are in business in one form or another, e.g., technology startups, financial services firms.

While I am grateful for the few readers I do have, the people from whom I am most eager to hear include women, those who reside in countries other than the United States, those who were born before 1940, or those who work or have worked professionally in fields as diverse as medicine or the arts. Sharply contrasting perspectives are brain food, in my opinion.

I intend to write about those topics which either occupy most of my waking life, or catch my interest in a significant manner ... significant enough, at least, to warrant the time required for an entry. The first few entries that I wrote in the pre launch or beta phase of this blog should provide some idea of the breadth of these interests. A topic about which I have not yet written, but intend to, is gender issues as they relate to technology and venture capital investing in particular, and life in general. For better or mostly for worse, venture capital ("VC") is a domain dominated by males, mostly Caucasian. Simply because of my gender, I have a distinctive voice.

Finally, there is the So what? I love that question, as it often is the least complicated path to the core. In this case, that is not a question for me to answer. That is for you, the reader. And if you don't care, if what I share on this blog does not move you either negatively or positively, please tell me why. Life is too short to be bored. In my opinion.